Dennis Pilon on electoral reform: lessons learned and reasons for hope

What are the most important lessons the electoral reform movement has learned in our two decades of fighting for proportional representation? How can understanding these lessons make us stronger going forward?

What progress has been made in Canada, and what evidence-based reasons are there to be hopeful?

Special guest: Dennis Pilon is a Professor at York University and one of Canada’s preeminent experts on voting system reform. He has written numerous journal articles, newspaper articles, book chapters, and books, including “The Politics of Voting: Reforming Canada’s Electoral System” and “Wrestling with Democracy: Voting Systems as Politics in the Twentieth Century West”.

I should know this by Heart by now Dennis not the long version just the short version if you want to look up the very long bio of Dennis and all the um probably 100 articles that he’s written you can go on the York University website and there’s just Reams and reams

Of stuff but for today Dennis Pon is a professor at York University and one of Canada’s preeminent experts on voting system reform he has written numerous Journal articles newspaper articles book chapters and books including the politics of V reforming Canada’s electoral system and wrestling with democracy voting systems as politics in

20th century West and today we’ve asked Dennis to talk to us about some of the most important lessons that the Electoral Reform movement in Canada has learned in the past couple of decades and also to give us some reasons for hope uh which are really important to

Those of us who have been in the trenches of this for quite a while so I’ll turn this over to Dennis thank you Dennis all right well thank you Anita and you know thanks to everyone for coming out tonight wow I mean almost 350 people uh signing up on a on a Sunday

Night uh to talk about this topic I mean if nothing else gives me hope uh it’s that so many of you have been involved in this topic and you’ve given your time and your energy uh and really you know we wouldn’t have made any of the gains

That we have if it hadn’t been for people like yourselves and I know that some of you are are just starting out maybe this is your first time coming to one of these events but I I noticed on the list of the names coming through some real um Warriors in the trenches uh

Of our movement so thanks for sticking with this topic and uh and taking it out into the streets uh amongst your neighbors and Friends uh you know getting us on the agenda I want to share my screen I’ve got a very short little presentation I want to do and then we’ll

Open things up so that people can um let me just I always have to this there we go play from start let’s see if this works there we go um so you know I I’ll chat and I I’ll give you my my my take uh and then we’ll then we’ll have a

Back and forth and that’s where I really want you to drive the content of our time together uh you know we’ve got this theme but if there’s other things that you want to talk about or you know things you want to be reminded of you

Want to go back to some Basics I’m happy to do whatever you want to do in the time that we have together tonight okay well let’s add things up since 2000 because that was the brief I was handed and I know sometime it may look like I have a large beer with me

Tonight you know our state of of of play is driving me to drink but not so it’s actually ginger ale um I I really think that you know we got um we’ve got a time to assess where we are at this is as good a time as any uh and so let’s add

Up where we are where we have come in the last uh 20 years and so just you know off off off the back of an envelope I put down the various things that you know we’ve run through and we’ve had two citizens assemblies BC and Ontario uh both wildly successful uh really amazing

Examples of people with resources able to really come up with fantastic ideas we’ve had roughly speak speaking 10 legislative efforts around the topic um so we’ve had two at the national level we’ve had let me just see my little thing is in the way here um we’ve had

Two in Prince Edward Island uh we’ve had two in New Brunswick three in Quebec and one in Yukon and I’m kind of using this fairly broadly um to uh include uh any effort by a government uh you know whether they set up a commission uh whether they have a committee of of the

Legislature like they did in Yukon you know looking at the question so 10 different uh efforts that were primarily running out of the legislature or delegated from the legislator but but not as Citizens assembly we’ve had seven referenda on the question at the provincial level so uh three in British

Columbia three in Prince Edward Island and of course one in Ontario and we’ve had a number of multi-party agreements to move the issue forward we had a situation in British Columbia where the greens and the bcnp worked together to um have another referendum on the question when they were helping each

Other remain in power in 2018 uh and we had a multi-party agreement in Quebec that we thought was going to actually bring a change uh a multiparty agreement everyone but the government had agreed that if they got into power they would introduce a new voting system unfortunately when one of

The parties came to power it backed out of its commitment so we’ve seen an awful lot of activity over the last two and a half decades but nevertheless if we look at the bottom line you know zero adoptions of PR uh which obviously has got you know got to be disappointing I

See my thing here there we go so does that make us failures uh are we failures do we walk away from this saying it was all for not uh you know we didn’t get what we wanted so we didn’t have any impact well as I said I think this is

Definitely a time for us to assess where we are at as a as a movement as a group of people who’ve been agitating on this question and I I think that we have to have a benchmark we’ve got to have something to compare ourselves too uh we

Can’t just look at ourselves and and say well we could have done more we could have hit the streets longer we could have talked to more people we could have contracted more politicians um I think we need some measure of what people have been able to do in other countries

Particularly those countries where they’ve succeeded to try to say well what have we done how does it measure up uh is what we have done remarkably different than other countries and at the same time I think we need to compare where we’re at today with where we have

Been where were we 30 years ago where were we 20 years ago where were we 10 years ago you know when I started on this topic over 30 years ago and appeared before the Royal Commission on electoral reform and party financing presenting my model for a proportional

Voting system for Canada they thought PR was public relations um you know these were Political Animals they had been appointed by a government to head up a royal commission but they had no idea not the not the foggiest what PR stood for today you won’t find many who are in

The political Elites who don’t know what PR is so even just at that measure things have have changed a lot since I got started on this topic uh three decades ago what’s happened in other countries how can we compare ourselves to what they’ve accomplished elsewhere and here

I just want to underline something that you may not be aware of which is that voting system reform everywhere has been slow except when it hasn’t um and so what I mean by that is you know when you look at the long duray uh most cases

There has been a very very long process of advocacy of mobilization of agitation for a new voting system uh and so let’s look just at Germany right Germany uh you know comes together as a as a nation state in 1870 and pretty much right away there’s there’s agitation to change the

Voting system uh and so that agitation just continues but they don’t actually adopt a proportional system until 1919 so a very long period of of gation over over the topic and and they’re not an exception they’re not an outlier most Western European countries see a very long period of advocacy and tussle over

The voting system um uh before particularly before World War I and even the most recent era of reform you know we we had a long period where there wasn’t really anything happening on voting system reform from the late 50s into the 1970s and then suddenly the topic relaunches again and we see

Everyone talking about it in these different different countries um but again uh the fact that people were noticing the voting system didn’t mean that there were any immediate changes and in the countries that we’re most familiar with Italy Japan New Zealand decades it took decades to move those countries from their existing voting

Systems to a new voting system so it really it really is a good measure of our success or lack thereof um by looking at what’s happened in other countries it’s too easy to say New Zealand wow what a poster child for voting system reform but it didn’t happen overnight there it didn’t happen

Overnight it took a long time and a lot of work and a lot of random luck was involved in making that change as I’ll I’ll go into in a moment what about when voting system reform happens quickly um well we did see a fairly rapid adoption of proportional voting systems in

Particular historical moments uh so after World War I and in the read-option of proportional voting systems after World War II in Western Europe you saw quite dramatic changes I mean an entire continent just swept across I mean it’s not often that you see different countries simultaneously making a change

The same change uh there’s something going on when that happens uh and so that is something that is outof thee ordinary unusual that again we have to factor into our our understanding um and as I say we’ve got lots of examples that we can choose from in both cases cases

Where there’s a long process cases where there’s a short process one of my favorite examples and by favorite I mean I hate it um is the alternative vote adoption in British Columbia in 1951 this one happened wow super fast super fast the government was a coalition of

