Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Legal and Constitutional Affairs
Issue 13 - Evidence for the meeting of April 6, 2000
OTTAWA, Thursday, April 6, 2000
The Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, to which was referred Bill C-2, respecting the election of members to the House of Commons, repealing other acts relating to elections and making consequential amendments to other acts, met this day at 10:53 a.m. to give consideration to the bill.
Senator Lorna Milne (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: We have before us this morning Mr. Stephen Best and Ms Liz White. Would you introduce the gentleman who has joined you at the table and then please proceed.
Mr. Stephen Best, Director, Environment Voters: Honourable senators, I should like to introduce George Dupras. Environment Voters is a child of two organizations, the International Wildlife Coalition and Animal Alliance of Canada. Mr. Dupras is a director of Animal Alliance of Canada. Animal Alliance is putting considerable resources into the work of Environment Voters.
I should like to thank this committee for inviting Environment Voters to appear to discuss Bill C-2. Environment Voters appeared before the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs in November on this bill. Today our hope is to take advantage of the differing roles of the House of Commons and the Senate and build on what was discussed in November rather than simply reiterating it.
Our particular concern in November, as it is today, was part 17 of Bill C-2, which is the third-party election advertising. Put less elegantly, but I think possibly more accurately, is that part 17 is the gag law section of Bill C-2. For what it is worth, it would appear from the draft of Bill C-2 that you now consider that Environment Voters' appearance before the House committee did not have much impact.
Before I begin, I should like to do a few housekeeping chores. The short notice of this appearance has meant that it has not been possible to have all the documents we would like you to consider available in both official languages. For that, we do apologize.
Having said that, what is available is the oral presentation that was made to the House of Commons subcommittee. As well, we have also brought along a detailed report about our campaign in the 1999 Ontario provincial election. The things we will be talking about here are not academic. They are things we have actually done. That report describes one of those campaigns.
That was our first campaign and we targeted seven electoral districts. It is a useful analysis in that it clearly lays out what Environment Voters is, why Environment Voters campaigns in elections and the campaign methods that Environment Voters uses. That report also gives the results of an analysis of the effects the Environment Voters campaign had on the voting patterns. I think you will find that unique. We actually measured what happened and what effect we had. Of the seven Progressive Conservative members of the provincial parliament targeted, only three returned to the Ontario legislature.
We also have copies for your viewing pleasure of a video that formed the basis of our campaign message. We used television in our campaign. I have also brought along an interview that I conducted in Plymouth, Massachusetts, with Thomas McMillan, who was Canada's minister of the environment from 1985 to 1988, where he speaks very candidly about politics, the environment, environmental groups and Environment Voters.
If you would allow me I should like to put our appearance before you in a context that includes ordinary people. We are not speaking about abstract things here in any way at all. There will be real effects from the decisions that these bodies make.
To help demonstrate what we will be discussing, imagine if you will that tomorrow a local chemical producing company accidentally releases a toxic plume into the air that settles on Ottawa and kills, over a period of a few days, 2,000 people. That would be a Bhopal-scale event. The horror of the disaster would trigger a massive and immediate response from emergency, medical, law enforcement and news services and in the aftermath from political and legal agencies. The deaths would be devastating to the families involved and severe health consequences would be suffered from tens of thousands of people for years to come. The economic effects would be perhaps in the billions of dollars. Governments at all levels would take measures to ensure that such a tragedy would never happen again, and the offending company would likely never resume operations.
Contrast that with this: In Ontario this year, almost 2,000 people will die prematurely because of poor air quality. The only difference between the fictional scenario and reality is that these people will not die in one weekend, they will not die in one place and the blame will not fall on one company. These 2,000 real people will die just as painfully and their families will suffer just as much. Another difference between the reality and the fiction is that, as of yet, no government has taken measures to ensure that the real deaths never happen again.
The crime is that these 2,000 people will die needlessly and it is too late for them now. Their fate has already been sealed, despite the fact that Canadian governments, particularly the federal government, have always had the legislative powers they need to prevent those deaths. The reality is that those people will die because our elected politicians and political parties have been compelled, for perfectly valid political reasons, not to exercise their powers in a way that would have saved those people's lives.
Environment Voters is using electoral politics to change that reality. The drafters of Bill C-2 seek to prevent Environment Voters from doing that.
The coming deaths of those 2,000 people in Ontario are just one consequence of the continuing degradation of Canada's and the global environment. According to a study done by the National Center for Economic Alternatives in Washington, D.C., Canada's environment is 40 per cent worse today than it was in 1970. The pattern of continued degradation is also noted in the 1999 report of Canada's Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, in the 1999 report of the Environmental Commissioner of Ontario, in the United Nations Environment Programme's Global Environment Outlook 2000, and the World Wildlife Fund's Living Planet Index. Everyone who measures these things finds a degrading environment over the last 30 years.
