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Transcript - Canadian Politics 101: Elections

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Ian Van Harten (00:01.538) Alright, Dr. Tom Bateman, good of you to be back again.

Tom M.J. Bateman (00:07.151) in.

Ian Van Harten (00:08.532) so this time around where you're talking all about elections and the electoral system and electoral reform. So lots of different areas to talk about, but I'm wondering just to start us off, if you want to give kind of a general comment about Canadian elections, how do you think about elections in the big picture and how they fit in the system overall and how they're carried out in Canada?

Tom M.J. Bateman (00:41.945) Well, Canada is a democracy that's founded on political equality. Political equality means that no person or group of persons has any natural preeminent right to rule. So sovereignty as a practical matter kind of resides among the citizens, each of whom has the right to vote in a

in general elections and the right to vote is protected in section three of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But that's kind of an unfortunate rendering in the sense that many people think voting is more an obligation of citizenship than it is a right. Because if it's a right, then you can choose to exercise that right or not, according to your own judgment. An obligation suggests that

whether you feel like it or not, you should do something. So anyway, we have elections and one big distinction in the history of political thinking and all of this is whether citizens should participate very directly in the government of their political community or whether they can participate only intermittently and indirectly.

And so the first option is where citizens actually gather and they deliberate upon a public policy issue and then vote themselves on it. And we are vaguely familiar with this in the form of referenda or plebiscites at more local levels. And these are circumstances in which a question is put to electors.

and it's phrased in terms of a yes or no option. And then the electors vote in a large regulated process to support or not support the question. know, Quebec has had a couple of referenda on separating from Canada. Canadians have had at least one go at approving or not approving a large set of constitutional amendments back in 1992.

Tom M.J. Bateman (03:01.295) local municipal residents will sometimes have the option in plebiscites to vote on some public policy matter. And so we're familiar with that, but it's very rare. And certainly what we do not do is gather regularly to transact public business, like what a direct democracy would be. earlier times,

when political communities were much, smaller, we have examples of city states whose citizens gather and transact public business, vote on this or that, and then we'll try criminals and so on and so forth. they were fairly unstable places and they're also very small. And those kinds of conditions, and also citizenship.

among the sovereign citizens was very narrowly drawn. So no foreigners, no women, and sometimes nobody without any kind of property holding. So you end up having a citizenry that's really quite small, making democratic decisions on everyone else's behalf. So we expand the franchise greatly in the 20, 21st century. We have very large political communities and

our democracies are liberal democracies, which means that we afford people a great opportunity actually to live their private lives in the ways they wish, quite independently of their political obligations. Which means in places like Canada, liberal democracies like Canada, generally

find it acceptable and even preferable that people have large private spheres in which they can worship whom they want, they can engage in commerce, they can engage in sports and entertainment and associate with whomsoever they want and so forth, quite independently of their political obligations. So that's the...

Tom M.J. Bateman (05:23.335) That's like one crucial piece of this, but what follows from it is an institutional structure of representation. And this means that we have parliaments with defined numbers of members, and those members are elected periodically by voting citizens. So no longer are citizens voting on

public policy measures and really spending the time and the effort to discuss with their fellows what is the right thing to do on this or that. Instead, we have periodic contests among candidates who appeal to voters for their favour. And on election day, each of us has an opportunity to vote for the candidate in our riding.

whom we think is the best to represent us. And once that person is elected, that person goes to parliament and participates in the daily grind of government lawmaking, holding the government to account, and so on and so forth. So we are sort of transferring to these representatives important activities that we ourselves either do not want to do or do not think we are competent to do.

And so political representation means indirect democracy and it means now sort of citizenship for most of us is kind of like a part-time thing. whereas the representatives are the full-time members of legislatures who act on our behalf.

Theories of Political Representation

Ian Van Harten (07:10.976) Mm-hmm. And so there's this idea of representation and these candidates act as our representatives in government. But you raise in the book how there are different theories about what representation actually means. So can you talk about those different theories and how they influence how we decide which candidates we want to choose?

Tom M.J. Bateman (07:35.267) Yeah, sure. Three, I think, big accounts of representation. The idea of a representative is that the representative is kind of like an agent acting on behalf of a principle, group of principles. And so the principle is delegating to the representative, a decision-making capacity, and then the representative remains accountable to the principle for how that

agency has been sort of executed or discharged. So one big theory is what is sometimes called the delegate theory, and that is that the representative is given instructions by the voters or the principals and will vote according to those wishes. And if

the delegate fails to vote according to the will of the constituents, the voters, then there needs to be a process to yank that representative for failing to be a proper delegate. And so the delegate is a representative who's kind of beholden to particular wishes by the people who...

reside in his or her constituency. so that's one big theory. And the next big theory is the trustee model. And a 18th century British parliamentarian and political thinker, Edmund Burke, perhaps articulated this account better than anybody else. And the trustee acts on the

best interests of the principal, but not the wishes of the principal. And when I talk to students about this, analogy, it's kind of an awkward analogy, but it does make sense. And that is that imagine the relationship between a parent and a child. In a way, the

Tom M.J. Bateman (09:59.885) The parent is the trustee and the child is the principal. The problem with the child is that he or she does not really know what his interests are, his or her interests are, and nor does he or she know how to advance them. So you got two big debilities on the part of the principal here. And the trustee engages in a kind of moral relation to the...

to the guardian, I'm sorry, to the child, and it's kind of bound morally to act on the best interests of the child. And so the trustee has a great deal of freedom and discretion and judgment bound by a steady understanding of what the best interests of the child actually are.

in a similar way the the political trustee elected by his or her constituents Will have a more casual relationship to public opinion and what the constituents actually want at any given time But will have an overriding concern for the good of the constituents

And so there's an independence from the constituents while at same time there's an overarching obligation to advance the interests of the constituents. this in a way works because a lot of the time voters don't know what they want. And in a more complicated, you know,

circumstance, different constituents will want different things. And this, by the way, is the real problem for the delegate theory, because the delegate theory more or less operates on the assumption that the constituents have a single and discernible interest that the delegate shall execute on their behalf.

Tom M.J. Bateman (12:29.391) those two conditions may not actually obtain at any given time. In fact, you could say often they don't obtain. And certainly on the homogeneity front, that's rarely the case. You got in Canada, federal constituencies that are between 100 or between about 88 and 120,000 people per constituency. And like, come on, we can't even agree on the weather in this country. Nevermind anything relating to public policy. So.

So the homogeneity of the delegate model really doesn't kind of like obtain in practice. The trustee is more comfortable with the diversity of opinion and so forth because the opinions of the constituents don't matter as much to the trustee as they do to the delegate. But of course, with so much freedom and independence from the opinion of the constituents, the trustee can fail in his or her task and

and misread the interests of the constituents, substitute his or her own interests for those of the people who elected him or her. So that's kind of fraud as well. Now, the third big model is the party member kind of account of representation. And of course, in Canada, with few exceptions,

candidates who offer themselves for election in a constituency in an election campaign are often tied to a political party. They have undergone a previous process to be nominated by their political party to represent that party in the election which constituents will vote in. And that means that

they have sort of declared an allegiance to a political brand, maybe to like a kind of a political philosophy in a way, kind of like a policy bent or orientation. Membership in a political party may commit them to very specific public policy positions that they are supposed to represent in election campaigns. And which means...

Tom M.J. Bateman (14:47.627) when the voters vote for the candidate, the voters at the same time are kind of voting for the party the candidate represents. so the candidate represents like a menu of kind of policy options or policy bents, if you like. And that's what you're going to get if you vote for that particular person. Canadians are kind of conflicted on the point, but I think the empirical reality is that

parties do something in principle that voters really like. And that is that they narrow and clarify the choices that voters must make. Because what each party does, it puts into a little package a kind of like an identity, a view of the country, a view of politics, a view of political ideologies, public policy preferences and so forth.

So this party shows you this package and this party gives you this package and so forth. And so they're doing some of the thinking for us and the candidate offers us a party label and that gives us a shortcut, an intellectual shortcut, which means we don't have to spend the time sorting it all out and so on and so forth. We've just got, you know, it's kind of like these days.

sitting down to watch TV. And like my wife and I have done this and we've sat down and said, so what are you gonna watch? Well, so we go on to Brit Box or something like that and we look at all the things and we haven't decided anything because there's way too much choice. And we just blown an hour and a half trying to figure out what we wanna watch. Okay, it's time for bed. So forget it, we're not watching anything now. Okay, and that's the tyranny of choice. And...

Back in the old days, when I was a kid living in rural Manitoba, there was one good choice, which was CBC. And then sometimes there was CTV, but the reception was lousy. So it was like CTV in the middle of a snowstorm. And so there were like two or three options. like it was easy to watch TV because there were only, and maybe it wasn't a peak experience, but I didn't even know what a peak experience was.

Tom M.J. Bateman (17:15.955) And so each network gave me something and yeah, they weren't that great, but I'll take this one and I could actually start watching like in a second as opposed to waiting two and a half hours to selecting what might be the best thing for me to watch. so political parties are kind of like taking us back to the old days with three big networks. And I think, yeah, people kind of like that. And now they're frustrated by it because

because this political party is not like the best movie I've ever seen. It's just kind of like a run of the mill kind of movie. And that political party, not the best movie I've ever seen. But that's the trade off we make. so the political party sort of account representation is that the actual person is a bit of a stand in for the party label that you are really purchasing when you're voting.

And in Canada, this is a particularly salient account because party discipline in the House of Commons is quite high. If we elect a liberal in my riding here in Fredericton, New Brunswick, that MP is going to vote liberal. That we can count on. And it'll be very, very notable if the MP does not vote with her caucus.

So that's how that works in this country. So we have these three accounts of representation and sometimes we can't really decide among them in one circumstance, one account seems to be preferable to the other. And then at another time with another issue, maybe with another candidate, the other account seems more attractive and so on. So we sort of bounce around between the three as well.

So it's all kind of complicated.

The Role of Identity and Diversity in Representation

Ian Van Harten (19:15.562) Mm-hmm. And yeah, I think a lot of people are conflicted about which theory of representation they hold to because I think like you say, the party member one turns out to be the one that effectively we're all using. But I think if you ask people, you know, we talked about this in our discussion about parliament and backbenchers being just kind of non-thinking automatons doing whatever the party wants and people get frustrated by that and they want

They want someone to represent them in their local constituency and their interests in the region that they live in. But those things are in tension with, hey, well, you just voted for this party and the party has this plan to do. So yeah, it's, a little bit complicated, but, but there, there's a tale that you mentioned in the book that really gives away the fact that the party member theory is the winning one. And that's when MPs cross the floor.