Two uh parties one a right-wing party another a center right party and when the Coalition fell apart they immediately introduced this new voting system practically overnight um and so when Elites want change they can act very quickly um when they don’t want change they can stall they can drag

Their feet they can push things off into committees um another really uh I think telling example was the flip-flop in France which adopted a proportional voting system in 1983 uh and then took that back out again in 1985 and both happened with very little consultation very little public input very much at

The behest of the parties uh that were in power so why do we see these patterns why why uh if we look at the total number number of voting system reform episodes why do we see these strong patterns uh for the most part uh fairly slow processes if any reform uh or quite

Quick uh processes happening uh in particular historical moments uh what what is pushing this well I think here uh you know the short answer is power you know one view of politics says that you know politics is kind of a reflection of what the people want um

You know the the voting system is an ADD adding machine that just adds up what people want and then reflects it into government but this is a rather naive view uh another view says that politics is all about power and power is not shared equally um and in a political

Environment unequal power then reflects in unequal um government um and so because the government in the state make laws uh they hand out contracts that are worth millions of dollars billions of dollars um A lot’s at stake for very powerful people in our society so even though parties obviously in some sense

Answered to voters I mean voters vote and that’s how parties get into office how they get into legislatures and gain power but it’s naive to assume that the voters are in the driver’s seat uh obviously the The funders Who fund the political parties who influence the party Elites they clearly have

Significant influence over uh what these parties do often to the detriment of what the public interest may be and we can see this impact of power on the patterns of Reform that I’ve been mentioning uh things that start with Elite interest uh are different than those that start with public pressure

Sometimes both are there uh certainly um around World War I in Winnipeg there was a huge Winnipeg general strike that followed uh World War I uh and there was an interesting um uh interplay between Elite interests and public pressure going on there but some of the examples I’ve talked about were strictly Elite

Interest so the case of British Columbia in 1951 where uh the coalition government of the day just suddenly introduced a majoritarian voting system uh that clearly started with a lead interest uh there wasn’t any other talk going on um on the other hand public pressure can lead to reform no doubt

About it we’ve seen examples where public pressure was a key ingredient in the reform process and if we look at Canadian history clearly public pressure was important in leading to the adoption of voting system reforms in 19 municipalities across western Canada uh shortly after after World War I but this

Pattern of Reform uh you know as I’ve mentioned can go fast or go slow and so what we’ve seen in tracking this as social scientists is that Elite interest tends to go fast um and uh public pressure tends to go slow um again these are these are Tendencies uh you can

Always find maybe some examples that stand out that don’t follow this but for the most part they do um so in the latter we often see that despite considerable public pressure the ladder can be delayed and deflected into consultation and redirection uh so um governments that don’t want to act

Parties that don’t want to accept the policy uh politicians who don’t want to take up the issue they can find ways to delay and deflect uh public pressure not forever um but as long as they think it may last sometimes they can Outlast uh the public pressure and some of the way

Way they do this of course I mean the most obvious one is to just ignore uh the pressure uh or they can condemn it and we saw that as the initial response of most of the political actors in the media was to you know try to ridicule

The issue first they ignore it then they ridicule it um then they start responding in all sorts of ways that you know don’t reflect a fair engagement with the issue um when we get past that and I would argue that those are the steps we’ve gone through right from the

Start of fair vote Canada in in 20 we have seen us March through these various steps where we’re ignored uh then we’re ridiculed uh then are are are then they engage but not in a in a in a Fair Way um and we have moved through

Each of those each of those stages and so once we get past a certain point then they have to start ponying up something uh but it’s usually not what we want uh and or it’s not directly what we want obviously what we want is just change

Change the system to a more fair one um so then they offer us consult or they try to redirect our efforts to other venues and here we can see in the Canadian patterns of delay and deflection over the last two decades obviously commissions of various kinds you know the government’s got a problem

People are unhappy let’s ship it out to a royal commission or a commission of some kind or a legislative committee and hey we’re talking and as long as we’re talking we’re not doing um and the hope is that by the time um pressure might Mount to do something U something may

Have happened maybe there’s an election uh maybe maybe the minority government has been turned into a majority government maybe the government’s been defeated and the opposition is now in power and they don’t care about the issue so these are all ways in which um public pressure can be uh delayed or

Deflected into other other areas um obviously public engagement we saw with the ca as good as the citizens assemblies were I mean when we look at the rationale the the intent of the governments that sponsored them it was pretty clear that they didn’t intend those to actually produce anything uh or

Lead to change and and there’s some very easy ways for us to know that I mean when push came to shove they didn’t spend any money uh to let anybody know that these commissions had done anything um and they they introduced the commissions uh with a host of rules that

Were meant to undermine their impact and make it very difficult for the public to take up the reforms that the uh different citizens assemblies have put forward the other uh technique that we often see is to try to push reform to other levels of government it’s not

Uncommon to see politicians at one level say ah well I’ll let these people at the junior level uh take up this uh take up this issue it certainly was the case historically uh if you look at the voting system reform history that I’ve done on Canada what you saw was that you

Know various activists were trying to get the federal and provincial government to change the voting system around World War I and the response of politicians was to say well why don’t you go to the municipal level uh and so we saw in in in provinces like British Columbia governments pass enabling

Legislation so that actors would focus their energies on the municipal level where there weren’t parties and so then they could you know basically spin their Wheels I mean they were successful for a time at that level interestingly of course more recently we saw that activists who were unsuccessful at

Getting parties to commit at the provincial level then were essentially forced to take local U efforts as a as a as an alternative um we saw how long that lasted uh so uh an Ontario liberal government you know allows people to make the reform at the Civic level but a

Conservative government just comes in and takes it away so much for referendums right we we heard conservatives are are terribly committed to referendums gosh we can’t do anything without them the people must speak except when we don’t need them to speak uh and so Doug Ford was able to just

Take away those reforms without any public consultation whatsoever so you can see here a pattern of behavior across all of these uh all of these efforts so what has changed in the 20 years I mean at one level we haven’t seen an adoption of a proportional

Voting system which is the goal of fair vote Canada and and obviously many of you who’ve tuned in tonight and that is Harsh you know we we all thought that we would get there we wanted to get there uh Fair vote Canada I think was rather um overzealous uh perhaps over

Optimistic uh I remember having a meeting with Larry Gordon talking about these historical Trends and him telling me well 20 years come on by that time you know we’re going to be there we’re not there um and so in that sense uh it is it is frustrating and it is time to

Take stock of of what we have learned uh what has happened well certainly what has changed in the last two decades is the elite visibility of the issue um if you’re involved in politics Beyond just voting um you know this issue you know about it uh and you know where you stand

Uh you’re for it you’re again it uh you know you’re there’s very few people who aren’t somewhere on the spectrum of what they think on the issue and that is a change you know when I was active in different political parties when I was taking this to public meetings I had to

Start by explaining what a voting system was to people because they had no idea right to them voting with single member plurality was the only way to vote how else could you do it this is crazy why are we having this conversation um they they had no idea that there were other

Choices that could be made because they didn’t have any experience and the people who did know were often people who came from other countries right people who had immigrated from Holland or Germany or Sweden they knew that there were other ways to vote but Canadians that had been in the country

And only voted in Canada really had had had not and these were politically active people didn’t know anything so we have seen a profound shift in the elite visibility of this issue which obviously moves the depth of the discussion uh in a in a significant way we have also

Improved the public knowledge of the issue it’s certainly less than the elites um the public generally is not well versed on any aspects of our elections um and hey I’m not I’m not throwing shade on the public uh they’re busy they’ve got lives uh unlike you and

Me who like to spend a Sunday night talking about this topic um most of them are doing something else um and they come to an election once every four years or however many different elections they’ve got going and they look to others to say you know how does