Canada has one of the worst environmental records among Western democracies. Canada fails to recognize in public policy that a healthy environment is not a luxury. It is a fundamental necessity of life and a necessary precursor to the social, economic, and physical well-being of all Canadians. Although the wording varies from report to report, the reason given for the continuing environmental degradation is the same, which is failure of governments to act to protect the environment. However, all the reports fail to discuss the reason governments have failed to act. It is not because governments are populated by perverse people who enjoy breathing polluted air, drinking unsafe water, and watching habitats being destroyed and species becoming endangered. The reasons are political. The short-term exigencies of electoral politics, indeed the very foundations of democratic systems, mean that, more often than not, thoughtful, long-term policies that would protect the environment simply cannot be implemented.
While the various agencies that report on the degrading state of the environment generally blame government for failing to act, much, if not more, of the blame should be attached to the environmental movement. The modern international environmental movement, despite the support of millions of people and access to literally billions of dollars, has utterly failed to make the environment a politically relevant issue. They have failed to grasp the fact that we do not have an environmental problem: we have a political problem. We have the technical and scientific expertise, the economic wherewithal, the market systems, the communications systems, and the political systems necessary to fully address the environmental problems facing Canada and the world today.
It would not be easy; it could not be done overnight; and some things have been lost that can never be recovered. However, we can have a clean, healthy environment that is rich in biodiversity and that is improved rather than degraded every year. Our failure as an environmental movement is not fully exercising our democratic rights and making our governments implement the policies necessary to protect the environment. The conclusion of 30 years of failures is inescapable. It will never be possible to protect the natural environment, let alone restore and enhance it, until the political environment is changed. It is in the political environment where people decide, as a society, how they are going to live.
The task that Environment Voters has set for itself is to change the political environment, to make it in the political best interests of all politicians and political parties to protect the environment by providing a political benefit for a good environmental record and exacting a cost for a poor one in the form of votes and seats won and lost. We must make it more important politically to protect the environment than to acquiesce to the economic and social interests whose short-term goals, left unchecked, would destroy it. In a modern market-oriented democracy based on the rule of law there is simply no other route to protecting the environment. Tom McMillan said that it is a simple fact of political life in our country that it is politicians and government that make most of the decisions in the environmental field. What will advance the environment of the country is votes, voters, and the ballot box. What is needed is an organization that makes sure politicians and government act responsibly in the environmental field, rewards them when they do, and punishes them when they do not.
More specifically, Environment Voters is currently preparing to campaign in 22 electoral districts in the next federal election. The planned budget is $50,000 per electoral district and the funds will be raised through direct response television programs -- 30-minute infomercials expected to start airing in May. The electoral districts chosen have two things in common. They are currently held by members of the Liberal Party and they will likely be won or lost by 4 per cent of the vote or less.
Environment Voters does not campaign in elections to elect candidates or parties that promise to pass good environmental laws. Rather, Environment Voters holds politicians and parties accountable in elections for what they have actually done while in government. As the Liberal Party currently forms the government of the day, only they have the power to pass sound environmental laws. If, when the next election is called, the Liberals can fairly be judged to have a good environmental record, Environment Voters will be campaigning to re-elect Liberal incumbents. On the other hand, if their record is poor, Environment Voters will campaign to defeat Liberals. Given the Liberal Party's environmental protection record to date, it seems likely that Environment Votes will be campaigning against Liberals in the next election.
It is very important to understand that the concern of Environment Voters is only policy, not which party holds power. In Ontario, for example, Environment Voters campaigned against Progressive Conservative candidates and in favour of Liberals and the NDP.
Bill C-2, of course, has been deliberately crafted in the hopes of preventing precisely that kind of political activity. The drafters of Bill C-2 hope to prevent Canadian citizens, through making common cause with organizations like Environment Voters, from effectively using the only democratic means they have of holding their politicians and governments directly accountable for their record while in office, and that is the right to vote.
Bill C-2 does not go so far as to ban third-party involvement in elections altogether, but the spending limitations are so low as to have exactly that effect. It is simply not possible to conduct a meaningful campaign in an electoral district on $3,000. In Bill C-2 the government is saying: "We do not mind you exercising your right to freedom of expression, we just do not want you doing it in such a way that people actually hear you."
The Honourable Don Boudria, Minister of State and Leader of the Government in the House of Commons, told the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs that Bill C-2 is part of "perfecting our democratic process." More recently, Jamie Robertson of the Library of Parliament suggested in his legislative overview of Bill C-2 that the Canadian electoral system is known as a model of electoral democracy around the world. Actually, neither of those statements is true. Bill C-2 does nothing to perfect our democratic process. Indeed, one of its explicit intents is to diminish rights enshrined in the Charter, and the Canadian electoral system is recognized as being so archaic and so undemocratic that it is universally rejected by modern emerging democracies when sincere electoral reform is undertaken.
