Reform debate reveals — wait for it — MPs are high on MPs

A few weeks back, I took the rare — and, in the Canadian political journalizing racket, generally ill-advised — step of expressing tentative but emphatic optimism over what appeared to be a shocking lack of cross-party bickering among the 12 MPs tasked to serve out their summers on the Special Committee on Electoral Reform.

Since then, the committee has held two rounds of hearings, an opening session with Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Monsef, then follow-up with testimony from both the current and former chief electoral officers in early July.

After those meetings wrapped up, they took a (well-deserved) break, returning to Ottawa last week for four days of panel discussions with various and sundry experts around the world.

By the time the gavel went down Thursday, committee members — and anyone else who tuned into the proceedings — had (or likely at least felt like they had) earned the equivalent of a hyper-specialized degree in the major alternate voting systems currently active somewhere on the planet, as well as on the potential benefits and possible downsides to tweaking our existing electoral machinery.

But as the discussion became more substantive, and committee members began to use what was, in some cases, newly obtained knowledge to crossexamine invited experts based on what they’d heard from previous witnesses, one area did reveal itself as a (and perhaps the only) loci of impassioned unanimous agreement: Namely, how crucially important MPs — local, individual and with their very own names on the eventual ballot — are and must continue to be in any democratic system.

A fair number — although most definitely not all — of the more impassioned proponents of proportional representation who appeared before the committee pointed out that, if you truly want to end up with a Parliament that accurately reflects the share of the vote each party receives, having voters directly elect a local MP tends to be deeply inefficient, particularly since most of those voters make their selection purely based on party affiliation.

Instead, those seats could be allocated based on those numbers, and the parties given carte blanche to populate their share based on their own preferences — or, as it is known in the field, a “closed list.”

While this may not be a particularly controversial position in the wider debate over electoral reform, it turns out that MPs have a markedly different reaction to being told that, when you get down to it, they’re basically just colour-coded seat fillers.

There are, of course, other models of PR that allow voters to mark an X beside a specific, preferred candidate, but interestingly, those same MPs also seemed distinctly less than keen on alternative selection methods that require MPs from the same parties to compete against each other to win one of the party’s available seats, as is the case in Ireland.

Future committee witnesses might want to take that into account while drafting presentations to this particular audience.

Even if you happen to believe that directly electing local MPs is a charming but anachronistic complication to a more perfectly representative system, coming right out and saying so will inevitably trigger a less-than-receptive response.

You may find your observations conspicuously absent from the final report.

Meanwhile, more cynical-minded voters can draw their own conclusions as to why MPs seem so reluctant to move away from a model that gives them the right to appear on a ballot as the sole endorsed representative of their party. Kady O’Malley is a political columnist for the Ottawa Citizen.