This system work so we haven’t been as successful at ramping up general public knowledge but no one has uh elections Canada the political parties I mean the public has got a lot on their plate of which voting in an election is just one thing that shows up every now and then

Um we have also built up the activist capacities and knowledge you know when we started people struggled to answer some of the um jerk uh responses that we get there’s really no nice way to talk about it right when you’re at a meeting and you’re trying to raise an issue

About democracy and somebody says well Nazi Germany had proportional representation you know you want to throw up your hands you know you you you want to say really you’re going there I mean but those were the kinds of things that people needed to figure out people needed to figure out well what’s the

Good response to this local representation issue majority government extremism all the usual accusations that would flow now we’ve got an activist Cadre who really have built up their capacity and knowledge about how to move a conversation past those you know into things that will bring in the uncommitted sure the political Elites

Who are trying to you know end the conversation will throw out all this stuff but the capacities that we built up as an organization and as a group of activists now allows people I think to get to the public uh more quickly and even reach some of the elites uh more

Readily we’ve also put together a a huge body of of expert resources uh you know at our fingertips now we have details we have facts uh that can be mobilized ized and marshaled and wielded uh you know in public debate in letters to the editor

Uh you know in in all sorts of settings and here I want to stop and use you know gonna put on my academic hat here for a moment um because I think this point is a really important one the hegemonic position of s SMP or single member

Plurality the voting system that we use has in the past 20 years been effectively challenged now heem is one of those you know words you know it’s like a $100 word like what the hell does that mean um interestingly it was invented by a you know workingclass

Political activist spent a lot of his life in jail uh you know he was no academic um but this idea of a geminy is really important because here’s the thing here’s what you need to know about a geminy if you don’t know it already and I don’t assume that you don’t but

You know if you don’t hegemonic ideas aren’t just popular ideas they’re not ideas that are are are you know the leading ones hegemonic ideas are ideas that are so out there that nobody questions them they don’t require any evidence to sustain them people just accept when people say them and so a

Hegemonic idea is a hard one to challenge because nobody’s asking for an explanation nobody expects there to be an explanation or a rationalization for a hegemonic idea it’s just accepted and that’s really tough it’s tough for activists to come in and get people talking about a hegemonic idea because

Everybody’s like why are we talking about this so the work that you have done um over the last two decades um is that you have challenged the hegemonic position of this voting system in a way that it is not as accepted it it cannot get the free ride that it generally got

Um when we started uh certainly when I started and when Fair vote Canada got started in 2000 um it is a very different world and that creates a different game space for us in terms of moving uh this issue forward all right well what have we

Learned I think that we can draw out some lessons from our time um one is that educating the public is hard I don’t think that um a lot of people reckoned with that you know we we we thought that um it was a no-brainer make every vote count who could be against

That I’m sure that once we explain this everyone will rush into our arms and that didn’t occur uh and then people thought well thank goodness the internets ared Because the Internet and social media are going to make it so easy for us to connect with people and communicate with people and get our

Message out and that hasn’t proven to be the truth either I mean obviously social media has given us some opportunities for organizing it allows us to do these webinars um but hey people who don’t like what we’re doing also have the internet also have social media and so uh you know it hasn’t

Proven to be an advantage uh over the others necessarily uh it’s just another way of of doing our work I think we’ve learned that organizations is about resources uh you you need money uh you need people you need time time uh is just another way of talking about uh

Money and people because to do the work that we do we need some people to not watch you know whatever is the top TV show and instead do this work uh we need people who can take time out from something else that maybe they need to do um meanwhile the rest of the

Political world is drawing on resources from all sorts of places uh which are designed to get results right you know corporations that give money to politicians expect to get something for it um you know they’re not just doing it for the good of their health um and you

Know I I remember my old local politics Professor you know once said that local politics is a cost to Citizens but it’s business to developers um and they write off those costs uh and so they’re on the phone every day you know to City Hall to

Get what they want the citizen on the other hand has to work uh and then they come home and then they get on the phone to City Hall uh so it’s really a a challenging thing uh to organize ourselves um you know it requires money it requires people I think we’ve

Discovered that fighting public campaigns like referendums is a lot harder than we had thought when Fair vote Canada got started in in uh in 2000 people looked at what happened in New Zealand and they thought bing bang bong we’re going to get a referendum the people are going to speak and we’ll be

On our way and that’s not what happened um and so I think people are are are are better equipped uh to understand some of those challenges I think we’ve learned that the traditional parties and here I’m thinking particularly of conservatives and um and liberals but also some of the third parties that are

More on the center right they oppose our issue I think for obvious reasons it cuts into their total control of the political system but that doesn’t mean that all their politicians do I think we’ve learned that sometimes we can get through to their politicians even when

The party itself is opposed and in times of of instability that can work in our favor we certainly saw that um when the Liberals were the third party uh and the NDP was the official opposition at the national level and half the caucus of the Liberals voted with the NDP on a

Motion around proportional representation the Liberals you know weren’t in favor but individual liberals were um and so I think that’s an important lesson we’ve learned we’ve learned that the media while traditionally opposed to our issue can sometimes be shamed um and we saw this last year that both the glob and male

And the Toronto Star historically foes of our topic both came out in favor it now it’s hard to know if it’ll stick the glob and mail had previously been in favor of PR for a short time but that is something and that wouldn’t have happened without the work uh that fair

Vote Canada and others had done to keep putting this issue on the agenda but here’s a thing I really want to underline with you tonight which is that there is an element of Randomness and luck in what we are doing we cannot underestimate how um events uh that we

Can’t predict uh can’t anticipate uh and can’t necessarily be controlled by the traditional power Brokers um create or foreclose openings for the work that we are trying to do so I’m I’m I’m sort of suggesting that our our way forward has to be about being ready uh and looking

For the breaks uh being ready doesn’t guarantee uh that you will succeed but if you’re not ready you won’t be in a position to take advantage of any unexpected breaks that may come your way so it it’s absolutely essential but it is not determinative in the final in

Uh and I I you know look at New Zealand New Zealand saw a lot of hard work over 25 years uh to get them to the point of adopting proportional representation but it wasn’t just hard work they benefited from some really dhead decisions from politicians uh politicians who thought

That they could somehow deflect or delay and only ended up intensifying the support uh they had a prime minister who misread his notes during a debate um and promised something that his party was not committed to doing um so so we cannot underestimate um how uh unanticipated consequences unanticipated

Events can become the opening that we’re looking for um and and again looking at the process in the United Kingdom that brought PR to the subnational level in Scotland Wales and Northern Ireland and brought proportional voting for European voting until brexit um in the UK benefited from all of the work that the

Electoral reform Society had done over the previous hundred years um so we we we have to recognize that being ready doing the work is an essential part of what we’re doing but we don’t know when the break will happen or how things might turn our way and we’ve been close

We’ve been so close you know we we we won the referendum in Pei but the powers that be wriggled out of it and came very close to winning the next referendum in PEI you know 58% of Voters in BC said yes to STV but you know super majority

Rule uh next time around and well actually 2018 you know 50% plus one would have been enough but there weren’t enough votes in favor of Chang in that referendum if only you know that’s I mean it just shows you a bit more support and we could have been on our

Way but we didn’t get lucky whereas New Zealand did uh 54% was enough to get them PR when they voted on it I wish I could give you a formula for success and I always get asked about that what do we need to do um but voting system reform

Experience is one of Tendencies um so increases in the party system tend to make voting system reform more likely so more parties a breakdown in political consensus uh threats to the major players social crisis like Wars um and depressions um and random unpredictable opportunities uh are the stuff of the