Let me give you some examples. The winner-take-all, constituency-based electoral system entrenched in Bill C-2 produces grotesque results that often directly contradict the express wishes of voters, sometimes with dire consequences that threaten the very future of Canada. In the provincial election in 1996 in British Columbia, the Liberals took 42 per cent of the vote and the NDP took 39 per cent. Yet, the NDP formed a majority government with 39 seats to the Liberals' 33. That was a direct affront to the voters. The current Government of British Columbia is legal, but democratically illegitimate, thanks to our electoral system.
In the federal election in 1993, the Progressive Conservatives earned 16 per cent of the vote and were reduced to two seats in the House of Commons. The Reform took only 3 per cent more and took 52 seats over the PCs. The Bloc earned less than Reform and became the official opposition.
In 1993, the Canadian electoral system, the model of democracy perpetuated in Bill C-2, negated a fundamental criterion of true democracy, the equality of each citizen's vote. In Canada, because of the electoral system, some votes carry much more weight than others. In elections, Canadians are not equal before the law. That is contrary to the letter and the spirit of our Constitution and Charter of Rights.
The worst example, the one that shows clearly what terrible long-term damage our electoral system can truly wreak, was the Quebec election of 1998. In that election, the Liberal Party won 43 per cent of the vote. Fewer people voted for the Parti Québécois -- only 42 per cent -- yet the PQ formed a majority government with 70 seats to the Liberals' 48. Canada's electoral system, extolled by the minister and offered as a model of democracy, utterly disregarded the will of voters in Quebec and produced a democratically illegitimate government dedicated to the breakup of Canada.
The way the electoral system distorts the number of votes earned by parties relative to the seats gained in legislature is only the most glaring distortion because it is easy to compare votes cast with seats won. However, an even more damaging effect to the country wrought by the electoral system, one that is not quite so obvious but just as devastating, is how it distorts the precedence given the multitude of issues that elected representatives must decide.
The fact that Canada's electoral system so effectively disenfranchises millions of Canadians is the reason for the rise of and the argument for the compelling need in our present system for third parties to vigorously participate in elections. It is the reason Environment Voters was founded.
The disturbing, underlying premise that corrupts Bill C-2 is that election laws are not made to serve the citizens, but rather the interests of the major political parties. Bill C-2 is a self-serving, pernicious piece of legislation that ought to be resisted by the Senate and by anyone else truly interested in democracy and fair and open elections.
The interest of Environmental Voters in Bill C-2 centres on third-party election advertising. Two months ago, the Supreme Court of British Columbia struck down provisions regarding third-party campaigns in British Columbia's Elections Act that are virtually identical to those found in Bill C-2. Furthermore, Mr. Justice Brenner, in his reasons for judgment, rejected the very same arguments on legal precedents that the federal government is relying upon to defend the third-party spending restrictions in Bill C-2. The Premier of British Columbia has decided not to appeal the decision of the B.C. court. At the federal level, the government continues to pursue third-party spending limitations, despite court rulings that such laws are contrary to the Charter and indications that they would never survive a Supreme Court challenge.
It is unlikely that a Supreme Court challenge to Bill C-2 can be concluded in time for the next election. Therefore, a reasonable assumption is that the Liberal Party is acting in bad faith in this matter and is hoping that Bill C-2 will have a chilling effect on third-party participation in at least the next election.
In the absence of meaningful electoral reform, third-party campaigns serve an important democratic function. Mr. Justice Brenner observed that they allow ordinary citizens to have influence over what issues will be raised in elections, issues that political parties would prefer were not discussed during a political campaign. They allow ordinary citizens to have some control over how an election campaign will evolve, rather than simply remaining as passive consumers of campaign propaganda.
Electoral change is anathema to campaign strategists who want as much control as possible over the campaign message and the responses to it. If passed in its present form, Bill C-2 will admirably serve the desires of political campaign strategists, to the detriment of improving Canada's democratic system and the Charter rights of its citizens.
In our opinion and the opinion of many others who have appeared before these parliamentary committees, Bill C-2 is a bad piece of legislation. Some of the most vexing parts, those areas that apply to third parties and those dealing with the threshold for becoming a registered political party, have already been struck down by various courts, but not by the Supreme Court of Canada. Consequently, there is still doubt about the validity of the restraints on third parties in Bill C-2. We believe that the government has an obligation to the citizens of Canada, and to the third parties that it presumes to regulate and deny Charter rights, to clarify this issue before the next election.
That being said, we would ask the members of this committee to consider what measures the Senate might take to recommend to the government that Bill C-2 be referred to the Supreme Court of Canada for an opinion on its constitutionality before the next election. Perhaps the Senate itself would be able to refer Bill C-2 to the Supreme Court. Failure to have the Supreme Court consider this matter will put groups like Environment Voters in the very difficult position of choosing between exercising their Charter rights, which have already been upheld by various courts, and contravening federal election laws.