And the fact that that's controversial kind of shows you that people are upset that, we voted you as part of this party and now you're switching and you're betraying us.

Tom M.J. Bateman (20:24.623) Yeah, yeah, I think that's true. That's true. Sometimes what will happen is that an MP will fall a foul of his or her party and either resign position in the caucus and sit as an independent in the House of Commons. And then sometimes that MP

will run again in the same writing as an independent. And now this time, what's happening is that the MP is really putting his or her personal appeal to the test. And occasionally it works. It worked, for example, with Jodie Wilson-Raybould back in 2021.

and then she subsequently resigned from politics. But I'll tell you, it doesn't happen very often. What happens also on occasion is that the MP will resign his or her position in the caucus of the party in connection with which he or she was elected initially and then cross the floor, as you say, and join another caucus.

And everyone in that receiving party is like extremely happy. They get a win and it shows that the other guys are falling apart and blah, blah, blah, blah, But the next question is, that floor crosser get elected in the riding next time around under a new party label? And sometimes it happens and...

Sometimes it doesn't and it's highly circumstantial. What some people say is that what you really need to do is as soon as you cross the floor, you've got to resign your seat and run again in a by-election under the new party label and see how that goes with your constituents. And that recommendation is exactly consistent, Ian, with what you just saying about the strength of party discipline and identity.

Ian Van Harten (22:45.806) Hmm.

Tom M.J. Bateman (22:46.639) in Canadian politics. But let me tell you, it wasn't always this way. This is a fairly late development in Canadian politics. Before the turn of the 20th century and into the 20th century, lots of floor crossing happened. And it happened in between elections and people didn't flip out over anything like that. was a, discipline was a more relaxed affair.

People were more attentive to the characteristics of the particular MP whom they elected and part of discipline was not as salient. It is more now.

Ian Van Harten (23:26.06) Hmm. Well, so there's another component about representation as well, and that is the idea of diversity and representing different identity groups. And there's sort of this idea that the government and the MPs and cabinet should quote, look like Canada. So can you talk about about this component of representation?

Tom M.J. Bateman (23:51.727) That's a great issue and a real tension here because on the one hand, one view is that the people we elect to parliament should be the best. They should just be the best people, the best judgment, best preparation, best experience, best mental acuity, so on and so forth. The other view is that they need to reflect

the polity in which they work. so Canada is geographically, demographically, culturally, linguistically, very diverse and arguably becoming more so. And the ranks of our legislative chambers

should reflect in large measure that diversity. And right from the start, we accepted that account when we structured the House of Commons at the federal level on the basis of proportionate provincial representation. The idea that

a province should have that percentage of seats in the House of Commons equivalent to its percentage of the whole Canadian population. If a province has 10 % of the Canadian population, it should have 10 % of the seats in the House of Commons. So that's like a geographical diversity that needs to be reflected in the House of Commons, and that's fine. And in the early days of the Confederation, the English-French dynamic was extremely important.

And so it was always important for governments to have significant representation from both communities in its caucus and in the cabinet, the governing body. And two points here. One is that maybe the representation of salient groups

Tom M.J. Bateman (26:19.319) linguistic, religious, geographic, cultural, ethnic, so on and so forth, is good because it actually produces better public policy. You've got more input, and you've got quality intervention from different points of view into the creation of public policy that will

when implemented, work better for the kind of polity that Canada actually is. So that's one point. And then the other point is that even aside from that, a legislature that sort of looks like the country as a whole is a more legitimate body than one that is

very asymmetric in its representational composition. And so this view is born of the, think, basic idea that constitutions are at bottom an affair of the heart of the citizen. That constitutions work when citizens writ large

recognize the Constitution and all the institutions of government as legitimate, useful bodies. And so the question is, what contributes to a broad sense of the legitimacy of an institution? Well, one of those elements, I think, is how broadly representative the institutions are of the broad socio-demographic composition of the country.

Now the issue, of course, is the reductio ad absurdum that this may produce, which is that, you know, I think according to the latest census, there are about 400 languages spoken at home among citizens and permanent residents of this country. So.

Tom M.J. Bateman (28:44.117) If we are to represent the full flower of Canadian diversity in Parliament, presumably we'll have to represent that linguistic diversity, not just English-French, but English-French and the 70 or so Aboriginal tongues and the 400 or so languages spoken by people who were born or whose predecessors were born in other countries. And of course that's impossible.

And then at the same time, well, part of the great diversity of Canada is that there are murderers and rapists and fraudsters and embezzlers and so on and so forth. So should they be represented in our parliament and so forth? And, you know, we have clearly the ranks of the House of Commons skewed in favour of the highly educated, you know, people with, you know, large

amounts of formal education. That group does not represent the broad sweep of the Canadian polity on the education front. So what do we do? So anyway, so the so-called microcosmic representation has its limits. And then the question that we don't really want to talk about very often is, so what are the...

What are the characteristics, the grounds for more microcosmic representation? And which are the ones that we can't do or we should not do? And that's just an ongoing debate. And perhaps it's just politics that sorts that one out. And it used to be, for example, really important that Protestants and Catholics

are represented like on the high courts in Canada, for example, in the Senate and so on and so forth. Now, no, not nearly as salient. It's just not that big a deal anymore. So what's interesting is that sociodemographic factors sort of come and go as to their importance and salience for this kind of representation.

Ian Van Harten (31:03.277) Mm-hmm and there there's There there yeah, they're it introduces some interesting problems. I think you know there's a lot of Hay made out of Justin Trudeau in 2015 he Said there's got to be gender parity in his cabinet fifty percent men and fifty percent women and a lot of people raised the point that you were mentioning earlier well it should just be the best people in cabinet and now you're reducing the amount of choices and there's also even

a little bit of, well, did I get picked for this position because I'm the best or did I get picked because I fit this identity category that you're trying to check off? So yeah, there's a lot of issues and it's becoming more controversial with time too, but yeah, I don't know if.

Tom M.J. Bateman (31:49.455) Yeah, I think it is. Quota is always pose problems. But at the same time, know, representational goals are not in any kind of conflict with the competence criterion, because there'll be lots of people in a particular group that are perfectly competent and so on and so forth. So a lot of the time, the

Ian Van Harten (32:08.44) Mm-hmm.

Tom M.J. Bateman (32:17.775) the matter does not really arise, but there might be occasions on which it might.

Electoral Districts and Effective Representation

Ian Van Harten (32:22.542) So, so there's a last part of representation that I want to talk about too. And that's just the local representatives. we, break up the country into lots of different districts. so that each district can have a local MP to represent them. So can you talk a little bit about how, how exactly those lines are drawn? Because I think the way that the lines are drawn are going to impact.

the results of an election too,

Tom M.J. Bateman (32:53.999) Absolutely. We have a single member plurality electoral system in Canada. It's been that way from the beginning. We've experimented sometimes at other levels of government, like even the local levels of government, especially in Western Canada with alternatives. But at the federal level, things have never really changed much. And there's been a little bit of experimentation at the provincial level with single transferable vote in the cities, for example.

in some prairie provinces while the rural areas remain SMP, blah, blah. But in the main, the story of Canada's electoral system is single-member plurality. the idea is that we have a number of seats in parliament. For the next election, it's going to be 343 seats. Every decennial census, there's a...

there's like a redistribution of the seats of parliament to take account of population growth and population shifts. But in any case, we've got 343 seats and for each seat in parliament, there is a geographically defined electoral district somewhere in Canada. citizens residing in a geographically defined electoral district will...

vote periodically to elect a candidate to represent them in the House of Commons. Now the main criterion for determining the size and shape of an electoral district is population. One sort of consequence of the idea of equality

which is a very big idea in democracy, is the idea that one person shall have one vote. But then there's a follow on from that, and that is that one person should have one vote which is roughly equal in its power to the vote of every other person. And what I mean by that is that by casting a vote in election, you have like a little bit of influence.

Tom M.J. Bateman (35:23.145) on the election of your MP. But let's say that there were two writings, and they're right next to each other. One writing had 150,000 people in it, and then the writing next to it had 100 people in it. And each person gets a vote. So one person, one vote. Great. And each will elect an MP. So in the first one, I am one of 150,000

people voting for an MP, which means I've got one 150,000th of a degree of influence over the selection of that MP. Next door, you live there and you have one 100th of a degree of influence. Your vote is way more powerful than mine. So you've got much more determinative influence on the election of your MP.

in our modern sensibility just doesn't seem right. Centuries ago in Britain, that was really quite normal. There would be writings that would be quite large and then others, population-wise, extremely small. These were called the rotten burrows. And they were sort of carved out precisely to make it easy for certain people to get elected at election time.

And by the way, the old idea of riding, we call them electoral districts in terms of our election law. Sometimes they're called constituencies and sometimes they're called ridings. The riding actually refers to a very old practice that you draw an electoral constituency in terms of how long it would take someone horse book to ride around the electoral district in one day. so that's where the riding comes from. But of course, we're beyond horses now with

Ian Van Harten (37:13.103) Hmm.

Tom M.J. Bateman (37:23.167) with our electoral district drawing systems. But in any case, now what we say is every district should have roughly the same population as every other. So that you divide the population of Canada by the number of seats in the House of Commons. And then the number you arrive at is called the electoral quotient. And it might be around, I don't know, 100,000.

people or so per constituency now in Canada. And I'm not good enough at math just to do the number in my head, but it'll be something like that. But now there's a complication because the distribution of people geographically is not equal. We've got some territories where there is highly dense population, then we have other parts of Canada that are extremely sparsely

populated. And so that means if we're going to have the same number of people in every riding in Canada, then geographically speaking, some ridings are going to be very small, like urban Toronto ridings, where you could walk the perimeter of the riding in a day, no problem, never mind a horse. But you're going to have ridings in northern Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta,

Northwest Territories, Northern BC, Northern Ontario, that are absolutely massive in geographical size, which means small number of people there, or same number of people, but they're all spread out like crazy, and so they may have nothing to do with one another. And it's extremely hard for an MP to be able to serve, represent, and know the people in his or her riding when that riding is so, so massive.

So then what we do in Canada is we say that we're going to allow deviations from the electoral quotient and we're going to allow some writings to have smaller populations so that the geographical size can be reduced. And we're going to have other writings that can be much larger than the electoral quotient.