Episodes that I’ve looked at in my research so I guess I’m stopping with Lessons Learned uh we we definitely have learned a lot of lessons in the last two decades and we have to live with hope I mean what what other choice have we got uh you know we’ve got to just keep

Moving forward doing some of the work we’re doing but being Eagle eyed about whatever opportunities may come our way so that’s me talking I went on a little longer than I intended uh but now I want to turn things over to you with the help of the able hands of Anita um and

Michelle to uh get to the topics that you want to talk about tonight thank you so much Dennis that was a great talk um you did a good job of summing up the past 20 years in uh 30 minutes pretty good yeah and also I think that’s the

First time that I mean and Dennis and I have been doing webinars it’s probably well 10 or 15 years or something it’s a long time and that’s the first time I’ve heard Dennis reflect on um how far we’ve come in a really substantial way um to

Be aild to look back that far and see how much things have changed in the last you know number of years it’s really really encouraging to hear so some of the questions that came in are yes those familiar questions that we always get and that we don’t have magic answers for

But let’s have a little go at it first so the first couple are asking our favorite question which is how can the government be made to enact a change that they don’t want and I’ve got a few different varieties of that same question which boils down to how how can

We get the big parties on board for something that seems obviously not in their interests okay well you know as I said there’s no single answer and the problem is that they learn uh so something that works in one instance you know they get wise to

Uh and then they come up with some other way of blocking it and that was certainly the case with the New Zealand example right I mean New Zealand didn’t just scare the beesus out of the New Zealand Elites it freaked out all of the different anglo-american Elites because

They could see the writing on the wall as governments were introducing policies that the public didn’t want and the other party was promising to do the same thing everybody was turning to something else and so we saw a a an episode of policy learning where the Gordon Campbell government definitely was

Following what was happening in New Zealand and they made particular surgical changes to the process so in New Zealand you didn’t need a super majority uh to uh get the change through but British Columbia did in New Zealand they set up a very effective public education process BC they didn’t bother

Um so really is interesting to see and then when Pei came after British Columbia they adopted all of the shenanigans that BC had done Ontario did the same and they added a few new wrinkles um so but you know if we were to sit here and plot uh our our change

Obviously a minority government situation uh is one that’s more more tenable uh but it would need to be backed up by a pretty significant public mobilization around the issue and one can imagine the kind of conditions that would contribute to it uh perhaps the de

Defeat of a of of a deeply unpopular say conservative government um and then the election of a minority government maybe liberal with NP support and greens um that could create the conditions uh for change there are no other barriers there’s no constitutional barriers all this fluff we hear from from some about

All these other things that could happen no that if the government wants to change the voting system if Parliament wants to change the voting system they can do it um but it will probably occur in a situation where no party has a majority um or it will happen in a situation where

We Face a crisis that no party wants to take responsibility for and then of course sharing the blame is the natural way of approaching it yeah I like what the way you’re framing it because I’ve sort of reflected on the same thing Dennis we’ve got a lot smarter in the last 25 years

But so of our opponents so it’s sort of it’s a bit of a chess game or something with them right where they we’ve learned some things and they’ve learned some things too so somebody else has asked about um why do advocates in the United States promote um ranked ballot and by ranked

Ballot I’m saying alternative vote the winner take all version and we do not so obviously context matters every country is different that’s why we can’t just import you know a one- siiz fits-all thing right I mean when we got started when I got started on this question you know in

1990 um there was a ferocious debate about which system you know was the right one and you had Advocates who loved to German then it was just the German mixed member system and but the Anglo Choice had traditionally been the single transferable vote that was the

System that was used in Ireland that was the system that was used for uh elections to the university seats in the United Kingdom In the interwar period so there had been all this experience with single transferable vote that was the system we used in Canada um in in various uh uh situations so

Um so that was the context and we had to get over that we had to figure out a way forward to get pass the system wars in the United States the problem is that there are various um laws that prevent third parties from entering the political realm both the Democrats and

Republicans as much as they appear to hate each other hate anyone else more uh and they conspire to put barriers in the way of third parties getting on the ballot you know to put a third party on a Canadian ballot is not hard um you know you need some signatures you know

You got to get to work but you can get you can get on there if you want to if you’re dogged the United States that’s not the case I mean it’s not the same because it’s all decentralized each state has a different model but for the

Most part in the states that matter it is very difficult for a third party to get on the B ballot so that’s why Americans tend to talk about the transferable ballot a majoritarian system because mostly they’re talking about an independent candidate trying to get in the game uh without necessarily

Benefiting Democrats or Republicans U so that’s you know and look it it was controversial there too I was at the founding of the American Center for voting in democracy back in um 1995 I went to Boston hung out with all of them um and it it was very clear that there

Were many people who wanted a a commit to proportional representation but the facts on the ground are that that’s not where the political action is we have an easier time in Canada because we have a multi-party system and so the logic of what we’re doing hits people you know

When we go in and say look you know don’t you think all the parties should get what they what what people voted for isn’t that shouldn’t it be a reflection of their popular support and people go okay that kind of makes sense to me given what I already know about the

Political system but in America you’re kind of starting from a different place yeah I mean I would also say too that after about 20 years of promoting almost almost exclusively promoting winner take all rank ballot Fair vote USA is starting to shift I don’t know if you

Folks that have are following it have seen that and there’s some other players now coming in promoting proportional representation in the United States because you’re able to talk about it now without sounding like some kind of Wingnut you know so the political situation is sort slowly shifting in the

United States but for sure proportional representation is what makes sense in Canada I have a few people in the Q&A who are sort of asking the same question it’s it’s around being baffled as to why the liberal MPS would have voted against motion m86 for citizens assembly when everybody who follows

Politics can see that the polls are showing a 200 plus seat majority government coming for pier pev why would those MPS vote no can you address that Dennis well here you know you you know one there’s a there’s there’s a take in in politics that says that um

Politicians are rational actors who want to get reelected and that’s what motivates them and so this is a very neat kind of way of explaining their motivation because because they respond to voters because they want to get reelected the problem with this approach is it’s kind of naive about the real

World of politics because the real world of politics is of money there’s almost like a triangle you know between the politicians and the money and the public and the ability of the public to hold the politician to them and what they want depends on the role of the money of

Course in the United States there are no National laws preventing the spending of money so billions of dollars are spent in the election cycle and it’s all spent to try to limit the debate control the narrative push the agenda of those who are spending the money in the Canadian

Context you might think oh things are looking bad for the Liberals why don’t they jump on our topic because they’re not thinking so shortterm I mean sure individual politicians might be thinking that way but the party as an organization does not you know when you are the traditional winner and hey the

Liberals have won the most elections and been in government in Canada more than anyone else a lot more yeah they got a vested interest in keeping the system the way it is they might lose now but they can count on winning later parties that start to change are ones that start

To think they’re going to be losers you know when they think uh oh we’re losing our let me go back to that term hegemonic position um then they start to think you know what maybe we should change the voting system maybe there’s a new competitor that’s going to cut into

Their support but generally speaking um because our two main political parties the Liberals and conservatives they do their job in part because they have the kind of control they do right the the ability to pay back the favors change the laws that powerful people want that requires them

To have all the power right if they have to share the power now it’s harder now you got to get two parties to agree to whatever deal you’ve cooked up you know snc lavelin harder to pull off you know in a in a in a in a situation where two

Parties are sharing power rather than one party because there’s an awful lot of secrecy that goes in on our system and often we don’t find out about the shenanigans that have gone on until the party is booted from power and then suddenly the books are open and it’s

Like oh look at all these Shady dealings that were going on you know personally I think it would be better if that stuff was out in the open so that it wouldn’t happen U and that’s of course one of the reasons why I think proportional systems