In closing, though, and in order to be perfectly valid, I should like to add that Bill C-2 is so badly conceived, because it is primarily designed to serve the interests of the major political parties and not voters or democracy, that, notwithstanding part 17, there are numerous ways for third parties like Environment Voters to adhere fully to the letter of Bill C-2 and still spend unlimited amounts in any electoral district overtly endorsing or opposing any candidate.
Thank you for your time. Ms White and I would be pleased to any questions or clarify any points.
Senator Beaudoin: My question relates to referring Bill C-2 to the Supreme Court. The Senate does not have such a power. Of course, the government has it. Did you propose that when you appeared before the House of Commons?
Mr. Best: As we were dealing with a body of elected members of Parliament, we decided to stay entirely on the subject of the nuts and bolts of how we campaign and the reasons we felt that exercising our rights in this matter were important.
Very briefly, if you will allow me, I shall expand. The environment, as an issue, does not have political relevance. In other words, it does not at this point matter whether you have a good environmental record or a poor one for your election chances. The environment is not geographically discrete for people. Thus, we do not have a collection of miners over here or manufacturers over there. It is spread out. It does not become relevant in the first-past-the-post system under which we operate. What we were describing to the members of Parliament was how we use our democratic rights to make the environment relevant, to make it look and feel, if you will, like a geographically discrete issue.
Senator Beaudoin: In other words, the courts saying one person, one vote, as they did in the United States many years ago, will not allow you to reach your goal. If you have one person, one vote, and proportional representation, you may reach your goal; is that correct?
Mr. Best: Many people have come before these committees to complain about the first-past-the-post system under which we operate. Those jurisdictions that have proportional representation tend to have better environmental records than we do because parties such as the Green Party can form and take 10 per cent or 12 per cent of the vote. Those people now sit around the table and have discussions; there is representation in the House on those issues in the various legislatures. We have a Red-Green alliance right now in Germany, for example. Under proportional representation, you can use the political system just in terms of gathering votes and making your issues relevant. We do not have that ability in Canada.
In the United States it is slightly different in that there are no third-party spending limitations so you can have an organization like the League of Conservation Voters that directly supports or opposes senators and congressmen and so on.
The United Kingdom is interesting; it has the same system we do. In almost every instance they are bullied into good environmental law by the European Union, which is dominated by countries under the proportional representation system.
Senator Beaudoin: The French system is called système uninominal à deux tours. You have a majority the second time. It is a compromise that apparently works well in France. Canada has another system.
I understand that in order for you to reach your goal you must go as far as proportional representation.
Mr. Best: I must say, Environment Voters is not in the business of reforming democracy. Environment Voters is in the business of using whatever means are available in whatever system we are operating under to get strong environmental policy. It is for others to decide.
Bill C-2 is a rule book for us. We look at the rules; this is how we are supposed to play it; let us use that rule book.
Ms Liz White, Director, Environment Voters: Honourable senators, to make it perfectly clear, whatever the rules are, we will be there as a third party exercising our democratic rights. We will not be waiting until we have proportional representation.
Thus, we will be out this election looking at 22 ridings held by Liberals where we can affect 4 per cent of the vote. We will not be waiting. It would be nice to have proportional representation, because I think we would have a much better discussion about the environment at the political table, but if that does not happen, we will have to force that discussion externally.
The Chairman: I understood you to say, Mr. Best, that you do not run candidates.
Mr. Best: No, we do not.
Ms White: We have videos that we prepared for the last election about what we did. In the videos, we actually said, "These are the people we do not want you to vote for; these are the people we do want you to vote for." We were very explicit at the end of each video. We filmed seven different videos saying who to vote for or not to vote for. The majority of the videos were similar. We have one example from the St. Paul's riding.
Mr. Best: To clarify what I said about running candidates, one of the ways that Environment Voters can participate in elections under Bill C-2 is to run candidates. Bill C-2 provides for no restrictions on campaign donations. Therefore, if we wanted to run in David Anderson's riding, for example, we could run an independent candidate not affiliated with any political party, contribute to that candidate the allowable $80,000, and spend that in that constituency supporting the Reform candidate, who would likely beat David Anderson.
In other words, you could run candidates in order to be allowed to spend the money. If you wanted to spend $160,000, you would run two candidates, and so on. The bill has so many holes in it that it becomes almost moot to someone who is looking at it differently than a party or a candidate would.
Senator Andreychuk: I take your point that you want a system different than the proportional system we have, and that requires a larger debate about changing Parliament and changing the electoral system. However, you seem to be saying that you will target candidates who you believe do not have a good environmental record.
Senator Murray: No, they do not say that.
Ms White: For clarification, the party in power is the one that has the ability to make decisions about their environmental record. We target the people we are best able to defeat, those who have won or lost their seats by 4 per cent of the vote or less. Their position on the environment makes no difference, because the fact is that decisions on the environment are not made by individuals but rather by political parties.