Tom M.J. Bateman (39:48.495) to kind of make up the difference in a way. And so we actually don't have writings in Canada that are right on the electoral quotient. Some are, but many are not. And then the other thing about drawing electoral boundaries is that the commissions that do this every 10 years try to respect historic communities that would otherwise

perhaps be divided, broken up if we adhered rigorously to some mathematical formula. so, know, writings will continue to follow like a river boundary or they will go around a community, not through it, because doing an electoral boundary through a community would then diminish, divide its political power to determine an election result and so on and so forth. So we've got a variety of...

Ian Van Harten (40:38.808) Hmm.

Tom M.J. Bateman (40:45.079) of considerations in drawing the boundaries. And it all adds up to what is called effective representation, according to the Supreme Court of Canada, not equal representation. And it sort of works. There are other things that cause deviations from the electoral quotient, but that's the short answer to your question.

Ian Van Harten (40:45.294) Mm-mm.

Ian Van Harten (41:05.39) And, kind of related there, there's a cool map in the beginning of the book, the Canadian regime that shows each province and a breakdown of how many seats each province has. And I guess I just didn't appreciate this before, but just how many seats are in Ontario. Ontario just dominates. think there's 120. And I think there's more seats in Ontario than all the Western provinces.

Quebec is also pretty big, and then the Atlantic provinces are also pretty small, just the distribution of seats through the provinces too, really, it's pretty eye-opening to see that too.

Tom M.J. Bateman (41:46.255) Toronto, or Toronto, Ontario, keep on confusing Toronto with Ontario. But Ontario is, you know, about 40 or so percent of Canada's population, so it deserves a lot of seats. But of course, because Canada is so regional, we as often think about what regions have the power, as we do what aggregations of people have power.

And so lots of people in so-called outer Canada, which would be the Maritimes and then the West, resent Ontario and Quebec because they have so much power. Well, have, like one reason they have so much power is because they have so many people. And like we're roughly following a democratic logic. You see, but Canada is, yeah, we're not just democratic. We're also federal. And that's like another podcast maybe. And...

And there's so many differences between Ontario, Quebec on the one hand, well, the difference between Ontario and Quebec, and there's differences between them and the other provinces. And so we easily pass over the democratic principle and examine the aggregations of electoral power through other lenses.

Election Timing and Fixed Election Dates

Ian Van Harten (43:07.022) Well, let's move on a little bit to the timing and calling of elections. So I believe the Constitution says we have to have an election at least once every five years, and it's usually four. But can you just talk about how and when elections are called?

Tom M.J. Bateman (43:20.463) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Tom M.J. Bateman (43:28.655) Sure. That is almost exclusively the prerogative of the Prime Minister of the day. so, yeah, the cap is five years, but an election in principle can take place at any time prior to that limit. And a government may be defeated on a vote of confidence in the House of Commons. And depending on when that happens,

That will trigger a new election sometime before the five-year limit. And also what's common is that after a government has been in office for a little while, it will begin to think about what conditions in the country or in the jurisdiction, in the party, in public policy, in the international environment are most propitious

for the government to be re-elected. And since the government has the prerogative basically to choose the timing of the election, it will often choose the date for an election when it is most likely to get re-elected. And that's no big surprise. Partisan.

considerations often affect decisions like these and it doesn't matter what party we're talking about by the way. So that's how that goes. But what we tend to see on the record is that majority governments will have elections roughly every four years and minority parliaments tend to last about two and a half years.

And so that's generally how that goes. Now, I should mention some, like an institutional change that started in the province of BC, I think in 2001, and then sort of caught the attention of other jurisdictions and ultimately the federal government in subsequent years. And that is that

Tom M.J. Bateman (45:49.039) provinces began to pass legislation setting fixed election dates. And the idea behind fixed election date legislation is that opposition parties resented the power of the government of the day to call elections when conditions were most advantageous to that governing party. That seemed unfair. And in a way, it is unfair.

So the idea was we should pass legislation requiring elections to be on this particular time every four years. And that way we're going to take the initiative, the partisan interest in election timing out of the hands of the government. And so now we're all on a level playing field in a sense. And the advocates for this idea, of course, looked to the United States.

whose elections are fixed and like Canadians want to do, they say, like the Americans do that, that sounds, that's a nice shiny object. Can we have one of those too? And so that's sort of what we've done. Now, there's a couple of additional things to be said about fixed election date legislation. The first point is that it's stupid.

because it is directly contrary to the logic of our parliamentary system of government. Our parliamentary system of government includes the concept of responsible government. Responsible government means that the government of the day is accountable to the House of Commons and must maintain the support of the majority of the members of the House of Commons on its program, its budget, its legislative agenda, and its speech from the throne, so on and so forth. And when

the government loses the confidence of the assembly when a majority of members of the House of Commons vote against the government on an explicit vote of confidence or on an important government measure like a budget measure, let's say, or something, then the government is obligated to resign. And in a great many cases, most cases, the government's resignation triggers a new election. And

Tom M.J. Bateman (48:14.903) And that's just how our system works. That's how the government remains accountable to the members of the House of Commons and then indirectly to the voters. And as you can, I think, see, fixed election date laws are in complete and utter contradiction to that fundamental constitutional principle. And in recognition of this,

All fixed election date legislation in Canada has a qualifier or a proviso and a provision in this FED law will say that this fixed election date requirement does not detract from the prerogative of the Governor General or Lieutenant Governor from dissolving Parliament and calling an election at any other time.

And that sort of reconciles fixed election dates with responsible government. But of course, what it does is it negates the idea of fixed election dates almost all the time. And because the governor general will 99.5 % of the time grant a request of dissolution made by a prime minister or premier, that means the old prerogative of the prime minister or premier

to call an election when he or she wants to do so, is still there. Basically still there. And all I can say to you is look at the evidence and just yesterday I think we read in the news that Premier Ford of Ontario is going to call an election next week. And this is more than a year out from the fixed election date for Ontario elections, which means

He has just ignored the fixed election date constraint with sort of a magnificent shrug. And the Prime Minister of Canada who introduced fixed election date legislation in the House of Commons, Stephen Harper, he ignored it. Justin Trudeau has ignored it. I think pretty much every Premier in a province with fixed election date legislation has ignored it too.

Tom M.J. Bateman (50:40.695) So it's dumb and it doesn't even have the support of people who support it. So there you go. And so we are kind of like back to our status quo ante, where we've got the prerogative of the first minister to decide when an election shall take place. And you know what? If electors think that this was a very selfish, highly partisan, opportunistic,

decision to call an election, then maybe the electors will simply punish the government, the incumbent government for doing so. So that's the political check. It's not a legal check, it's a political check.

Campaign Finance and Election Spending

Ian Van Harten (51:19.63) Mm-hmm. Yep. So there's the timing of elections, but there's also the length of campaigns, I guess, which does also have an impact, in particular, I think, on campaign spending. And because there's a lot of rules around limits on how much you can spend, and limits on how much third-party advertisers can spend as well.

So can you talk about generally how much money gets spent during an election and how much is allowed to be spent?

Tom M.J. Bateman (51:54.521) Yeah, it gets really complicated really quickly. So I'll just try and stay at a reasonable level so no one gets a headache. the history of elections in Canada is the history of increasing government, that is legal regulation of elections. They were very loosey goosey affairs in the first several elections in Canada.

There wasn't a secret ballot at the start and elections would actually not take place on a day, but they take place over a period of weeks. And that means that a candidate who didn't win in this writing can scurry over and have another go at it at another writing whose election is going to take place two weeks hence and so forth. Patronage was obvious. People would quite easily try to bribe electors to vote for them in elections. if in the absence of a

of a secret ballot, then bribery can work because if you give a guy a Mickey or something like that to vote for you and you don't see him put up his hand when you're supposed to vote for you, then you can say, right, give me my Mickey back, buddy, you know, you're not getting another one for me. And but if the secret ballot, OK, that doesn't work. the potential for that kind of petty corruption goes way, way down. And then over time, over time, we began to to think about other

problems in electioneering and parliament, especially since the 1960s, began to move to regulate elections. often the regulations took the form of requiring candidates and parties to disclose their donors and the amounts of donations so that they can go ahead and collect all these donations, but they have to publicize this so that people like you and I can look and

we can see who their benefactors are and who might exercise untoward influence if they get elected and so on and so forth. And then with the passage of time, new regulations were passed actually to limit the amounts of money that candidates can spend, that parties can spend, and that non-political party groups can spend during election campaigns. And the idea

Tom M.J. Bateman (54:19.291) is that money is the oxygen of politics. It costs money to run a campaign, to rent offices, to buy pamphlets, to distribute them, so on and so forth. But you don't want too much money running a campaign. You don't want concentrated masses of money underwriting a particular candidate or party.

So on and so forth. The assumption for years has been that political parties, I'm sorry, that money can actually like buy candidates. And that just doesn't seem to be proper. so we limit now the number of days for an election and we tie

the amount of money candidates and parties can spend during elections to the length of an election. And that sort of makes sense. Now, Mr. Harper, years ago, he sort of exploited the absence of regulation because I think when he ran for reelection in 2015, there was no upper limit on

the length of an election campaign. There was a minimum, but not a maximum. And so he opted for like a really long, like two and a half month campaign. Why? Because election spending laws are keyed to the length of a campaign. So the longer the campaign, the more money a party and a candidate will have available to spend. And at that time, the conservatives...

were raising way more money than the other parties, NDP and Liberal, so they had more money to spend. So you have a really long campaign and the idea is that you can outspend them and not win them. And not true, but because it turns out that money by itself does not win campaigns. But when Mr Trudeau became the Prime Minister, one of the changes to the Canada Elections Act was to regulate the top end and the lower end of elections. So now we have

Tom M.J. Bateman (56:43.343) elections that can be no fewer than 36 days and no longer than 50 days. And that accordingly puts a bit of a cap on how much spending can be done. A candidate is roughly able to spend about $100,000 in an election campaign. And the election, the political financing law ties the amount of money

that can be spent by a candidate to the number of voters in his or her riding. And so the higher the number of voters, the more expensive it'll be to get to them and reach them and so on and so forth. And so you're allowed to spend a bit more money. Doesn't mean you have to spend that, but you're able to if you have the money. Parties as a whole can spend 30 million bucks across Canada in a year or in a campaign. third parties,

are able to spend a maximum of $5,000 per electoral district and overall approximately $600,000 across Canada. So third parties for free speech related reasons are allowed to participate and spend, but they are subject to limits in how much they can spend. Same with political parties, same with candidates and...

Tom M.J. Bateman (58:12.271) There's been lots of litigation on this because one of the arguments is that spending money is a form of expression and freedom of expression is protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. And so we've seen lots of litigation on this, but the Supreme Court has basically accepted some reasonable limits on spending by both parties and third parties like interest groups. So that's where we are. It's sort of, think we're at sort of a stable moment on all of this.