Are better but I think that should help you to understand why even though they’re heading for a loss Liberals are still not prepared to give up the system yeah I’m I’m wondering if you can reflect a little bit too Dennis um on maybe some of the pressure that some of

Those MPS felt because it’s it was interesting to me to see that you know we succeeded in getting 39 of them to vote for this which was really sort of historic considering the fact that MPS vote along party lines 99% of the time but for any of them that were sort of

Still you know the default position is just to do whatever the government says you know so I’m wondering if you can comment on maybe some of the internal dynamics that went on there that influenced some of the other ones we weren’t able to reach and I just have to

Go get my cord to plug in my computer so I’ll leave you for a second while you answer that let me say I’m I’m really impressed with the discussion that’s going on in the chat and the Q&A wow there’s a lot of uh forget about me you

Guys are having your own conversation uh a lot of expertise uh being shared about the different processes that’s uh that’s really great um okay the question was um uh party discipline and you know Scholars who study this will note that um uh Canadian party discipline is very

Very very strong much stronger than say in the UK and part of that is that in the UK there’s so many members 650 plus MPS uh not all of them are going to make it to the front bench not they know that um and some of them have a fairly loyal

Constituency so they’re going to get reelected and so some argue this is why you see a greater level of independence of of MPS on the other hand you know people we know vote party uh you know people say they might like their local MP but often that’s a post

Rationalization everybody uses party as a way of navigating the system and politicians are that way too politicians join parties because they support that party because they like what they think they also understand that it’s a quidd proquo you can’t go into a situation and say well I’m only going to be here for

The things I agree with right as a collective entity you say well look you know what I’m I’m I’m here because I want to see these six issues go forward but you know I’ll also support your four issues because you’re going to support my six issues so it’s that kind of log

Rolling trade-off which is not a bad thing in a democracy uh it’s it’s how you get things done um but it does mean that it can be difficult to move divisive topics forward and often you’ll see issues where the Prime Minister will make it an issue like the Prime Minister

Will say look I you know there issues I don’t care as much about but this one you’re going to fall in line on um and so and and there’s a lot of back room pressure that people feel you know politicians may be ambitious they want to move up the ladder they want to

Become uh personal secretaries and then they want to become cabinet ministers or maybe they want to become the prime minister or leader of their party and not playing ball is a pretty direct route not to getting those things uh so those are some of the reasons why you see that

Yeah okay um all right I think a lot of these we have already addressed uh so somebody’s asking about referendums so would you just maybe in general comment on referendums as a strategy to get electoral reform or reflect on that a little bit that’ll cover a lot of questions related to

That you know what I was looking in the chat and I missed the last part of your question oh but can you comment on referendums so somebody here who’s new is saying you know what was the results of the referendums which sort of just leads into how have referendums worked

Or not worked for the Electoral Reform movement yeah you know I mean referendums I think for people they say I’ll have a vote I mean we’re a voting system group surely we should be in favor of referendums what’s more democratic than voting um the problem is is that when we study referendums what

We discover is that um most people are not paying attention you know most people don’t know very much about institutions the whole idea of a referendum is that well the politicians shouldn’t make the decision on this question it should be the people the people should make the decision but the

People are not really ready to make the decision because they don’t know anything about it so what do they do well they end up looking at the party that they support so we come up up with a process that’s supposed to be about putting the voter first but in end in

The end is just reflected party positions you know when we break down the votes what we discover is the conservatives are much more likely to vote against voting system reform new Democrats are much more in favor Liberals are split hey that looks like the party system um and so in that sense

Um it’s not it’s not a good use of public money unless you’re going to spend a lot of money to bring people up to speed I mean we know that people can handle the details the citizens assembly made that clear the citizens assemblies Drew people from all walks of life and

Hey they got a handle on it but every week for a number of months they attended sessions where they talked about it and explored it and got up and felt competent about it which is not the case for the average voter the average voter goes H I don’t know what’s this

About um and so the party that wins the referendum is the party that can mobilize the strongest response to the question and we saw that in British Columbia in the last referendum in 2018 when the Liberals which of course were really a conservative party um at the provincial level uh made it an

Existential question and just you know they were telling all kinds of stories about what would happen if uh you know a new voting system were adopted be the end of times um so you know in that sense you know referendums are are are not that much closer to the people um

And they’re often invoked and pushed for very undemocratic reasons I mean the only reasons that we see for instance conservatives pushing so hard on referendums is because they know the fact which is that when things are pushed to a referendum their voters are going to pay more attention than others

Uh and so they’re going to win you know it’s not that they want to know what the people think um they think they can win uh and so that’s why that’s why they push it yeah would you address some of the I remember when you started you said

You know when Fair vote started there was a lot of people who were just like oh why don’t we just do like New Zealand and I mean I still get trickles of that not as much as 10 years ago mind you but I still do get that sometimes why don’t

We just have the the two-part question or the you know there’s people that just have some particular idea that if they had a certain kind of question on the referendum ballot whether it’s one particular system or it’s a clearly explained proposal or if it’s a two-part

Question or if it’s a rank Ballot or whatever then that’s going to be the thing that would make the successful referendum could you just address that a little bit I get that a lot so the name of my book is the politics of voting you might think that sounds kind of dumb I

Mean yeah politics you know you vote in politics what I mean by the title is that the voting process itself is political in that every aspect of our electoral system which covers everything voter registration you know all kinds of questions how we shape the writings that electoral system every single part of it

Has been vetted by the by politics by political parties by the opinion leaders um and they’re making their decisions on the basis of what kind of decisions will help them win how can and they benefit they want to they want to frustrate their foes and they want to Advantage

Their friends and so the politics of all these referendums is is is obvious once you start looking for it so you think oh they said the problem was that there wasn’t enough choice you know and when we had the first referendum on STV people said I don’t like STV this is

Ridiculous why can’t the people choose you know the system they want okay so 2018 they get a choice this choice is terrible I it’s so confused how can we have this Choice system you’re trying to confuse the public this is wrong okay before you said we needed a choice now

You’re saying we shouldn’t have a choice H seems to me like you’re just offering up any excuse to derail the process and make no mistake they threw everything at that 2018 referendum I mean on the one hand the the Liberals were essentially the no campaign the BC liberals um they

Threw an enormous amount of money into public advertisements and radio ads that the talking points were all factually wrong but didn’t matter because it doesn’t matter what what what is the truth it only matters what people believe the truth to be but at the same time a group of very well-funded

Business people started taking various questions to the courts so they tried to get an injunction to have the referendum thrown out and when that didn’t work they brought a court case forward to try to contest the ballot and when that didn’t work then I mean so I I I’m

Trying to lay out the story here right to get you to see that you think you are going to win this by coming up with the right question that everyone is going to recognize as fair and just what I’m telling you is this is a political fight it’s a political fight between wildly

Unequal forces um where what is the public interest is much less important to the various actors than winning we on the other hand do have the advantage of putting the public interest first that’s what we are trying to do and you know when I speak to people from across the

Political Spectrum I say I’m a Democrat I believe your vote should count and I don’t care if you’re conservative or you’re a people’s party or you’re a new democrat or you’re green if people voted for you that’s the Democratic way and so you deserve representation if you get enough support

And so in that sense sometimes we can leverage that but it’s still very very hard I think you know one of the webinars that we did the last one I did with Dennis back in August was after we sort of looked at a whole bunch of uh just summarizing how other countries got

PR and it was very interesting to discover how uncommon it is to bring in PR by a referendum and how almost all countries that got PR it was because of a multi-party agreement so that’s one of the reasons why Fair vote canid after seven referendums and just looking at