To their credit, Charles Caccia, Karen Kraft Sloan, and a number of other members of the Liberal Party have been very vocal in the environment, in complete opposition to the Liberal government, and it has not made a bit of difference to the Liberal government's environmental policies to date.
Senator Andreychuk: Therefore, you are using certain constituencies to make a point about the environment, if I may put it that way. First, what objective standards do you use to target them, or do you simply go where you think you can defeat them? What objective, or subjective I suppose, criteria are you using to assess whether the record is good or bad, beyond that you think it is a swing vote?
Second, it seems to me that it is an acknowledgement of your failure to communicate your message about the environment that you do not believe you can proceed on a national basis but must proceed constituency by constituency. In the 1980s, there was consensus and the Canadian people put environment at the top of their list. Leading up to Rio, there was a lot of national activity and a national debate between parties. That has been lost.
Mr. Best: Improving environmental policy and moving forward on the environment is not easy. In many cases, it will cause major social and economic disruptions to industry, business, and so on. It must be done incrementally in a way that society and the economy can deal with.
We have found reports to be very useful. For example, we can use the report of the Environmental Commissioner of Ontario. Federally, we can use the report of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development. We want to see that at the end of a government's mandate they have moved forward. Some issues may be left, but generally speaking the government should move forward. We should be able to say, in good faith, that because this government has been in office for four years the environment is better protected, a little cleaner, a little healthier than it was four years ago.
When that happens, our job is to provide a political benefit for that in the form of votes and seats won. We are not trying to be perverse about this.
Senator Andreychuk: My point is that you are doing it as a report card. You are not analyzing the opposition in comparison with the party in power to determine whether their record and stance has been equally strong on the environment, and you have no criteria to say that the opposition will do better. You are simply reporting on the government.
Mr. Best: That is because the government of the day has the power. You may be looking at an election differently than I would look at an election. A government makes a promise and puts forth a platform. Unless there is a day of accountability, it does not really matter what is said. An example is that the Liberals ran on scrapping the GST, and they did not. It is good to hear the government say that it will act on the environment, but you can judge only on what a government actually does. At election time, citizens can hold the government accountable. It is a matter of accountability, not a matter of another party saying what it will do.
In many countries, no one party necessarily has a better record on the environment than another. Currently, the NDP governments in British Columbia and Saskatchewan have terrible records on the environment. The government with one of the best records ever on the environment was the Progressive Conservative Party under Brian Mulroney.
All parties can have a good record on the environment. It is a keystone issue. I am not the least concerned about which party takes power. If it makes political sense, most people want a clean environment. It must make political sense. There must be votes to be harvested in order to have a good environmental record. That is just the system.
Ms White: We measure progress on the environment through external, relatively conservative agencies. The Commission on Environmental Cooperation and the National Center for Economic Alternatives have studied and measured various environmental situations. A deterioration of the environment in Canada has been shown in every regard. We are not holding the government accountable on the basis of what I think is a good or a bad system or on whether the environment is getting better; we are doing it based on the studies of external bodies.
I get the sense that people think that we think that politicians are not good people. That is absolutely not true. We understand that environmental changes cannot happen because of the political dilemmas you face regarding whom you have to deal with when you come to the table. We are saying only that Environment Voters allows you to benefit from having a good environmental record. For example, if the Liberal Party decided to bring in an endangered species act with proper habitat protection and various other issues, we would be in the 22 ridings saying that we think the government should be re-elected, and in the ridings where Liberals would have trouble getting re-elected we would spend our money to ensure that they would be re-elected because they had moved forward on some key issues. We are not trying to make this a good and bad thing. It is simply recognizing how the political system works.
Senator Murray: Has your organization ever advocated the re-election of a government?
Mr. Best: Our first and only campaign was the most recent one in Ontario, and the PCs have a very poor record in Ontario. We would look forward to supporting their candidates in the next election. That may seem strange, but it is the fact.
Senator Murray: You will choose Liberal candidates to oppose on the basis of whether they won or lost their ridings by 4 per cent of the vote or less. It matters not to you, as you have acknowledged, what the positions of those individuals may be on the issues that are of importance to you. Does it matter to you who their opponents may be?
If Ms Kraft Sloan, Mr. Caccia or Mr. Lincoln, who are well known for their positions on these matters, happened to have won their seats by 4 per cent or less and you found yourself opposing them, would you not agree that your position would appear rather incoherent?
Mr. Best: Let me answer. If Charles Caccia's seat was won or lost by less than 4 per cent and it looked like he would lose his seat and he was part of the Liberal Party, we would probably go in there and work for his re-election.
Senator Murray: That is not what you said before.
Mr. Best: What you are looking to me for, I think, is some criteria or some set of rules that I adhere to like the law. This is a political exercise.