I don't think there's too much rancor now about the regime that we have. And of course, there are lots of moving parts in all of this. One conclusion someone might draw from the recent American presidential election is that, yeah, it turns out that money does not buy elections. Joe Biden's campaign, I'm sorry, Kamala Harris's campaign outspent Trump's by almost two to one.

Ian Van Harten (59:10.765) Hmm.

Tom M.J. Bateman (59:11.703) I think, and he still won. So in principle, money's not gonna do it all by itself. The other thing I think that's going on is that the technology of political communication is changing very quickly and that candidates and parties are able to get access to people by cheaper means than perhaps was once the case. TV advertising, very, very expensive. Putting stuff up on...

on YouTube and other social media platforms not nearly as expensive. And so all kinds of things are changing to complicate the ways in which we want to kind of regulate and make fair our electoral processes. Also, by the way, I should say that there are regulations in place for donating to political parties.

Voting Age and Voter Participation

Ian Van Harten (59:46.638) Mm-hmm.

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:00:11.201) And so there are a big change that we have had in the last 15, 20 years is that we no longer in Canada allow corporations and unions to spend money to or to spend. Yeah, I think that's true. Yeah, there are bans on corporations and unions in donating to candidates and parties. Only individuals can do so. And there are upper limits on it.

But we also have generous tax incentives for individual people to donate to political parties. And when you do your taxes every spring, you'll see you're asked if you have donated to a political party and you get a pretty generous political contribution tax credit if you have done so. So you get quite a bit of money back from the public central revenue fund if you've donated to a candidate or a political party. And that was done.

starting way back in 1974 to encourage individual Canadians to contribute to political parties because up to that time, parties got the lion's share of their donations, not from individuals, but from corporations and from unions. so the government thought that it would be much healthier overall.

if individual, parties got their donations from individual Canadians. And so we adopted a political contribution tax credit scheme to encourage Canadians to do that. And it's worked. And the regulations on corporations and unions have become way, way stiffer. And the regulations facilitating individual donations have become

richer over time. now, yeah, it's the party that gets individual donations, that's the party with the money. And it turns out that, oddly enough, it's the conservatives that have been now the best in the last 20 or so years in getting lots of money in small amounts from a large number of individual donors. The other parties have been catching up on that one.

Ian Van Harten (01:02:32.108) Hmm. Yeah, it's interesting just going back a little bit to what you were saying earlier about how this is technically a free speech issue and people should be allowed to spend money as a form of free expression. But, and so it may be it's one of those gray areas we talked about when we were talking about in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that whole episode. But I doubt this one is very controversial with most Canadians. And I think it's

It won't be controversial to say, we should limit the amount of money people can spend. don't, I imagine people won't get upset about, you're taking away our free speech rights in terms of regular Canadians thinking about that.

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:03:16.131) Yeah, I think that's generally true. Yeah. I mean, some Canadians are really exercised by it. Some interest groups have been very active on this front and litigating free speech against these limits. But I think that that phase has, for now anyway, passed and we're at a stable kind of moment on this public policy front. That is true.

Ian Van Harten (01:03:40.206) Mm-hmm. Yep. Well, let's talk a bit about voters. So this is our main democratic right is that everyone 18 or over has the right to vote. And there has been some discussion about, should we lower the voting age? I don't know if anyone out there putting forward that maybe we should increase the voting age. That would probably be interpreted as being anti-democratic.

But what do you think about the voting age and should we change it?

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:04:17.295) I tend to be an institutional conservative. And so, as I said at a forum just a week or two ago, conservatives like to conserve things. And that makes them kind of grumpy about change. so I think my personal view is that if it's not really broken, then

then probably don't touch it. Because we're human and we're limited in our knowledge, we might be interested in changing something and we might know some of the consequences of the changes that we produce, but I'll bet we won't know all of the consequences of the changes we produce. And there's no reason to think that the unanticipated changes are going to be good changes.

that could be as easily bad as good. And so that sort of puts me in a frame to resist most policy innovation. In fact, what it does is it just simply raises the burden of proof that the proponent of change actually has. For me personally, that's what it means. It convinced me at a high level of proof that the change you suggest is good.

Ian Van Harten (01:05:35.15) Mm-hmm.

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:05:44.003) that it's really addressing a really bad problem. And then let's consider it. So on the age of voting, it used to be higher. In some periods it was 21. And then in some other periods it went down to 19. So now we're at 18. And by the way, section three of the charter says that citizens have the right to vote. So.

So some people say we should allow permanent residents maybe to the right to vote. I think that might require an amendment to the constitution. And that'll never happen, not in this country. I think we're kind of stuck with citizens. But of course we allow non-citizens to participate in other ways, like in political parties and so on and so forth. And there's no reason why a non-citizen can't talk to an MP or complain in a letter to the editor or whatever it happens to be.

But here, I think, is the best case for reducing the age of the franchise in Canada. Some people say it should go down to 16 or so. And the idea, the practical effect, of course, would be then to have high school students become voters. And the argument would be that voting is an important

educational activity all by itself. So in other words, it's not like your exercise, your voting to influence the political process. You might be doing that a little bit. But the other thing that that happens when you're voting is that you are engaging in an institutional activity that is linked to learning, common action and integration.

into the political community, that you're actually participating in a larger common world, and that you may not know anything the first time you vote, but that the practice of voting, sort of the environment in which you are participating, will encourage and stimulate learning for the next time and then the next time.

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:08:10.479) And so, and young people are impressionable on these things, the argument would go. And so if you lower the voting age, you're going to be socializing Canadians better into the electoral process. And I think that's an excellent argument. I'm not sure, I don't think it convinces me, but it's a very good argument. Like I see it.

And you can see how high school teachers could really exploit this and they would have sections in their social studies curricula at election time and they'd have candidates come in and they would have maybe mock parliamentary debates and they would talk about salient public policy issues and all the merits of them and so on. So you could see how it would be

the right to vote at 16 years of age would be like an anchor for all kinds of really great stuff happening in a high school setting. So I think that's potentially very, very positive. I just don't know to what extent younger people will sort of take it up. But maybe it doesn't matter. Like, so what if they vote or don't vote, you know, it doesn't matter.

I don't know. What we do know is that electoral participation is low at the lower age levels, 18 to 29. And then when people, when they get older, when they maybe have more education, when they get jobs and they start to assume some of the features of...

of adult life, house, kids, responsibilities, so on and so forth, then this brings them into the system. And participation rates at elections really start to go up. And that sort of communicates something interesting, which is that voting is not some virtuous, abstract exercise that we do because we think we should.

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:10:35.097) know, voting is kind of attached to having a real stake in the operation of one's political community. And once you start assuming the obligations of life in the world, that you're starting to pay taxes, and now you own a house, which means you're interested in the state of the neighborhood, and then all of a sudden, like vandalism and crime become salient to you, because someone might just be stealing your car while you're having breakfast.

Ian Van Harten (01:10:39.726) Hmm.

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:11:04.429) You think like, okay, what's going on here for heaven's sakes? Then you might think, gee, I gotta call somebody about this. And then you might go to a forum in downtown that involves the police service trying to convince you to calm down and so on and so forth and whatever it has to be. So all of a sudden you become a citizen, you become active. And I think that's the key. And so do young people sort of have that kind of stake in...

the political life of their community, which really supports the action associated with voting and deliberating and learning about the issues and so on and so forth. So there's a sense in which what we want in the 30 and 40 year olds, or what we've seen the 30 and 40 year olds is kind of what we want to impart at the high school level.

And it may be that they're just not ready for it. They're too interested in rap music and what somebody's wearing and haircuts and social media, you know, and blah, blah, blah. And they're just not into it, you know? And I don't know. So the thing is, would it be any harm to reduce it to 16? In which case, if it works, great. If it doesn't, doesn't matter anyway.

Ian Van Harten (01:12:06.286) you

Ian Van Harten (01:12:11.214) Mm-hmm.

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:12:30.255) Or are you making a statement about the like the like the dignity and the importance of the franchise by limiting it to people who are more in a position to take it seriously? Because what you don't want to do is to trivialize the vote Because because I because you know We've been talking about 16, but well, about 10?

Ian Van Harten (01:12:48.589) Hmm.

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:12:59.971) You know, if socialization is so important, you know, and people learning to go through the motions and so forth, well then, well then why not 10? Like why, why, why not seven? And people would say, no, that's actually stupid because now you're, now you're making the vote look like, you know, hanging your toque on the right hook when you get to class in the morning, you know? Well, that's stupid. So, so anyway, you see what I mean. So I, I, I, I don't want to decide the issue, but I, but I kind of.

We like to sort of lay out the factors.

Voter Turnout and Democratic Engagement

Ian Van Harten (01:13:33.378) Mm-hmm. Well, so how do you think about voter turnout more generally, not just with younger people, because I believe that turnout rates, they fluctuate, but they're not... People often point out that they're not very high. And so what in your mind, what does that indicate? Is that a bad sign?

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:13:55.855) Yeah, it's a great question. And I think there might be some obvious things to explain why people decide not to vote. And I'm sure it's different for different voters and different groups of voters. But for a good number, like it must be obvious that, well, it's a lack of interest. like, I'm just not interested. And I can hear that. I hear that from people quite a bit. that might be another way of saying,

that the issues before the province or before the country, like they're not important. They're not salient. Like none of this really affects me. And so I just don't see why I need to invest the time and the energy and the frustration in learning about the issues and taking time off work and blah, blah, blah, all that stuff to exercise a vote.

when nothing really animates me in any of stuff. Now that's another way of saying that, so things actually might be pretty good in the country. If the place is not falling apart and we're not being invaded by China and I haven't lost my house and so on and so forth, then yeah.

Like then in this case, non-voting is actually maybe a sign that things are going relatively well. And because what you might say is that we don't want people voting and just being pains in the neck just for any reason. Because there are people like that, They just like to be obstreperous. And you know, they're just like big bothers. And so you don't want people voting and talking and debating and...

and just to hear themselves talk all the time, you want people to be kind of serious about this. And if there's nothing serious happening, then maybe low voter turnout is a kind of an endorsement that things are going fairly well. So who knows? By the way, you know, we are not just a democracy, we're a liberal democracy, which means I spend most of my time in my private realm doing my little thing. And if there's nothing in the public realm disturbing my private life, then maybe things are going as they ought.