Real World Experience provided to us by Dennis tries to push for those multi-party agreements and uh compromises rather than push push it to a referend which has all the problems that Dennis mentioned um so a couple people are asking about Municipal reform they’re saying does it is it easier I’m

Sort of paraphrasing a few different things I’m sort of seeing you know is it easier to start municipally is it easier to start locally is that the place to to break in and would that you know get people used to it or whatever the short answer is no um you know the longer

Answer is maybe uh you know the the um I mean they are literally in a longer but the the point here is that you know people think the local will be easier and and one of the reasons I think it is because the degree of opposition will be

Different right you you don’t have parties in many cases uh in some cases you have slates um and so they think that well there won’t be that that barrier to change uh but the difficulty you have at the local level is that without parties it’s also harder to

Reach people harder to mobilize people and we know for instance uh my my colleague at York Bob mcder did a study of funding of of local uh campaigns outside of Toronto found that 80% of funding was from developers um so they are setting the agenda right they are

Determining who the candidates will be because they’re the ones funding them and so you can’t choose something that isn’t there um and you know you need money to run um these even these local councils are increasingly larger uh you know the the wards are larger um and so

It it you know it’s just that much harder so I don’t think it’s easier and the public demonstration idea at the local level has never worked I mean it’s a nice idea but it’s never led to a copycat effect right we saw 19 municipalities adopt sdv voting in

Canada after World War I didn’t lead anywhere you know to the adoption of PR somewhere else where we did see semi- proportional systems adopted in Manitoba and Alberta um it really was for very different reasons than that and we can go outside Canada we can look at the

Attempts in the United Kingdom and we can look at the attempts in in um the other anglo-american countries New Zealand Australia nowhere does local campaign it didn’t work in the United States that’s where they ended up with a considerable number of of towns including New York City uh using

Proportional representation for a decade and a half um doesn’t doesn’t you know you’ve got to look at the political forces that are for and against change uh that’s that’s the bellweather not the public I mean that’s the discourse is that the public decides but they don’t our institutions are all designed well

Before the public comes on the scene um and the public is rarely given a look in except through processes like referendums which are basically manipulated by the same Force that we’re trying to stop with the referendum all right so somebody else is asking and I actually don’t get this

Question as much anymore but I’m gonna ask you anyway because it’s I’m sure it’s going to keep coming up does the fact that there are many different forms of PR make it more difficult to get agreement on adopting PR without detailing the exact way it might work in

Other words would it all be easier if voting reformers just all agreed on one system and said this is the one yeah again you know I I I just draw you back to that essential lesson that I think my research points to which is the politics

Um you know to what extent are people wanting to know about specific systems as a way of derailing the conversation altogether now again average folks you know I think it’s not uncommon that some of them will say oh you you want to do something else what’s it going to look

Like I mean that’s a practical question I I it’s a common sense question in many ways um but the thing that you have to try to recognize is that sometimes people ask for things that they don’t really want you know they they don’t really want all the details um you’ve

Got to be very um artistic uh in responding um you know I often start by saying that people don’t really understand the current system you know they think they do because they can mark the ballot but they don’t understand the implications of it you know when you say

To them well you know how did Doug Ford turn 40% of the vote into 65% of the seats I’ll just sit back you tell me I mean this is the system that’s supposed to be so simple this is the system that’s suppos to be so transparent but

It isn’t and and so people actually have a false sense of confidence about what they think they know about our current system which is why the debate is often so unfair right you it’s the problem of concision you know it’s always harder to talk about something that people don’t

Already know than something they think they do know uh so that the debate is kind of kind of unequal so yeah no I don’t think that having agreement on one a model uh is going to get you forward uh it’s going to be easier for the activists I think because you can unify

Your message and maybe if people feel very strongly about different systems but again you know one of the things and I know this is not a consensus position is that there’s really not much difference you know when it comes right down to it when it when in terms of like

What most people are doing in politics it doesn’t really matter which system you do as long as it’s proportional as long as it’s proportional you will attack the very thing that is the root of the work that we do on PR which is breaking phony majority governments forcing governments to work together

With multiple parties and creating a competitive system that will allow the people when they want to choose differently to do so and by doing so affect the balance of power that exists in our legislative system how that gets done there’s lots of different ways to

Do it um but the public is not going to get into all the minutia of those systems and drawing them in is a pretty good way of turning them off I have to agree with Dennis and I I think you know I can reflect back on you

Know the 15 or so years that I’ve been here and I get that qu that push for us to just pick a system and just push that a lot less than I used to because I think people have seen over so many referendums and campaigns and promises

And the more we’re explaining the more we’re losing basically that that’s not a path to PR and so right now in the last five years or so we’ve been United around the idea of pushing for a Citizens assembly not because a Citizens assembly is a magic way to PR obviously it’s not but

Because we’re working on that long-term um project of En encouraging the parties to negotiate you know and that is that is a step and a citizen’s assembly is not a divisive issue compared to when voting system Geeks get into you know arguing their system I feel your pain

Right I mean I as you can imagine I’ve talked to a lot of people about this topic um over the years and it’s tough if someone comes to you and says look I want to know X you know you feel like you have to respond I’m totally

Sympathetic to that but all I’m saying is is that you have to judge the context you’re in you know if you’ve got a group of people and one person wants to go down the rabbit hole let’s talk after the meeting um hey I’ve got some resources that you can look at you know

What you’re really interested in that and there’s some people who are really expert in that I’m going to connect you with them right but Focus your main message on results it’s results you know everybody think You’ got that Uncle who’s always looking under the hood you

Know oh what’s this motor it’s a V8 you know everybody else doesn’t care right everybody else cares about performance people care about what will be the results if I buy this what will I get and that’s what the Lion Share of your focus should be on is our political

System is producing these kinds of results generally and that’s what you’ve said you don’t like and these systems do this differently would do you like that do you like how that sounds like talk about results get concrete in terms of the kinds of things that PR countries

Produce that’s how you’re going to get their their interest and get them away from the minutia questions and more interested in the results that they might get from change yeah 100% agree people care about outcomes okay I wanted to I’m gonna go down a couple of small little rabbit

Holes so I hope everybody bears with me before we go head back to a general kind of question to finish up so some people are asking about the charter challenge would you like to comment on the status of that Dennis and just in general and maybe the pushing through the courts

Yeah well look I mean the people who were behind this did an awful lot of work and they’re great people and they brought in so many interesting experts and they put together you know a really strong case um but you know courts are a risky proposition uh because courts can

Do things you like but courts can also do things you don’t like and uh so the court case went forward in the fall I was trying to follow it um you know I was meeting with some of the people who were involved um the decision came out

Much more quickly than I thought I read the decision by the judge and I think there’s some worrying aspects to that decision um I think the judge um uh says a bunch of things that are not good for our movement uh and no I mean the judge

Was just out to lunch I mean he didn’t understand the documents he was looking at he drew wrong conclusions from what the experts were saying I mean I I think this goes to appeal you know there’ll be a way to try to um uh to try to to to

Deal with that um but the bottom line is that you know one of the things I took from reading the judges um response was that he thought that the voting system was constitutional um and that it was in the original constitution of course it isn’t um and that is very worrying

Because to the extent that those who are pushing this line and it’s coming from the Canadian constitutional bunch out in Alberta um you know they’re basically trying to prevent any change by making it a mega constitutional issue uh which it isn’t um so that’s always a risk it’s

Always a risk that you know judges will stick something in that now you’ve got to try to get past okay and I also wanted to take a little deter over to the Yukon because that is where things are happening right now for us most immediately do you want to

Comment on that Dennis or do you want me to either one you know I do but I notice in the chat which the things keep popping up on my screen here and and I you know I see I see an awful lot of questions wow so many questions I’d love