Generally speaking, the members of Parliament in the caucus will do what the party eventually decides. They will take credit for whatever the party might do. What you are suggesting is that they ought not to be responsible for the failures of the party, because they might individually have a different point of view. However, the point is that as long as we have party discipline, unlike in the U.S. where you could support an individual senator or congressman, the MPs will collectively take responsibility and benefit from it.
Senator Murray: The voter makes up his or her mind on the basis of many factors, including the candidates, the leaders, the record and the positions of the various parties. Your position seems to be somewhat indiscriminate, irrational and not very coherent. I say this more, I suppose, with some sense of self-reproach for political people. Why have you given up on political parties? Do you realize how rife many constituency organizations of all parties are for I would not say takeover but infiltration by good causes?
Mr. Best: Senator Andreychuk asked a question previously along a similar line. Since 1970, the environmental movement has grown by 5,000 per cent. The amount of money put into the environmental movement, various groups and causes is $200 million a year in Canada. That represents an enormous amount of public support.
While the environmental movement was growing by 5,000 per cent, the environment in Canada was being degraded by 40 per cent. Despite the fact that we had overwhelming public support and that in every poll people are concerned about the environment in one way or another, depending on how the poll is done, that public support has never found its way through into public policy.
Senator Murray: You had better be careful assuming that all those dollars went in there for the purpose of political action. Please be careful about that.
Mr. Best: Senator, if I may, you make assumptions about what I say. You read interpretations in them.
Senator Murray: You are brandishing about your hundreds of millions of dollars.
Mr. Best: No, I am not. I am saying that the Canadian public votes with their dollars with $200 million dollars on environmental issues. That represents public support. How that is spent is another issue. What I am saying is that there is widespread public support. If one needs an absolutely clear indication of that, it is the way cheques are written to environmental organizations.
Senator Murray: My point is that people are not writing cheques for political action.
Mr. Best: There is a contract made between an environmental organization and a donor that says that, "If you give me money, I will protect the environment for you." The environmental community has not been delivering on that contract.
Senator Murray: I take it that you are opposed in principle to limitations on third-party spending in election campaigns?
Mr. Best: Yes, that is correct. In the kind of democracy that we have, a particular group can be disenfranchised. In other words, a private organization like the Liberals may spend as much as they want, and another organization, such as Environment Voters, for some arbitrary reason is told that they may not participate in the election.
The Chairman: I would point out that political parties have very strict limits set on them as to what amounts of money they may spend.
Senator Murray: There is also open disclosure.
The Chairman: Yes, absolutely, there is open disclosure. I think we will bypass that last remark of yours and go on to what Senator Murray was saying.
Senator Murray: Are you opposed in principle to limitations on political party spending?
Mr. Best: In principle, I am not opposed to limitations at all. I think everything should be fair.
Senator Murray: There are limitations on political parties. The question is whether there should be limitations on third parties. You have money to spend and various other environmental organizations may have money to spend in election campaigns, but so have dozens, scores, hundreds of other organizations that have even deeper pockets than yours. If you were considered to be a threat and the situation was wide open, do you not think the BCNI, the Business Council on National Issues, or the big oil companies would come in with such money and force as to drown you out?
Mr. Best: They already do that. They make direct contributions to the Liberal Party. That is how they exercise their influence. In other words, the purpose of contributions is to acquire the capacity to get votes. That is why you get political contributions, so you can campaign effectively. The money is already being spent by various corporations and interests in different ways. What we are saying is that we do not have those deep pockets.
Senator Murray: Who is drowning out your message in an election campaign? The environment is and has been in my adult lifetime a fairly important issue in most election campaigns. You have various parties taking various positions on the issues.
Ms White: Senator Murray, the only thing that counts is what measures at the end of the day. It does not matter whether governments talk about the environment. It does not matter whether they sign various international agreements. Frankly, it does not matter what individuals in parties say. If the environment continues to deteriorate, then the environment is not being addressed. That is the bottom line.
Senator Buchanan: People can vote against them in the next election. What is wrong with that?
Ms White: What we are saying is that the environment is not a luxury, it is an necessity. Without clean air and clean water and habitat protection and all of those things it does not matter what we do because we will not have our health.
The Chairman: Several other people wish to make comments but I want to shorten up these answers if I possibly can. I think we must agree to disagree on some basic premises.
Ms White: I agree with that. If I may just say that several independent organizations are saying that the Canadian environment is deteriorating. It seems that that is a very important thing to actually address.
Senator Cools: I wanted to follow up on Senator Murray's line of thinking and the witnesses' responses. I keep hearing from the witnesses a repetition of the word "fairness". I think everybody around this table is preoccupied with fairness.
I may be wrong. I did not hear most of your testimony. What I hear you saying is that you want party results without party commitment and all the other responsibilities that go with being a party. What I do not understand is this: If you so want to be a player in party politics, why do you not organize yourselves constitutionally as a party and field as many candidates as you want and then you can have your say? That will then be a real test of the voters' thoughts.