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:16:22.915) So there's that view. Other people may not vote because they literally don't see the point in it. They have a low sense of efficacy that I've got a bunch of frustrations. I don't like this thing that's happening. I don't like that thing that's happening. But voting is not gonna change anything. And there's just no point. And there are different degrees of radicalism associated with this view. And one is that

Yeah, voting is just me as one of 100,000 people in a federal riding. So like, come on, just look at it. How can I influence the outcome of this election? So some people may say that. The more radical view is that the whole system is sort of rigged in a certain direction. Maybe it's wealth that is actually dictating everything or the professional managerial elite who ensure that elections actually don't.

don't do anything to upset the system operating as it has to our benefit. And so it might be that kind of criticism. And then that might be connected to another reason, which is just some more worrying disconnection from the political community that some people, like they're just not, they just don't sense.

that they're part of this larger enterprise. And they just don't know where to fit into it. It all seems alien. And the language is a language they never use. These are people they never associate with. And it just doesn't make any sense. It's almost like voting, it's like a foreign country. I just don't know what's going on here.

And I don't feel a part of it. And this is kind of like a fragmentation, which I think is perhaps a deepening malaise in the Western highly developed, increasingly technologically sophisticated democracies. Because now, you know, we silo ourselves in different Facebook groups and social media platforms and...

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:18:47.981) and so on and so forth. We're not watching common TV shows. We're not reading like one or two big flagship newspapers as a community anymore. So we're not even, we're not even thinking about the same things. Nevermind having the same opinions about things. Like we're not even connecting on anything. And if that's true, then it's not hard to see how people may just feel disconnected from the whole political order.

By the way, just in the last week, a couple of polls have come out asking people that, know, if President Trump promised lower taxes, good healthcare, and, you know, all the goodies associated with American citizenship and so forth, would you support joining the United States? Well, when all the nice conditions,

were put into the question, 43 % of young people said yes.

Yeah. And it's the older Canadians who said, no, I don't care how good it is. I'm not going. Okay. And, and I think like, wow, that is, that is fascinating. Now, of course, the question in the poll was kind of rigged in a way to make joining the United States really quite attractive. But, but what it's doing is it implicitly, I think it's a measure of the basic psychological connection that a young person has to the country, to the political community and that

Ian Van Harten (01:19:54.498) Hmm.

Ian Van Harten (01:20:21.89) Mm-hmm.

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:20:23.487) if we create a decision-making situation in which joining another country will yield better material benefits, better quality of life and so forth, would you do it? And 43 % say yes. So this is like really interesting and really sobering. And I think it might be connected to this long running phenomenon we see that voter participation does vary with age.

And only when you're really quite old does it really drop off for kind of obvious reasons, but at the front end, it's very low.

Ian Van Harten (01:21:01.582) Well, does, does the responsibility for voter turnout fall on any particular person or group, or is it, is it just the voters responsibility and choice? Or, or is it the politicians themselves or people in leadership to create the conditions where people do feel connected and engaged?

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:21:27.289) Well, as I said at the outset, the dominant way in which we understand voting is as a right rather than an obligation. you know, I think that's like a, that was a fateful decision we made. And we think that we have bolstered voting by

by guaranteeing it in the Charter of Rights. But the whole, as I said earlier, the whole problem with a right is that you don't have to exercise it if you don't want to. It's a prerogative of mine. And obligations operate differently. If I am called by a sheriff to appear for service on a jury, there's no, it's the criminal who's got, it's the offender who has a right to jury.

not me. I have an obligation, like a legally enforceable obligation to serve on that jury. And unless I provide a really good excuse to the judge as to why I cannot serve, I am taking time out of my private life to transact this extremely important public obligation. And Canadians kind of understand that part, I think. And so when we pitch

voting as a right rather than an obligation, we've given up a large part of the rhetorical case for voting participation, seems to me. So maybe we need to think about what is required actually of people to make a polity actually work well. And hard to say, maybe that ship already left port, don't know. But.

Ian Van Harten (01:23:22.902) Hmm

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:23:23.233) Anyway, that's just part of the answer, I would say, Ian.

What we have done is that we've done all the technical things. Modern societies are really good on the technical stuff. We've made it easier and easier to vote. And it has moved maybe the needle a little bit, but not very much. Now, what does move the needle actually sometimes is the salience of an election. And so if there's something big happening,

then maybe more people take interest and voter participation does go up. The 2015 election was a real spike in voter participation at the federal level in Canada. That was the year Stephen Harper's conservatives were defeated and Trudeau's liberals won a majority. And voter participation went up markedly and it's sort of trailed off since then. So you see these spikes.

when perhaps there is increased salience in an election, maybe like a big issue, like in 1988, it was free trade, very big deal. Everybody was animated about that. Maybe it's like a new personality, know, Trudeau really had that kind of effect on a lot of people and young Canadians, by the way. of course, yeah, of course, good point.

Ian Van Harten (01:24:52.91) Or maybe it was legalizing marijuana.

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:24:57.987) Yes, how could I forget? Dope. So yeah, so that happens sometimes. That's a point.

Online Voting: Convenience vs. Community

Ian Van Harten (01:25:06.062) Well, so what do you think about voting online? As I think people sometimes bring this up as a way of making it voting more accessible. And maybe that's even though, like you say, we have been making it more accessible, but is it, will voting online move the needle or is that even a good idea?

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:25:29.935) I think it would be consistent with other measures we've taken to make it as easy as possible. maybe that'll work for certain people. can see elderly people maybe taking advantage, but elderly people are also less proficient on electronic technology. So that's a tough one. I think security issues are a pretty big question for electronic voting.

We are now, I think, quite suspicious of pretty much anything that happens on the internet. And there might be excellent reasons for that suspicion. So I think that's a real steep hill to climb, just the security questions associated with electronic voting. This might be my cranky conservatism coming out again.

You know, more and more online life does disconnect us from the common world, the common material world in which we live. And so it means that people, you know, they might be staring at you, but they're listening to something that's generated like in, you know, Japan or somewhere like that. And yet our political communities are defined by space. So you've got our information technologies.

that eliminate the significance of space and time. And yet our politics remain territorial and that means they are bound by space and time. And so I think we're living through this great disjunction. People are living in two worlds kind of simultaneously, but the two worlds are not well connected. You got the spaceless, timeless world of social media and the internet and all that kind of stuff. And then you've got the time bound.

territorial world of our carbon existence, of people who are close to us, and the political community that is actually all about giving solidity and integrity to an actual place, like a piece of real estate on the planet. And so online voting would, I think, just increase that disjuncture that is already fraying the ties of political community. So I think that's my...

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:27:57.635) sort of grumpy sort of suspicion about online voting.

The Influence of Opinion Polls

Ian Van Harten (01:28:02.062) Well, I think it's not totally only grumpy, I guess, you know, those are fair points. Let's talk about public opinion polls that happened during elections. These also have become more controversial. I don't know if they, maybe they've always been controversial, but it seems they're becoming more controversial. Sometimes they're wrong, but sometimes they seem to influence

voting too much or that's how the argument goes. And it makes the results seem inevitable sometimes. But can you talk about opinion polls and how they impact elections and voters?

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:28:46.713) Yeah, I'm not an expert on this, I've sort of kept up a little bit with the scholarly commentary on it. I think the main criticism historically of polling is that it sort of converts election periods into horse races.

pollsters will undertake surveys. And the key question is, if an election were held today, for what party would you vote? And then quickly that information is tabulated and it's made public. And then we say, okay, at this point in the election, the concertos are up five points over the liberals. And immediately, like the horse race image comes to mind. And election day is the finish line down there.

and they're rounding the fourth turn and, boy, it's getting exciting. What's it gonna be? And the idea then, it becomes this weird kind of contest among titans, usually the leaders of the parties. And that occludes the public policy issues that really should be the subject of voter attention and debate. So I think that's...

That's one of the biggest arguments against polling is that it sort of distorts the nature of elections and it makes election campaigning sort of dumber than it would otherwise be. I don't know, but it's a good argument, it seems to me at least. And...

And then as the election day approaches, the question is whether polling will have sort of an independent kind of effect on voter choices, because generally what happens is that voter attention goes from something close to zero at the beginning of a campaign, and then within two weeks of the election date,

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:31:06.145) voter interest really starts to pick up. that voters may not actually have the time or the interest or the capacity to really quickly dig into the issues and what's dividing the candidates and the parties and so on and so forth. They'll look to other heuristics, they'll look to other shortcut types of indicators of how they should go.

And the argument is that they will fall upon the horse race to see whom they should bet on, if you like. in other words, they're sort of either for or against the lead horse based on how far the lead horse is from the others, rather than voting on, like, well, is this like a good horse? You know?

And so the argument against polling then is that it creates that kind of distortion. And so for a long time, we had laws in Canada which imposed a blackout period within days of the election saying no polls shall be published within, I think, 48 hours of the opening of polls. So that there's like this quiet time when people have to think and not just simply look at polling and who's up and who's down and so on and so forth.

And that became difficult to enforce in the internet era. And I think now it's basically gone defunct. so it's no longer applied in the short period before elections. Anyway, I don't know, is...

in some ways a deeply democratic exercise and it is a form of expression and people love polls. Polling technology is getting more complicated for lots of reasons, notably because people don't use landlines very much anymore, so it's hard to get representative samples and there's so much polling going on that people, when they pick up their phone or whatever it is and they

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:33:32.751) They hear it's someone from Angus Reid, they go click like immediately, right? But who's doing the clicking? Who's hanging up? It tends to be younger people. Older people will participate, which means unless certain statistical wizardry is practiced, then you'll get unrepresentative results. And so the polls are less valuable, blah, blah, blah. So there's lots of flux in the industry, real concerns that polls are accurate and so on and so forth.

but we still like them and I think they're gonna be around for a long time to come.

Ian Van Harten (01:34:10.318) Well, it was interesting in one part of the book where you're talking about polls. There's the notion that polls create the idea that something is good because it has majority support. And then that's not always the case. Now in an election, that may be the context is a bit different for that, but I think the book mentions how you wouldn't take a poll on what the interest rate should be being set by the Bank of Canada.

So there are certain things where, you know, just because most people want it doesn't make it right.

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:34:46.991) Sure. So, yeah, I think that's right. And I guess I should agree with that since it's in the book. But yeah, in a way, polling then is this institutional expression of the power of public opinion in democracies. And that, yeah, people...

Yeah, maybe sometimes don't want to be left out. Like they want to, they want to be part of the winning team and, and so on. And instead of contributing to the formation of public opinion, they, they are allowing public opinion as they understand it to dictate their view. And so many people have it exactly backwards and it kind of reflects maybe a lack of confidence that people have in their own deliberative capacities. And, like.