To deal with them all and I see some people are a little frustrated the question isn’t being answered all I can say is I I know that um I know that Anita is trying to get you know trying to pull out from all these different questions but if you have a question

That we don’t get to you are absolutely welcome to email me I’m happy to follow up with you if you think that I can offer you anything or recommend anything or just chat with you about it I’m totally happy to do that so don’t worry if if you’re not getting we have limited

Time so obviously we can’t necessarily deal with everyone but if you would like to it’s an invitation I always make to everybody put my email in the chat uh if someone can do that and I’m happy to chat with you if you want um absolutely absolutely I want to say you know I

Cannot follow the the chat my brain doesn’t deal with that many different things at once so I’m following the Q&A and there’s 62 different questions in there and I’m trying to just pull out the ones that I think you know if if there was a newcomer on here what would

Be the most generally useful thing for them to hear and I know that’s frustrating when people have really specific things they want to ask Dennis and so it’s great that he’s always available do you want to just um talk a little bit about what’s going on in the

Yukon and Yukon I mean you know it was another situation where the whole thing was happening for political reasons was minority liberal government and uh the NDP said you know you want support you’re going to give us uh a legislative committee to look at the voting system

Uh but of course they started it and part of the deal was they brought in an expert who set the tone in all the traditional ways uh basically privileging the existing system offering up a bunch of arguments that really have no support um they hauled in a whole

Bunch of experts who frankly in my opinion aren’t really experts on the topic uh they love to talk about it but they don’t haven’t done any real research on it um and so I tried to intervene I tried to set the scene on what I thought they should do basically

They’ve come out in favor of a process that would involve public consultation probably a referendum um and that they would uh want to maintain a local member they’re really concerned about rural underrepresentation which really means of course maintaining rural over representation so there are some very problematic things that come out of it

And I I imagine that not much is going to come from it but maybe you have some other insights any I would just give a little plug to our Yukon team I see uh Sue is here tonight from Fair vote Yukon and I just just to

Give everybody a bit of Hope and you all know how cynical I am about referendum seven was quite enough for me probably six was good um we are heading for another one in the Yukon after the citizens assembly and electoral reform which is going to start in may the

Report will be due at the end of October and then any recommen recommendation for a change to the voting system will go to a referendum in the Yukon and I would imagine that referendum will be in conjunction with the next election um I would just say for for those folks who

Are looking for a little bit of Hope in the Yukon first of all we have an absolutely fantastic team in the Yukon of wonderful people uh the second thing about the Yukon is there’s about 45,000 people so I just want to draw everybody’s attention to the after the

Initial BC referendum where we got 58% of the vote and they ignored that anyway um the referendum down the road that the pbit that reformers did win was in pii in 2016 and what really helped in PE it helped them win that many things help them not all in our control the thing

Within our control that helped them win that is pi is so small that they can literally go from Kitchen to Kitchen they could knock on every door they could call people it’s it’s that small so when they can when they had you know 150 200 volunteers knocking on thousands

Of doors it really gave them a chance in pi that we we really didn’t have in in places like Ontario and BC when you’re looking at 15 million people you can’t reach those people in the Yukon almost everybody lives in White Horse the both two-thirds of them it’s possible for our

Team to reach those people so I would just say there’s nothing really there’s not a lot that we outside of the Yukon as people from away that don’t live in that Community can really do but we are cheering on our local team and I will keep everybody posted and you can go to

Fair vote you c.ca and uh check out I’ll be keeping updates there on what’s happening with the citizens assembly as it gets going and the work of our local team you know let me let me revise my comments because you know I’m letting my frustration with the politicians experts you know run away

With me here it goes against my message which is that um accidents can happen and by accidents I mean that sometimes a process is sponsored that gets away from those who sponsored it hoping that nothing will come of it um but you’re absolutely right to draw attention to

The context which is very different in Yukon and so in that sense maybe the networks can be used in a way that can get past some of the scale problems that we see in places like British Columbia uh and Ontario where you just got millions and millions it’s so hard right

To reach them without money um but it you know it’s a very different case in Yukon so look and the Yukon team is great uh so obviously we all want to do what we can to support them we’ve got a chance that’s that’s the best I can tell

People and I know I said the same thing with m86 but I’m it’s true we really have a chance in the Yukon um okay so Dennis have you seen any other questions that before I move on to any final questions that have come up for you like

Any themes that you’d like to address that are coming up in the chat that I’m not following wow you know there’s just so much here and uh and you know wow what what a what a group of people I mean you know there’s some really well-informed people uh you know some

Who clearly are better informed on some aspects of the question than I am so and that’s great I mean we need we need that kind of team right you know it’s this isn’t a oneman show right I mean I’ve carved out a niche that I work on um but

I’m happy to share the stage and the space with others who who can offer you know their expertise and insights so that’s really that’s really fabulous um uh I did see some people talk about those classic questions of authoritarianism and I’ll just say a word or two about that uh you know we

Don’t hear it as much anymore because frankly it sounds ridiculous you know it sounds ridiculous to point to Nazi Germany uh and say well they had PR it’s well you know I my my standard response is to say well um uh Zimbabwe has first passed the post

Oh gosh I guess we better get rid of that system look what it’s led to I mean it’s ridiculous it sounds ridiculous because obviously Zimbabwe’s problems are not limited to the use of first pass the post and the situation in Germany in Nazi Germany was not in any way

Restricted to the use of proportional voting um all the other West all the other Western European countries were using PR as well um and they didn’t succumb to the same kinds of politics so I think you know it’s just it’s it’s a ridiculous claim and it’s an uninformed

One and we have you know now hundred years of experience uh to say that authoritarianism can rise in any kind of system when there’s enough public support for it and we’re certainly seeing that in first P to post countries yeah I would say it’s Inc the amount of authoritarianism around the world is

Increasing and for many of our supporters that’s increasing the urgency they feel for for Canada to move to a more proportional system because they’re quite concerned about the power being concentrated with the wrong person or group yeah voter turnout that’s a you know a classic question that comes up nuanced

Response uh the answer is maybe uh you know if we look at the statistical information uh PR systems tend to have higher voter turnout but they’ve also seen declines um on the other hand we saw in New Zealand that the introduction of PR led to a change in the makeup of

The electorate uh so people who had felt undercounted uh not included uh excluded uh not represented they were much more likely to vote in a PR system so in that sense even though we didn’t see a dramatic aggregate change in voter turnout in New Zealand we did see really

Important changes uh in voter turnout from women from indigenous uh new zealanders so there’s some really interesting nuances uh on that question of um of voter turnout um there’s just so many questions here and really good ones did you see another well I mean the one theme that’s coming

Up over and over again um is the upcoming federal election so let’s just assume that’s in 2025 right so people are wondering basically how the the fair voting movement can capitalize on the upcoming federal election especially considering uh looking at the polls you know we should be having seeing some

More interested people in open minds on this topic what would be your best advice to us Dennis over the next year or so well I mean I think one of the real concerns I have is that when we get towards elections we always start to hear about strategic voting and we

Always start you know people say oh you know this I hate this party you know you need to vote for this party to stop that party and that is a one-way Street to nowheresville as far as our topic goes because if there’s something that’s really really strong uh it’s that uh PR

Tends to follow an increase in the party system you’ve got to create some costs for these political organizations as long as they can win it all they’ve got an incredible incentive to hang on with their nails forever only by increasing the competition in the party system do

You start to impose costs uh on those other parties so I think you know you people have got to resist the Strategic voting arguments that we’ve all got to vote liberal to stop the conservatives or we all got to vote liberal to stop the NDP or whatever is the Strategic you