Mr. Best: In fairness, nowhere in the Constitution of Canada is the word "party" raised. I am a citizen of Canada. I choose and ask to be treated the same as any other citizen. I choose to ask that my organization, Environment Voters, has the same rights and benefits as a political party.
If you want to know our list of donors and where we spend our funds, I do not have any trouble with that. I think fairness means that when you get into an election, which is the most important day on the democratic calendar, citizens get a chance to hear everything; it means that the election is not geared more to one type of organization than another; and it means that votes mean the same thing. One person's vote in one place means one thing; there is equal representation and votes have equal weight.
Right now the system is set up to serve the interests of major political parties. A party does not even get registered status until it fields 50 candidates. That means you can have Bloc Québécois but you cannot have Bloc P.E.I. There is no fairness there.
Senator Buchanan: I find it difficult to follow what you are saying here. On one hand, you say that in an election campaign a political party will espouse environmental issues and will say that they are going to do this or that, but when they get elected they do not do it. Is the remedy not to kick them out if they do not do it?
That does not happen. If a government is kicked out, rarely have they been kicked out because they have not followed through on environmental issues. It is for many other reasons that they are kicked out for. That just does not hold water.
Second, I listened to what you said here, and on at least six occasions you cited the Charter of Rights. Yet you say that our system of government has to change. The Charter of Rights was passed by democratically elected governments under our system. I know; I was there. I signed the Charter of Rights. It was signed by Liberals, Conservatives and NDP. It was not signed by René Lévesque but it was signed by democratically elected governments under our system that you oppose. You pick and choose. You say the Charter of Rights is great. It was passed by democratically elected governments.
The Chairman: Do you have a question, Senator Buchanan?
Senator Buchanan: You talk about the great concern the Canadian public has for the environment. Yes, there is a lot of concern. You say that our system has ensured that the environment is deteriorating; health is deteriorating; we are all going to hell in a handbasket. Yet, in our country, people are living longer than they have ever lived before. I read an article recently reporting that longevity is increasing both for men and women in this country. That contradicts what you are saying.
Second, I know a lot about polling. In every poll that I have seen where people are asked what their concerns are, they answer education, employment, health care, social services, and then -- at the bottom of the list -- the environment.
You may say that that is because of the wording of the polls. The wording of the polls is "What are your concerns?" You believe the pollsters should say, "Do you have a concern about the environment?" The answer then is going to be "yes". "Do you beat your mother-in-law?" The answer will be "no".
The Chairman: Senator Buchanan, ask your question.
Senator Buchanan: Would you agree with what I have said?
Mr. Best: People are living longer and they are getting sicker.
I applaud you for signing the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I should like you to leave me with my rights and not take them away now.
Senator Pearson: I agree with your aim, your end goal, an improved environment. I have no question about that. Everyone is concerned about the environment. Yet I feel very uneasy about your method because I do not think it is going to work. It may defeat some candidates but it is not going to improve environmental policy.
The voters are individual people. They are the ones I have confidence in. They are the ones you should be reaching through the ways people do reach people: going to the all-candidates meetings and raising the issue. To use what looks to me to be a form of blackmail is not going to work. If you are really interested in what you say you are interested in -- improving the environment -- why are you choosing that particular method?
From my years of experience -- and I am older than most of you -- I can say that it is a method that does not work. I am in favour of improving the environment. I want people to put all their energies into encouraging the voter to make those little changes in their lives, all the other kinds of things that we can do, the kids, the recycling, everything. That is where the efforts should be, not in this form.
Ms White: We did an interview with Eva Ligeti, who was, until a short time ago, the Environmental Commissioner of Ontario. She said that if everyone in Canada did what her or she could to improve the environment, it still would not be enough. We need government policy in order to do it.
When we did the video, we just put in what the Tory government said. We showed people and we said, "Look, we all want clean air and we all want clean water and we would like to have some endangered species around so that our kids could see them, and maybe we could even make them not endangered any more. Would you consider switching your vote on that basis?" They did.
Even though there were other discussions going on about many other issues, we can demonstrate that in those areas that we identified as swing areas, where we delivered videos to every door, about 4,000 in every riding, people actually put the video in, looked at it and said, "That sounds like a really good idea and I think I am going to go out and change my vote." We did 22,000.
Senator Pearson: You did 22,000 what?
Ms White: We did 22,000 videos, split up among seven ridings.
Senator Pearson: How can you demonstrate that they had the impact you suggest?
Ms White: If you look at the report, you will see that we were able to figure out exactly where the swing votes were in the riding. We measured the change in votes between those areas that did not get the videos and those that did.
Senator Pearson: How do you know it was your piece that made the change?
Ms White: The most interesting riding was David Johnson's riding. Every anti-Harris union at the time was involved in that campaign. We can demonstrate that, in that riding, the votes went down everywhere else, but where we distributed our video they went down substantially more. We were responsible for David Caplan's election and David Johnson's defeat. That is absolutely demonstrable. We were able to measure exactly where we went and how that affected the vote. The report is at the table for anybody to look at.
