A Sacred Bond? Really?

How important is local representation? What is effective local representation for voters anyway? It's the one aspect of this electoral reform debate that can drive a wedge between the .00002% (a high end guess) of Canadians who are married to either Mixed Member Proportional or Single Transferable Vote as the only acceptable PR system. Most Canadians don't know the difference between MMP and STV and most PR supporters are happy with any of the Canadian PR models - they just want fair results. Background - Two Assemblies, Two Approaches to "local" Both the Ontario and BC Citizens assemblies identified most of the same values - with proportionality at the top. Both thought local representation was important. However, the ON Citizens' Assembly thought local representation was best achieved by keeping most of the ridings single member, elected by first-past-the-post - pretty much the same local representation you get now, but in a larger local riding. The proportionality was achieved by compensatory MPs.

The BC Citizens' Assembly felt this kind of representation was local but not particularly "effective" when most people didn't vote for the local MP and the MP pretty much just followed the party line anyway. They felt a diverse team of local MPs representing a larger local district would be more effective (and proportional). The value of local representation to me Like most Canadians, l live in an urban area. In fact, I live in a large city. So my view of this issue is no doubt shaped by that.

I would prefer to live in a multi-member riding electing a team of MPs which would probably include a couple of MPs I actually like and helped elect. Just like I would not be happy if there was only one restaurant choice because 30% of people around here like Chinese food, I'm not too happy when a single MP "owns" my riding and is "my voice" in Ottawa. That MP may have "won" some kind of archaic contest, but that kind of representation puts me in the spectator's box for another four years. I actually have no idea what "local representation" on the federal level means to me in Kitchener Centre. Is my MP going to build a gazebo in my yard? I have no sense of identity related to my riding boundaries in particular. Don't get me wrong. I am fond of my street and my larger community. But I just don't walk around feeling like "I belong to Kitchener-Centre and we in Kitchener Centre have a shared identity as voters" - as opposed to "those other people" in Kitchener South-Hespeler or Kitchener Conestoga or the former Kitchener-Waterloo.... If you live in a big city, 5 years ago you might have been in one riding and in another ten years you might be in another...and you didn't even move. But heavens, if you live in Etobicoke North don't be showing up at the town hall for Etobicoke Centre on a federal issue like climate change - that's another MP's turf!! What do I vote for when I vote federally? This week I got a large colourful brochure in the mail from MP . It features pictures of my MP smiling with local seniors somewhere - among various other generic feel-good photos of the MP in the park etc. Recently I saw him at a local event taking multiple photos of himself to put on his MP page. That's very nice and I'm glad he's involved in the community - as MPs will be in any system. I voted for an individual representing a federal party policy platform - not for somebody to be a federal ombudsman for a particular collection of streets. And like nine million other Canadians, I didn't elect anybody. But hey, I have "local representation" in a single member riding. And listening to some of the pundits and MPs at ERRE, wow, do I ever value that. Are Rural Ridings and Rural Voters Different? I have come to understand that some Canadians in rural ridings feel differently about their local MPs. Unlike voters in cities, I bet they are more likely to know who their local MP is and more about him/her personally. They might see their MP often at the church and the grocery store and chat about a shared local event. (The only place I'm going to see my MP over the next four years is if I happen to walk by one of his photo ops - which I did last week and he pretends he doesn't see me). Rural voters might have some shared sense of identity that comes from living in a small town or unique geographic area - and their MP might be part of that. They might have a sense of shared local history. They might have a feeling that "We're in this together, advocating for this community" with the MP that exists regardless of what party the MP is from or whether the person voted for that representative. I think there's some truth to that. So I understand the fear that some rural voters might have about living in a larger multi-member riding with local MPs who share responsibility to a larger area. While some feel that they would be gaining something, others fear they would be losing something. Striking a Canadian Balance - How this relates to Electoral Reform Jean-Pierre Kingsley, our Chief Electoral Officer for 17 years, testified before ERRE suggesting an electoral system with multi-member ridings in the cities and single member ridings in the rural areas - because he says rural voters and rural ridings are different. (Check out the proportional version of Kingsley's suggestion here developed by Fair Vote Canada!). If it means THAT much to some of my fellow Canadians in rural areas that we must have a proportional system that also keeps some single member ridings in rural or small urban areas, then all good, let's do that! Local Can Become a Religion at ERRE Keeping in mind that there are some differences between urban and rural voters in terms of their relationship to their MPs and riding boundaries, some days I fear most of the MPs deciding this issue have stretched the importance of the single member MP to the limits of plausibility. As Kady O'Malley so aptly put it the other day, "MPs think MPs are important." Conservative MP Gerard Deltell on the ERRE committee believes that voters and local MPs in our current system have a "sacred bond." Trudeau has also used that same word - "bond" - to describe the relationship between a federal MP and the voters in his/her riding.

