Electoral Reform
Tuesday, February 20, 2001
The following exchange is a part of a
debate on an NDP opposition motion on electoral reform.
The motion was;
That this House strike a special
all-party committee to examine the merits of various models of proportional
representation and other electoral reforms, with a view to recommending reforms
that would combat the increasing regionalization of Canadian politics, and the
declining turnout of Canadians in federal elections.
Mr. Bill Blaikie
(Winnipeg—Transcona, NDP): Mr. Speaker, I was obviously interested in what the member for
Regina—Qu'Appelle had to say. I know he has worked on this issue for a long
time. It is too bad that in the last parliament we did not get to vote on his
private member's bill having to do with proportional representation. It was
also raised in the last parliament by myself. I remember asking a question to
the Prime Minister. We got the usual sort of partisan trivia from the Liberal
front bench.
When I asked, on
behalf of the NDP for an all party committee, for what is being asked for
today, not for a particular solution but for a process by which these concerns
of the Canadian people could be taken into account, the response of the Prime
Minister was that because the NDP lost elections and they won them that was why
it wanted an all party committee struck.
However, it seems
to me, if I heard the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle correctly, we are talking
about the country, not about the NDP, Tories or the Reform. We are talking
about the political fabric of the country and the way in which certain fault
lines are developing, both in terms of voter confidence and regional division,
as a result of the first past the post system, the way in which it tends to
throw up a homogeneous image of particular regions. As the member said, it
looks like everybody in Alberta is a reformer, everybody in Quebec is a
sovereignist, everybody in Ontario is a Liberal or whatever the case may be.
Could the member
elaborate on that?
Hon. Lorne
Nystrom:
Mr. Speaker, the first past the post system tends to really distort the
composition of the House of Commons. If we look at election after election we
can see good examples of that.
I think of 1993,
for example, when the Conservative Party was wiped out. One would have thought
that nobody voted Conservative in the country. The party had two members, the
member for Saint John and Jean Charest. However, the Conservatives received
some 17% of the vote. It took over a million people or thereabouts, if my
recollection is correct, to elect a Conservative member of parliament.
As much as I
opposed the Brian Mulroney government, we should have had an electoral system
that gave that party some representation which would have reflected the
proportion of the vote in the country. What has happened now is even worse than
that. We have the regional divisions that are setting into the country where we
have people in the various provinces and regions voting as a block for their
particular party. We come to parliament now with five regional parties. The
Liberal Party itself is basically a regional party centred mainly in the
provinces of Ontario and Quebec. That is not good for the unity of the country.
If we had PR it
would force all parties to address the regional issues. It would force
Liberals, for example, to address the issue of the farm crisis in the prairies,
which they are not doing now because they do not have any members of parliament
from there. It would force my party, the NDP, to address the issues of Quebec
because a vote in Quebec would be worth as much as a vote in Regina. That is
not happening in the current political system.
The other thing it would do is radically
change the voting patterns in the country. People could afford to vote NDP in
rural Alberta, Liberal in rural Saskatchewan and Reform in Newfoundland and the
votes would count. That would change the voting pattern in Canada and the
Canadian people would all of a sudden find a parliament that reflected the way
they felt in terms of the common good of Canada.