Like, I don't know what's going on. I don't know what to think about this, but lots of other people seem to know what they think about it. So maybe I should just go with them because there are lots of them. There's only one of me. So there's that kind of thing. And of course, a lot of people are frail egos and their sense of themselves derives from the opinions others have of them. so they want to be part of the big crowd. That way they'll get recognition and some...

some security and so on and so forth. you know, political thinkers going way back said, yeah, this is a bit of a problem with democracies. They end up being tyrannies of public opinion.

the idiosyncratic, the eccentric, the forward thinking, maybe the highly competent get frozen out of the debate as a result.

Assessing Electoral Systems

Ian Van Harten (01:36:37.102) Mm-hmm. All right, let's move on to looking at our electoral systems and the influence they have. But before we drill down into the specific systems themselves, I'm wondering if you can set the context a little bit in terms of how we assess and go about choosing what the quote right system or best system should be. And I think it's

Most people don't think about how we're the ones choosing the rules of this, how this thing works. And in terms of how many MPs are there going to be, how many per writing or if there's any per writing, do you win by, do you need a majority of votes to win, or do you need just to have more votes than the other guys got? So these are choices that we make and the influence on how

what the results will be. can you just talk about a little bit at a high level how we go about thinking about these different questions when considering the electoral system we want to adopt?

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:37:46.873) Yes, I ask students often, okay, so how does it work? And they say, well, like we vote and then somebody gets elected. Well, that's great, but like it's way, way, way, way more complicated than that. And we have the easiest electoral system on the planet, I think.

Like it's really easy in this country. And still, you know, a lot of us just don't really know. Like we sort of intuitively know what we have to do and so on. But if you ask someone to explain our system, very few sort of really get all the pieces. So I just find that fascinating. But what it means in part is that what we have

is something that's been in place for a long time and we've never had to think about it in any any depth and so in that sense you know it's one of those things that's just not salient. So I remember a book I think from the 1950s by a political scientist and he made this great great point and it has such broad application he says all

Organization is bias. All organization is bias. Now, what he's getting at is that when we fashion institutions, we will find it impossible to create an institutional order that treats absolutely everybody, every interest, every principle equally.

and neutrally. So you're always favoring somebody and disfavoring others when you create different kinds of systems of decision making, essentially. And I think in electoral systems, it is truer perhaps than almost everywhere else. We in Canada have the single member plurality system

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:40:12.163) basically because the British had it when we inherited their whole constitutional structure and made it part of Canada's. So there's no necessary connection between the single-member plurality electoral system and parliamentary government, but it just so happens that historically they went together in Britain and they've remained together with us. And then what happens over time is that

It becomes just sewn into the fabric of our lives, our rhythms, our thinking, our party organization and all that kind of stuff. it's kind of like fish in water. You ask a fish, so what's water? The fish is like, I've got a clue, you know? And it's kind of like that. What's your electrical system? Well, I don't know, water, I don't know. And so...

you know, at the highest level, that's why we have the one that we have. And then it's usually, you know, questions and criticisms from the margin that are raised about the operation of the system. And people begin to say, you know, it can be different than it is. And the voices from the margin begin to say, you know, like in Germany, they have a different electoral system.

and they are a prosperous, advanced, industrial democracy, just like Canada, but they do it differently. And actually, they've got, and their political outcomes, you know, I think are better than Canada's. So, and I think that their political outcomes are connected to their electoral system. So maybe we should look at that stuff, you know, and other people say, yeah, you know, it's true in this country, it's this way and so on and so forth. So that's sort how it's gone in Canada.

We've had a steady adherence to the kind of electoral system that we have, but with occasional periods of debate about reform and electoral system change. that's, you know, I think the high level thing. The main point is that it is never completely obvious how

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:42:38.127) votes by citizens are translated into seats in parliament. You have to have some kind of well-developed way to figure this out. And there are, I think, about 150 different potential electoral systems that you can choose from. Now, a lot of them are on paper and not in use anywhere. But there are lot of different

alternatives that are in play in different countries. And so there is choice available. The question is whether we think ours is so bad that we need to change, whether what's operating in that context would actually operate well in our context. And is it worth, is it possible to actually make the change given that Canadians find it difficult to agree on many things?

And then I guess the last question is whose interests will be advanced by changing the electoral system? Because if it's true that all organization is biased, then a changing electoral system is going to benefit somebody and operate to the detriment of somebody else. Just as the current system benefits certain kinds of interests and operates to the detriment of others.

That's the high level.

Single Member Plurality: Strengths and Critiques

Ian Van Harten (01:44:08.216) Cool, so let's drill down into the current system we have, the single member plurality. Most people know it as the first-past-the-post system. So can you get into how does this system work?

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:44:23.727) Sure. We have 343 seats in the House of Commons.

Accordingly, we have 343 geographically defined electoral districts covering the whole of the territory of Canada. Each electoral district has roughly, and I mean really roughly, the same number of people as every other one. So they're roughly equivalent in terms of...

demographic population size. And then we say that there will be one MP elected per riding in every election. So single member seat. And any number of candidates can run for that seat in an election. There are certain rules that apply.

You have to make a deposit with the Chief Electoral Officer and you'll get it back if you comply with all the reporting requirements that Elections Canada imposes on candidates. so there are technical things to make sure that complete idiots are not involved in the electoral system to sort of discredit the process and so on and so forth. And there actually is like no limit.

on the number potentially of candidates who can run. If you can get 50 signatures, you make a deposit with the chief electoral officer, you can basically run. I think in one of the by-elections in, maybe it was the Ontario, the Toronto by-election in June of 2024, the federal one, there might've been like 180 something candidates. Like it was a ridiculous number.

Ian Van Harten (01:46:25.742) Hmm.

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:46:26.925) And of course, I don't even know why half these people or even all of them ran because they would get like zero votes or one, like how about a guy who gets zero votes? That means he didn't even vote for himself, you know? But anyway, like they're there. So there's in principle no limit, but what it means is that there is actually a small number of really viable contenders, maybe two or three or four. But anyway, that's what happens. And then the decision-making rule is very clear.

During the one day when polls are open and there's advanced voting too and so forth people vote for the candidate of their choice and when they're all added up the candidate with the most votes wins. That's it. And if there are two candidates then the person with the most votes is also the person with the majority of votes. If there's three or more candidates the winning candidate may have a majority of votes but not necessarily.

But in our system, it doesn't matter. All you have to do is get more votes than everybody else. So that's a plurality of the vote, not necessarily the majority of the vote. So that's basically it. And I'll explain one potential consequence that everybody seizes upon in criticism of it. When we have a...

a general election in Canada at the federal level. I'll talk about the federal level here just to keep it simple. We actually don't have an election. We have 343 elections. Every election in a riding is its own election.

And so we have 343 of them. I think that's very important to get straight. And then, and each election produces a winner. And that winner goes to the House of Commons. And the winner is almost always a representative of a political party. And so then you can calculate at the end of an election, a series of elections rather, the number of votes that

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:48:38.755) candidates of a certain political party won. And then you can aggregate the number of votes the candidates representing another political party won. And what people often do is notice the disparity in popular vote given for a party and the percentage of seats in the House of Commons.

that party actually won. And I'll explain it here very, very simply and easily, just so we understand the point. Let's say we imagine elections in Canada, 343 elections in election year, and there are two parties, party A and party B. Let's say in every single contest,

the candidate of representing party A won with 55 % of the vote, okay? A landslide. What that means is that when you look at the composition of the House of Commons, party A wins 100 % of the seats, but it wins 55 % of the vote. And that disparity is

Like just sort of the way it works. You know, just the way it works. And the critics of SMP say, that's a real problem because the SMP mistranslates votes into seats. And that's why it's bad. Because 45 % of voters don't have any representation in the of Commons. The parties for which they vote

get no seats in the House of Commons. And that's unjust. And so we need a system that translates votes more accurately into parliamentary representation. But notice a couple of things that happened here with that argument. First of all, that way of arguing kind of downplays the significance that 343 separate elections

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:51:08.569) for place.

And so it's kind of an interesting slip then to sort of aggregate the result of these individual elections into this big giant global result that we report with respect to parliament as a whole. And then the second little piece in this argument is that the critics are automatically going to party representation. So they're already sort of like embodying

Ian Van Harten (01:51:23.384) Hmm.

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:51:40.271) a certain account of representation when they make this criticism, that it's actually the parties that are important, not the candidates. And there is merit to what they're saying because parties are really important in Canadian politics. They really help to organize the vote. As a matter of empirical fact, a great many voters...

do vote on the basis of party, not on the basis of candidate or on issue and so on and so forth. So there's merit to that, I get it. But in the constitutional sense, you're actually voting for a candidate. You're not voting for a party, right? That's the constitutional sort of principle here. so anyway, that's I think the nature of the discussion about SMP and...

why critics think we really need to change it because it mistranslates votes into seats and it operates against the interests of some parties but operates in favor of the interests of other parties better.

Ian Van Harten (01:52:48.718) Well, and one feature of SMP that you point out in the book too is, you can get, effectively you can get a majority government if you get 40 % of the popular vote. so that, so SMP means it's possible to have a majority government, which I think a lot of Canadians

I can't speak for everyone, but I think a lot of people like the fact that we can have majority governments and maybe don't realize that if we switched to a different system, probably we would never be able to have a majority government. So that's another significant thing to think about, I think, with the system too.

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:53:37.027) I think it's Yep. That is a subject of lots of discussion. because the great thing about a majority government is that we know who's responsible for public policy in the next four years. It's them because they get to control parliament. so accountability is an important principle in democratic politics and constitutional politics. And the SMP

It does manufacture parliamentary majorities and it does so by kind of, you know, awkwardly translating votes into seats, but it produces what some people think is a really salutary consequence. so that's a good point. Now the critics would say in response that there are many countries in which

the electoral system produces a constant minority or coalition government. And it generally works. It works. It's worked for decades in Germany and in other continental European countries. People understand that elections produce fractured parliaments, but that there are

long-standing and fairly natural affinities between and among parties, which means they get together after the election, they talk about their representation results, and then they come together and form coalitions so that parties of a certain general stripe come together and they fashion a majority. And they will share cabinet posts in this new coalition. And away we go.

and they can be quite stable. So it's a question of sort what you get used to. Now, the response to that is that, yeah, OK, you can manufacture majorities with coalitions and so on and so forth. And the advocates of this model say it's actually more democratic because you get a much more representative legislative assembly out of it.