Do you have a bond with your local MP? Really? Do you know anyone (not on a local EDA and of no family relation to the MP) who does? If I stood outside the grocery store in my riding and stopped people, how many people could successfully name their riding? Tell me where it starts and ends? Tell me who the local MP is? If they had ever visited that person? If you asked them if they have a sacred bond with their MP might they call security?

According to Royce Koop, an "expert" testifying this week at ERRE, Canadian voters are "delighted" with their local representatives chosen by first-past-the-post. But according to a study by Samara, a non-partisan charity (which has never taken a position on PR and if anything avoided the topic until just recently) which reports on the health of Canadian democracy: "Over half of Canadians are dissatisfied with how MPs are doing their jobs overall. Canadians gave MPs failing grades in most of their functions, including helping people in their ridings, holding government to account and explaining decisions made in Parliament.​" Maybe that's because with first-past-the-post, most of us didn't vote for the local MP we supposedly have the sacred bond with. Choice, anyone? Early on in the ERRE hearings the MPs were listening to the experts from Ireland testify about how well PR-Single Tranferable Vote - local MPs sharing multi-member ridings - worked for voters there. The experts were explaining that people like it. One MP on ERRE was close to aghast that voters in a local district would have a choice of MPs. "Wouldn't that lead to MP shopping?" she said. I guess the sacred bond can't be shared. A busy office can create a bit of myopia An MP's office phone probably rings off the hook. Even in only 5% of people in the riding ever call them over 4 years - and many of them for something like a passport - it's enough to keep the MP so busy that he thinks he is personally both special and indispensable to local voters.That's human nature. With a PR, system, MPs providing a variety of local services would continue to be just as busy and feel just as special and indispensable. There's no loss of this kind of "local representation". What they will lose is the sense of being the only game in town. How Important Are Individual MPs, Really? As Associate Professor Dennis Pilon suggested to ERRE, the evidence suggests that in most cases, the individual MP's performance in the local riding is not that important to voters when election time comes. Nor were elections in Canada historically ever based around this ideology of the sacred bond with a single local MP (note: multi-member ridings are not new to Canada) with or the ombudsman services provided by a single local MP. Associate Professor Dennis Pilon summed this up nicely to the MPs at ERRE, and found few fans among the MPs by doing so: "That doesn't mean your vote is a reflection of all that hard, hard work. In fact, it's just sort of an expected part of the job. You may not know this, but it was really only in the 1970s, fairly recently, that Parliament gave the funds to MPs to actually set up local offices and do the kind of work that we seem to think now is a historical legacy. There's all kinds of evidence, really clear evidence, that you are not the centre of the voter's universe.​ I'm not against having local representation, but your job is to try to work out the balance. Right now we have an overbalanced sense of the local. People use it to basically try to block every attempt at reform with these overblown ideas of the importance of the local. You had André Blais here the other day. He did a great study in which he asked people what influences their vote and if they vote on the basis of a local member. Of the responses, 40% said that, yes, local is very important. When he asked a follow-up question on what if that local member wasn't a member of the party they supported, only 4% were now prepared to support that local member​."

Let's think outside the box, and let's find a balance. Proportional Systems for Canada that all Keep Local Representation Single Transferable Vote (PR-STV) - including STV+: www.stvforcanada.com http://www.fairvote.ca/fvc-erre-submissions_appx_10_-made-in-canada_stv/ Rural-Urban Proportional Representation: http://www.fairvote.ca/ruralurbanproportional/ http://www.fairvote.ca/fvc-erre-submissions_appx_12_-rural-urban_pr/ Mixed Member Proportional Representation: https://youtu.be/D3guVBhKmDc http://www.fairvote.ca/fvc-erre-submissions_appx_10_-made-in-canada_mmp/