Know issue you’ve got to try to avoid that because um what we’ve seen is that what’s been keeping this issue alive instability in the party system instability in the party system has kept the issue alive in PEI in New Brunswick in Quebec in British Columbia and at the

National level it’s the most constant factor that has kept us popping up like the bobblehead um you know every time you know our opponents say you’re dead you lost that you’re out of here stop talking about it and then the issue comes back and it comes back precisely

Because the party systems are not settling uh into a two-party Norm as we’ve been used to yeah really really really important point we need more parties in Parliament pushing for this that’s going to increase our odds that’s what Dennis has been always saying to us that’s what the research shows that’s

What practical experience in Canada shows the closer we get to two parties the more our odds go down the more parties we have the more odds go up we have it has to threaten the big two or yeah that’s what’s going to change um okay do you see any other ones I think

I’ve got everything that I S I mean you know it it I was I was sort of uh well someone asked about the Constitution question the answer is no but again it’s political right the the the forces that don’t want PR are going to keep leaning on this idea that the

Voting system is constitutional which would prevent a party from coming to power with a commitment to introduce a new voting system because you know the idea that we need a referendum is is not correct that’s a political Choice uh we had 10 voting system changes in this country before the 1960s at the

Provincial level all just introduced by a simple vote of their of their legislates um so this is a political strategy uh when people say oh it’s constitutional it’s because they don’t want it and they think that by putting a constitutional barrier in they can prevent it from happening but it’s a

Political argument not a factual one um what does elite mean in Canada uh that’s an excellent question our sociologists work very hard on that to try to figure out what is the obviously there’s many different kinds of Elites uh you know there are intellectual Elites there are uh Elites around different issues uh

There’s a music elite you know um I think that when I talk about the party Elites I’m talking about the people who run the organizations and who have the highest positions in those parties uh typically the leaders and the Cadre of people around the leader um they um they

Are are seen as the elites um because they have the sticks and carrots that can keep the people who vote with the party and give them their legislative power um in line so and then we have Elites uh often I think people when they talk about Elite they mean Financial

Elites they mean those who have the wherewithal to enter into discussion with a degree of weight that the average citizen does not you know the average citizen doesn’t really have very much impact at all uh unless they act collectively unless they join some group that can speak as one and get the

Attention of those who decide what the issues are so I I’m using it in a in a fairly flexible way but I think think you get my message in terms of what I think an elite is yeah it’s another comment just came up I’m noticing that

We haven’t touched on yet and that’s the influence of the media so somebody was asking us you know what uh mass media have you worked with to get this message out or something like that would you want to comment a little bit on the media the role of it how it’s

Changed well I mean uh obviously media studies is a whole subfield uh you know at in the in the university and there’s been a lot of study about media over the last 100 years years um and but I can tell you as someone who’s worked on this

Issue and I’ve done research on the media representation of the issue I mean particularly around the 2007 um uh uh referendum in Ontario they were not balanced in their approach I mean if media um is a reflection of the people uh then it’s a pretty wonky reflection uh because they did not

Reflect the different views they didn’t reflect the different kinds of experts that were available to speak to the issue and they didn’t play a role really in helping people understand you know what would be involved in making the change um and of course people ask questions why why I mean the star you

Why was the star so against proportional representation why was the glob in maale why is the National Post so against uh these changes why do all their columnists condemn it well again politics it’s politics uh in the case of the the the right-wing press the glob and male and National Post it’s because

They support the conservative party and they want the conservative party to win and they want the conservative party to respond respond to the business interests that support those corporate media in the case of the Toronto Star it’s a little harder right Toronto Star has always pitched itself as something

Different but essentially they’ve been a liberal paper and they also believe in a kind of elite accommodation approach to politics where people get together and make a deal uh you know for the good of the people um and so I’m not in any way trying to take away from the Star being

Um uh you know a different kind of paper I think it obviously does represent a different kind of politics than the other papers but they were just as committed to an elite form of Politics as the other guys and they are mostly guys um and so they they came out with a

Position that would support the federal Liberal Party and the provincial Liberal Party whom they were supporting with their editorial line uh and they sck their attack dogs it was very interesting to look at the media treatment of the BC citizens assembly and the Ontario citizens assembly in BC

In 2005 the media had a kind of lovein with the citizens assembly uh but then that helped the public to see the citizens assembly is something positive and that contributed to the 57 58% of the popular vote that they got in Ontario they weren’t going to make that

Mistake and so they came out fighting right from the beginning challenging The credibility of the ca challenging the individuals involved who are these people who gave them the right to make this decision why should we trust them I mean that was the kind of coverage uh

That it was getting um and in a sense it had its intended effect um people didn’t really understand what it was or just thought it was you know politics people who paid more attention saw that there was something interesting going on okay so I just want to comment a

Little bit on the star too about how they’ve I I’m sure everybody saw about two years ago that they came out with an oped saying that just this is just provincially for onario mind you right that we now support proportional representation and we think that the 2007 uh editorial board was wrong in

Opposing proportional representation of course you’ll notice now we have a Doug Ford government right and people pointed that out right away right I could have changed um but I mean in terms of you know looking forward on the federal issue if the polls are correct you know

We could end up seeing um a more formally established support from that news Outlet which would be actually really nice to see a silver lining I suppose okay I think that we’ve covered pretty much everything that we’re gonna cover we’ve been here almost an hour and a half Dennis has answered so many

Questions I know that there are so many more questions the what I want everybody to take away and I know that the presentation probably seemed like quite a while ago now but on those slides which I’m sure he’d be happy to share with you he gave us a lot of reasons to

Hope which is about you know just to sum up you know when you see shifts in the party system more parties having more power more minority governments instability in the party system um you know coinciding with the buildup of our activist movement from a couple people at a kitchen table talking about

Something nobody even could even ident like Define 25 years ago to you know where we’ve come now where we had so many people knocking on doors for us in December and January our movement has come a long way in terms of the number of people in terms of this the expertise

We have in terms of the lessons we’ve learned in terms of the skills that we have we have a long way to go but we’ve come a long way too and you know like Dennis said this movement is really about being ready for that moment uh

When we can help make change happen we have to keep growing so that we’re ready to to push that change through the door when that moment opens and it and it will open for us okay so I want to thank everybody yes I just throw in a few

Final words Anita that’s a great great wrap up um you know when we started FAO Canada and I didn’t I I I was there at the beginning but I wasn’t one of the founders I was just I set myself aside I said look let me be your you know geek

Um and uh you you guys be the public face um when we started I think a lot of people thought that fair vote was going to March out and educate everybody directly and we were going to lead this you know March of of of millions of people to reclaim their democracy um and

I think we’ve come to realize that we have a more strategic role to play our role is to open up the space for the discussion our role is to create the space so that politicians can say well you know there’s a lot of really great

Work out there and uh well as Fair vote Canada says like we we create the space to let them come to our positions you know politicians need to be able to justify taking different positions and not just politicians opinion leaders different people who have influence the more that we can connect what we’re

Doing uh to the public and what the public wants to see the more persuasive we we become and that is due to the work that all of you are doing right that door-to-door work the the the endless you know appearances at the pride parade all of that is really important and and

So I you know I just got to thank you all you know for what you’re doing because the more that we can connect with people um it it’s it’s another way of of being ready because when the moment comes and there are enough people who know where to go to get information

Then people are going to turn to them and say what is this issue why are people talking about it so to the extent that we’re visible and you’re visible you become a point of contact you become someone who can be an ambassador uh for our issue so thank you for your efforts

Uh we can’t do it without you um and let’s keep let’s keep going forward I think there’s lots of reasons for Hope thank you Dennis and thank you everyone who joined us tonight and hopefully we’ll see you again okay good night everyone