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:55:58.041) But it's also true, you see, that the voters have no influence really on the formation of the coalitions, who's in and who's out. And so you still got extra democratic or extra popular sorts of negotiating and wheeling and dealing that happens kind of outside of the electoral context. So there's that. And then furthermore, critics would say,

that there was a time when even the proportional representation systems produced minoritarian parliaments, but with not a ton of political parties. And that sort of occurred because political cultures were relatively integrated and people weren't interested in extreme, eccentric party choices and so on and so forth, so on. But these days,

These days, the concern is, well, political life is really fragmenting. There's a lot of anti-system kind of agitation. Far-right people and parties seem to be gaining some traction in European politics. And yeah, we might be in for a rough ride here because a lot of the arguments for proportional representation in Canada and in Europe

have always had kind of like a left-wing sort of bias. That what's good about PR is that it actually helps the left parties become stronger. Well, and that's because there've been a lot of left parties, like small left parties, but not many at all on the right. Well, what if the political climate changes and now we've got all kinds of right-wing parties of various kinds now gaining some electoral traction? PR works for them too.

And then a lot of say like, uh-oh, we weren't in for this. So there is a sense in which the majoritarian SMP type system does operate against all fringe parties based on numbers, not ideological stripe.

Ian Van Harten (01:58:13.23) Well, so a couple follow-up questions still before we move on to the PR system. But I'm wondering if you can address this idea of, from the certain voters' minds, that, I wasted my vote because the guy I voted for, the guy or girl, didn't win. Can you address that comment?

Tom M.J. Bateman (01:58:41.453) Yeah, it's a common claim and it's like a serious claim. I think a lot of people feel that way and I understand the frustration. So the idea is that if you are in a constituency in which the strong party, let's say is the conservative party, but you're an NDP-er, you want to vote NDP because you think their ideas are the best ideas.

And but you know that, you know, the past, the past experience in this writing, and maybe even the polls in this campaign, are showing the NDP candidate with with just like 10 or 15 % of the vote supporter, the vote support, but the conservative candidate has 40%. And the liberals, you know, maybe have 30 or 33 % or something like that. So the liberals are kind of close to the Tories.

They could beat the Tories maybe but the Tories are in front I hate the Tories because I'm an NDP er and I don't like liberals either but I Dislike them less than I than I dislike Tories but I really love the NDP and and so the election election day has arrived and What do I do? Well, do I vote my heart and my conviction vote for the NDP candidate and

lose and lose big because probably the conservative candidate is going to win or do I say do I vote strategically and and say okay I want to vote NDP they're my heart's desire if I do they will lose and and if I vote for them that means I'm not voting for the party that couldn't

beat the Tory, in which case I'm actually helping the conservative win. And I really don't want that. So what I have to do is abandon my party, vote for the liberal to block the Tory. That's strategic voting. And it leaves a bitter taste in the mouth of every NDP voter in a minority NDP riding. So I understand the idea. And yep, that's what you just got to do.

Tom M.J. Bateman (02:01:09.103) And one can say, well, like welcome to life. Life is about compromising and choosing the least worst often and not the best. And here's just one political example of a general law of human existence. And that's like sort of, you eat your darts or something. advocates say, it doesn't have to be that way. We can adopt a different system that counts votes differently.

so that you don't have to kiss away your preference. So let's do it.

Ian Van Harten (02:01:44.76) Well, so one last thing before we get to proportional representation. Can you say more about the parties that, single member plurality seems to favor like they're the national broad parties and, also regional parties, right? That those parties kind of are advantaged by the system too.

Tom M.J. Bateman (02:02:07.629) Right, so large parties with significant support across the country, which means across the 343 electoral districts have a good shot at government. Because if they, let's say if they are pulling at 40 % across the country and around 40 % in every riding, then they've got a good chance of electing a lot of MPs. But

but it's a particular kind of party. It's a party that has a national prominence, that is attractive across the country, and that is competitive in lots and lots of writings all across the country. And so the question is, what kind of party can be that kind of party? Now there's another kind of party, which is...

a fringe party, a smaller party, which may have support across the country, but with a certain constituency, with a certain kind of voter. And these voters are everywhere, but not in great numbers. And that means that in any riding, that party would get 10, 12, 15 % of the vote.

which means if that's true across the board, then that means that party would get 10 or 12 or 15 % of the national popular vote. And that would translate into like 40 seats in the House of Commons, if we translated perfectly. But you see, in our single member plurality system, if a candidate gets 10 or 12 or 15 % in a constituency election, he or she's not gonna win.

And if that's true across every riding, yeah, then that party will get no representation at all. Now imagine another small party with, let's say, eight or 10 % of national support. So 7 % of all votes in an election were delivered to this party. But imagine...

Tom M.J. Bateman (02:04:33.839) that that party is competitive only in one region of the country, such that the 7 or 8 % national vote is actually concentrated in a small number of electoral districts, which means the 7 % national translates into 35%, 40 % of the support in a group of

regional, regional writings. And that, and if you get 35, 40 % of the vote, yeah, you're going to, you're going to elect MPs. And, uh-huh. So that means then, it's not just the national vote for some parties that determines its parliamentary success. It's how that national vote is actually distributed. And if it's regionally concentrated, then that small party can actually gain parliamentary representation.

But what that means then is that the parties that appeal to regional electoral interests are the ones that can really gain parliamentary traction. And the best example right now is the Bloc Québécois. This is a party whose activity and support is regionally concentrated, mainly in Quebec. And it gets eight or so percent of national support.

But it's all concentrated in a province with 78 seats. And that means the 8 % national support translates into, what, 25 % or something of the popular vote in Quebec. And then that 25 % is concentrated in writings in Quebec. And so it gets a lot of MPs as a result. In 1993,

It was the second party in the House of Commons. So you got a bunch of separatists who were Her Majesty's loyal opposition of all things. They had 50 something, 52 seats, I think, or something like that in the House of Commons at that time. So what that means is that our electoral system favors large parties with national appeal, and it also favors

Tom M.J. Bateman (02:07:02.143) small parties with regional appeal and it punishes small parties with national appeal. Talk to Elizabeth May, leader of the Greens, and she'll say, I just can't stand this because we've got support across the country, know, five, six maybe or so percent support, but it's like pulling teeth to elect anybody because that five percent is distributed across the country among a certain kind of person who really likes the Green agenda.

Proportional Representation Explained

Ian Van Harten (02:07:30.958) Well, so, so let's, let's move then to proportional representation, which would help out Elizabeth May and other parties like the Green Party. Can you talk? And so there's a bit of, there's a couple of different systems that fit within this category, but can you talk about proportional representation and how that system works?

Tom M.J. Bateman (02:07:52.205) Yeah, I'll keep this simple, not least because it gets blindingly complicated very, very quickly. There's so many different ways to allocate votes in a PR system and so many variations on the theme and so on and so forth. And I don't even know most of them. And so it just makes my brain hurt way too much. But the simple point is this, that

Proportional representation systems operate on the premise that parliamentary representation of parties should match voter preferences for parties. So if a party gets 28 % of the vote in a jurisdiction, it should get something close to 28 % of the seats in the legislature. So there's a much more fitting

a symmetrical translation of party votes into party seats. And so that's actually the premise of it. That's the point of it. That's not the effect of it. That's what it's designed to do. And so we have to alter the way we organize the system to produce those results. And what proportion representation does is...

create multi-member electoral districts. And I can explain this one maybe with a simple example. So let's say that we adopt proportional representation in Canada at the federal level, but we still have the concept that each province will have roughly the number, the percentage of seats in the Hills of Commons that matches its percentage of the population of Canada. So under that,

Under that principle, Ontario gets whatever it is, 122 seats in the House of Commons. So let's say we're going to have PR. Well, what we're going to do is make Ontario one large electoral district.

Tom M.J. Bateman (02:10:04.591) And that district is going to elect 122 MPs. So it's going be a multi-member electoral district. And at election time, Ontarians are going to vote. And they are not going to vote for a candidate. They're going to vote for a party of their choice. And the result might be, you know, 35 % conservative, 35 % liberal.

and 30 % NDP, let's say. Well, that means that 35 % of the 122 candidates from the Conservatives are going to go to Ottawa, and 35 % of the 122 are going to go as Liberals, and the 30 % are going to go as NDP MPs representing Ontario.

And well, who exactly? What MPs? Well, prior to the election, each party is going to draw up a list of candidates, 122 names, rank ordered from one to 122. And that'll be that own party's process for determining who are the people on that list and in what order they appear. That's up to the party.

When after the election, the conservatives get 35 % of the vote, then the top 35 % of the Tory candidates on the Tory list are elected to the House of Commons. And the leader will be at the top of that list for all the obvious reasons. then the question is, yeah, like who gets to be number two, three, four? Well, it will be people who are popular, lots of experience, whatever it tends to be.

it'll be like an internal party process to determine that list. So that's sort how it goes. It's very party-centric, but it really delivers on this promise that the percentage of vote for a party translates into percentage of seats for that party. And then in a federal election like this, every province would undergo the same process and you would have a House of Commons that would pretty accurately reflect the party preferences of Canadian electors.

Tom M.J. Bateman (02:12:33.187) Now the one big variation here is, I mean, there lots of variations, but one common one is to open the list, which means during the election, I would get a ballot as a voter and the ballot would not only have the parties across the top, but under each party label, it would have a list of the candidates the party is fronting. And I have two choices.

Ian Van Harten (02:12:50.221) Hmm.

Tom M.J. Bateman (02:13:03.183) I could either check the party at the top, this little box beside party, go check, and that means I'm voting for the party and I'm okay with the list that the party has drawn up. Or instead of checking the top where the party is named, I check a box beside the candidate I want, in which case I am not only selecting the party, but I'm also voting for a particular candidate. And the candidate

who garners the most checks goes to the top of the list, which means is elected to the House of Commons. And so I'm voting for the party and the candidate at the same time, and I'm reordering the list or helping to, right? And that sort of opens the list to the voters to decide what MPs they would actually like to have. So you can do that kind of thing. And it will almost certainly produce minority parliaments.

and then we'll be into coalition governments and the merits of that way of operating a parliament. Could be good, could be not good. We'll have to see.

Ian Van Harten (02:14:09.582) And one other question I have about the effect of proportional representation. I've heard people argue that this would change how campaigns would be executed in terms of how parties would run their campaign. And maybe they'd be less combative and we'd be less polarized because they know, we're going to probably be in a coalition government with some of these people. So we shouldn't be as hard on them. is that

true, or is that how you... Do think that's a viable argument, or a viable effect that this would have?

