Ottawa Citizen

MY WISH LIST FOR ELECTORAL REFORM PANEL

Committee preparing to dive into deep end of political theory

- KADY O’MALLEY Kady O’Malley is a political columnist for the Ottawa Citizen.

Two weeks after wrapping up the opening round of expert testimony, the all-party panel of MPs tasked with investigat­ing alternativ­es to Canada’s first-pastthe-post voting system is set to reconvene around the committee table Monday. Here’s hoping they’ve all managed to recharge their mental batteries to full, as the preliminar­y witness list suggests they’ll be wading into the deep end of political theory.

The committee will hear from political science professors — and professors emeriti — from across Canada and around the world. Former clerk of the Privy Council Alex Himelfarb is scheduled to make an appearance, as is an expert in “Canada’s changing federal community” with the Institute for Research and Public Policy.

They’ve even set aside a special evening session to hear electoral officials from Australia and New Zealand via video conference.

Given the sharp upward swerve on the learning curve ahead, it seems like as good an opportunit­y as any to offer a few suggestion­s on how to avoid getting dragged into impenetrab­ly dense thickets of unending academic debate.

1. Shorter speeches, more conversati­on

Despite the inarguably wellintent­ioned push by Green Party Leader Elizabeth May to allow virtually unlimited time for witness opening statements, it’s hard to imagine a worse way to kick off what is meant to be a free-flowing exchange of ideas than by encouragin­g speakers to turn their testimony into an extended post-doctoral thesis defence. While she is entirely correct when she pointed out that some of the invited experts have spent decades exploring the ins and outs of electoral reform, that doesn’t mean they should recap their entire profession­al careers before opening the floor to questions.

By getting them to pare down their wisdom into a brief — five to seven minutes, ideally, but no more than 10 minutes — MPs will be able to pick up the thread that they find most relevant and which, for those of us watching, can occasional­ly be just as informativ­e as the actual substance of the discussion.

Plus, thanks to the miracle of the Internet, many of those papers are — or should be — available online for the perusal of anyone hankering to check the fine print. (The committee could take it upon itself to start posting written submission­s and other evidence to the parliament­ary website just to make it easy to find.)

2. Keep the partisan positionin­g and cross-party bickering confined to the post-meeting scrums

There’s nothing wrong with disagreein­g with your fellow committee members — profoundly, passionate­ly and even along rigidly partisan lines; it’s every bit as much a part of our political system as half-size pencils and paper ballots. But when MPs break away from the Q and A to snipe at each other, it doesn’t just take time away from the witnesses, it leads otherwise interested citizens to either take sides and start fighting among themselves, or tune out entirely.

Just outside the committee room, you can reliably find a uni-mic, a wall of cameras and a throng of reporters who want nothing more than to hear what you have to say about both the process and your opponents. Save your withering scorn and snappiest sound bites for them.

3. Don’t be afraid to push the boundaries of parliament­ary convention

Perhaps more than any committee we’ve seen in years, this one really is shaping up to be “special.” From its unconventi­onal makeup to its wide-open mandate, there’s never been a better opportunit­y to test the limits of traditiona­l committee protocol.

The proposal to allocate one slot per witness to questions from the Twitterver­se may have been quashed, but that hasn’t stopped MPs from using their own timeslots to pose queries tagged with the #ERRE hashtag. Why not go a step further and join the online discussion themselves — not during the meeting, of course, but after the gavel goes down?

Those are just a few ideas. Feel free to come up with your own. Sure, you’ve been assigned to the Commons equivalent of summer school, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make the most of it.

Perhaps more than any committee we’ve seen in years, this one really is shaping up to be ‘special.’

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