Tom M.J. Bateman (02:14:43.087) It's plausible. It's a plausible argument. I see the logic of it. See, every vote counts now, in a sense, in a PR election system. And so if I want a greater number of members in the House of Commons, then I'm looking for ways to garner votes. And I have to appeal to lots of people.

to get them to support my party. And that might have a moderating effect because in SMP, what you got to do is you got to get your 35 or 40%. And then after that, you don't care about anybody else. And the argument is that that sort of creates more conflict and rancor and polarization and so on in the whole political process. And

So maybe that would work. The other thing, of course, is that a party competing in an election against other political parties has to keep in mind what the reality is going to be after the election. that, like, I'm to have to cooperate with some of these people, like, after the election. And so I don't want to defame them too much because we might actually be governing partners later. And so that may produce...

a moderating effect on the system and on the nature of political debate and so on. So we'll have to see. The counter example would be Israeli politics. It's got a very straight up list PR system. It's got a Knesset with lots and lots of little parties and governments always have to negotiate.

coalition arrangements with small parties, some of them with fairly extreme policy positions, and it's really hard to do. Italy, for many years after the Second War, had a list PR system, it had a proliferation of parties, and it was a gong show. They'd have changes in government once a year. Lots of instability, which means power basically shifts to the permanent bureaucracy because the politicians can't figure anything out.

Tom M.J. Bateman (02:17:09.263) There's a lot that is very particular about this. It's not just the electoral system that does all these wonderful things, because that's what the proponents of reform always say. All we've got to do is change the electoral system and then we have heaven on earth. It's going be fantastic. Well, no, because the experience over in that place is dependent in part on all kinds of conditions that operate there that don't operate here.

Ian Van Harten (02:17:24.372) You

Tom M.J. Bateman (02:17:38.339) And so we just can't say exactly how it's going to operate here based on their experience. We may have some intimations, but you can't really take them to the bank. So we have to be careful about this. so, yeah, think lots of effects are plausible, but you just never really know for sure.

Ian Van Harten (02:18:00.654) So I'm curious.

Tom M.J. Bateman (02:18:02.351) And one last point, by the way, Ian, is that people vote a certain way, in part because of the system we currently have. What often happens is that we say, well, in a new system, how it's going to work? Well, what we use is voting patterns from this system to extrapolate on the performance of the new system. But the new system creates different kinds of incentives.

and people may change their voting habits, in which case, like we just don't know how it'll all work out in the end for that reason. We may have a proliferation of all kinds of political parties that nobody ever thought about before in a PR system. And I'm not saying it's true. I have no idea if it's true. But it's just that when you change things, sometimes you get more than you asked for.

Reforming Canada’s Electoral System

Ian Van Harten (02:18:53.806) Hmm. Yep. well, so I'm curious about how we would go about reforming the electoral system if we chose to do so. And that there have been attempts in the past to bring this forward. And there was somewhat, the recent example of Justin Trudeau in 2015, declaring that that election was going to be the last first past the post election.

which then didn't end up happening, and now he's kind of saying that he regrets, or this is one of the big things that he regrets from his term in office, is that he didn't change it. So I don't know if you want to talk about what exactly happened there, but can you talk about how this would come about if we were to decide to do this?

Tom M.J. Bateman (02:19:45.295) At the federal level, I think it would just take new legislation. Now, the Canada Elections Act is structured around the SNP system, so it has all the details, the rules about conducting elections in a single-member plurality context. So I think to change the electoral system, we would have to entirely renovate the Canada Elections Act.

And that's just an act of Parliament. So it can be done fairly straightforwardly. But I think many commentators would say that the Canada Elections Act is not like other kinds of legislation. It might be counted as an organic statute among other organic statutes that really have a constitutional kind of character.

because the legislation sort of fixing our electoral system is very closely tied to the operation of the whole constitutional order. And so the Elections Act, it's not a constitutional document, but it is close to a constitutional document and that it's kind of special and that it has to be amended with some care.

and with a significant degree of consensus. You don't want to start fiddling with the Elections Act for very small petty partisan reasons to try and freeze out your opponents. You know, that's what authoritarian regimes do, not constitutional regimes. And so we want to make sure that if we're going to do electoral system change and therefore renovate the Elections Act, that we've got a broad

agreement among everybody concerned that this is what we're going to do. And I wouldn't be surprised if there might be calls for some kind of popular consultation on this, like a referendum or something like that, or at the very least an election in which a plan for concrete electoral reform is

Tom M.J. Bateman (02:22:09.023) is in the platform of one of the parties. So that if you vote for these guys, this is what you're going to get. And when we have seen electoral reform in other countries like New Zealand, that's how it's actually operated. New Zealand is a very good comparator country to Canada, parliamentary, small. They've had lots of partisan rancor. They changed their electoral system in early 1990s, and they did it kind of pursuant to an election in which the electoral system was a big factor, was a big matter of debate.

So I can see it happening like that. And we had something similar in Canada in 2015 when Mr. Trudeau of the Liberals proposed electoral reform if he were elected. He was elected, got a majority government and considered it for a while and then dropped it. And I think his motives became really quite transparent quite quickly because

He wanted to have a broad consultation and talk about the merits and so on and so forth, but he wanted everybody to agree that it will be a preferential vote system that would come out the other end. the preferential vote system is basically a change to our SMP. Still single member.

but now it'll be a more majoritarian thing so that the winning candidate in a riding just doesn't get a plurality but gets actually a majority. But what you do is you have a ballot which gives each voter the opportunity to rank order candidates in order of preference. So if I'm a liberal voter, then I put number one beside the liberal candidate. And I think if I can't have that person, then I would take...

go with the NDP candidate number two. And if not them, then I'll take the Tory number three or something like that. You do that. And then at the end of the election, everybody's ballots are counted according to the first preferences. All the first preferences are added up. And if the first preference candidate among all the voters gets a majority, we're done. But the candidate with the...

Tom M.J. Bateman (02:24:29.581) the highest number of first preferences may not have a majority. So then what you do is you look at the ballots in which are recorded the first preferences for the candidate that gets the least number of first preferences. And then you look at all the second preferences on those ballots that you've just taken from the bottom and you distribute those up. And then you see if the number of second preferences

given to the liberal who's got the most first preference ones on the on the earlier round puts him or her above the 50 percent and if so bingo you've got you've got a winner if there's still no majority winner you do the same thing you take you take the second lowest first ballot counts for the candidate and and distribute the third preferences up to the remainder and see what you get and

Mr. Trudeau averred, and I think accurately, that the liberals would be the party that would do the best with this kind of preferential vote system, which coincidentally is why he liked it. And it turns out the Commons committee actually supported a proportional representation model, not an alternative preferential vote model. And he said, yeah, I don't like that. And he said, yeah, let's move on.

And so it became quite cynical and very dispiriting for people who voted for him because of his promise of electoral reform. like right out of the gate, Mr. Trudeau, think sort of injured his credibility among a large group of progressives who thought he was gonna really do something.

Ian Van Harten (02:26:20.948) Mm-hmm. Well, do you see? Because it will take a wide consensus or broad consensus to make this happen Part a lot of parties will have to agree Like you say it a lot of people do argue that it will it requires a referendum to give it legitimacy as well and And there's also kind of the fact that the parties that have power to do it like

The parties who win power win it by the single-member plurality system. And so their incentives to change it are low. do you see the, and so the demand for, and referendums in Ontario and BC, and I think in PEI as well in the past few years have all been defeated. So I don't know, again, it's hard to predict the future. This might change, but do you see our electoral system changing?

Tom M.J. Bateman (02:26:59.897) Correct.

Ian Van Harten (02:27:19.49) in the future, you think we're stuck with what we have? And maybe that's not a terrible thing.

Tom M.J. Bateman (02:27:24.911) Yeah, we're stuck with what we have. That's my opinion. There's so many things going on in this country that there's just no room on the agenda to fiddle with this kind of stuff, yeah, it's a bad time. And there's no energy for this kind of exercise.

I don't think. There's energy for other stuff, but not this. And, you know, it's not the best for sure, but I'm not sure that it's bad enough to really scream for change.

Ian Van Harten (02:28:11.886) Well, and so is there any, but is there anything that could be done to improve our system or how it, how it's carried out without a complete overhaul or change to the, to the system itself?

Tom M.J. Bateman (02:28:15.447) And as you say, change will be difficult.

Tom M.J. Bateman (02:28:36.815) I think a long-term project might be to resuscitate political parties. this is a long and different conversation, but political parties are increasingly leader-dominated election delivery vehicles. They are now highly professionalized organizations.

driven by leaders and catering to the aspirations of political leaders. And so, and once a political leader gets into parliament, then that political leader becomes an extremely powerful prime minister who dominates cabinet and sucks all the oxygen out of pretty much every room that he or she goes into and dominates the political party.

And there are rules that political parties have developed to give leaders such overweening influence and authority. And I think that some people now are beginning to notice this and they're thinking about maybe ways that we need to alter the operation of political parties themselves.

to make them broader institutions that bring more people in and that operate to reduce the idea of a leader as kind of like a personality cult. And unfortunately, the liberals have been suffering from the effects of having a personality cult for 10 years.

and the party's in terrible shape. And everyone's hoping, well, maybe like like another, you know, real cult leader is gonna deliver us, you know? And unfortunately the liberals have not had time to like think all this stuff through and kind of re-examine themselves and what their policy identity is and how they're going to integrate Canadians into the, like the continual.

Tom M.J. Bateman (02:31:04.015) kind of operation of the political party. And also think about how they elect leaders and how they influence the leader of their own party, as opposed to the leader taking over and telling them what to do all the time. And you know, like the criticism of Justin Trudeau is now like a very familiar song that he sort of camped out in the PMO and he had three or four people around him. And that's all you need to know about him and his decision-making.

That's it. Caucus, nothing. Cabinet, nothing. And it worked to the detriment of the country and to the party. And so I just wonder if that's where some change may take place. And again, it's not going to be top-down change. It's not going to be like the government of Canada telling parties what to do. No, no, no. The parties will have to decide this, whether they want to have

They want to generate personality cults every time with a new leader or whether they want to think of a different model.

Ian Van Harten (02:32:10.085) Yeah. Uh, well, yeah, I think that's a great note to leave on. Uh, again, there are lots more we could talk about, but I think it'll be good to leave it there. But, um, again, it's really fascinating conversation. So just really appreciate you taking the time to do this. So thank you very much.

Tom M.J. Bateman (02:32:28.889) My pleasure,

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