Senator Pearson: And David Caplan agrees?
Ms White: I have no idea what David Caplan thinks about it.
Senator Di Nino: Mr. Best, I believe you said that you base your plan on a report card of what the government has done. Is that correct?
Mr. Best: Yes.
Senator Di Nino: I understood Ms White to say, using the endangered species example, that if the legislation would move the yardstick forward you would support that. To make my point, you cannot suck and blow at the same time. You either use the experience of the past or you follow the same trap as anyone else and believe the promises that are made. Which is it?
Mr. Best: We would judge whatever party is in power, provincially or federally, by what was accomplished by the time an election was called. If the Liberals have legislation pending on species at risk, as is currently the case, but do not pass it, we do not give them credit for it.
Senator Di Nino: Is it a question of passing the legislation or of what results therefrom?
Ms White: I will give you a very clear and brief example. Prior to the NDP getting elected in Ontario, they put forward a private member's bill to ban the use of animals in cosmetic testing. I do not think there is a person at this table who thinks we should use animals to test cosmetics.
We believed that when the NDP government was elected they would pass that legislation since they had put forward a private member's bill. It seemed perfectly logical. In fact, the provincial minister of agriculture drafted a whole set of regulatory changes and in five years we could not get it passed. We could not get it passed because there were different interests at the table that carried more weight than we did in political terms.
At the end of the day, would I judge the government on whether or not they passed that legislation? Absolutely I would.
Senator Di Nino: I was confused about what you were saying. I am not entirely sure that I understand you yet, but at least you are saying that what matters is results, not promises.
Ms White: Absolutely, it is results.
Senator Di Nino: On the main question I wish to deal with, I agree that there should not be limits. However, how do we define "third party" without subverting democracy by creating a group of people on each side of an issue, each of which may have huge sums of money, that in effect become the election instead of having members of Parliament put forth a comprehensive plan to deal with the issues that they believe are important to the entire country rather than just to a small segment or even to a large segment?
Mr. Best: I do not think you can do that under Bill C-2 or with a constituency-based, geographic, first-past-the-post system. I will tell you right now that I think what we do is a bad thing. It is a strategic response to this system. We do it because as citizens we believe, rightly or wrongly, that the interests about which we are deeply concerned are not given adequate weight by members of Parliament, and I believe that that is because they do not have political relevance.
There will be third parties coming up and distorting this system because of that. We no longer have an agrarian country that can be neatly divided up into little packets. We are divided by interests, and those interests can overlap. In one apartment building there can be different interests on different floors. Geography no longer works, and that is the problem.
In the German system, on the other hand, interests and geography can play a role. Under that system, you can have fair hearings and you can discuss the issues and negotiate policies and not have this problem. However, under our system it can be horribly distorted, as it is in the U.S., by economic interests.
Senator Di Nino: The Green Party has done extremely well throughout the world. The Green Party took the bull by the horns and in many countries has been able to influence legislation without appearing to subvert democracy. Is that not a better way of doing this? It may take a little longer, but at least at the end of the day you will be sitting at the table and making decisions.
Mr. Best: The Green Party is a measurable political force that has measurable effect on public policy in those countries that have proportional representation. In those countries that do not have proportional representation, it does not. Although I cannot speak for the Green Party, it is one of strongest advocates for a system with some aspect of proportional representation, a more modern political system.
Senator Di Nino: You would be surprised at how much support there is in Parliament for that.
Senator Fraser: I will assume, for the purposes of discussion, that your strategy is sound, advisable, and effective. That being the case, I wonder why you oppose a ban on third-party spending limits, because it seems to me that to oppose that ban risks shooting yourself in the foot.
I understand your response to Senator Murray's question on what happens if the really big interests swing into play against you, supposing you actually start to have sustained impact. You responded that they already contribute to the parties. I invite you to envisage a future, and perhaps an imminent future if we do not get this ban into law, in which they will not just contribute to the parties but do as they did in the 1988 election; that is, take direct action on a scale that you will never be able to match. For example, the oil industry, given what we know about some of the imperatives it lives with, would have every interest in mustering many millions of dollars in your targeted ridings to counteract your message. Why would you, of all people, oppose this ban?
Mr. Best: In an election, money is not everything. There is also political strategy. There is also a certain amount of discrimination on the part of the voters. As Justice Brenner said in his reasons for judgment, during the Charlottetown Accord discussions and referendum in B.C. the "yes" side outspent the "no" tenfold, yet the "no" side won.
Money plays a role, but the key is that at the end of the day Environment Voters and other people in the environmental community need to sit with people who make policy. You must have relevance. Relevance is measured in votes and influence over elections, be it a large amount or a small amount.
Currently, when the environmental community talks to members of Parliament, the concern of the MPs is the political relevance, what the environmentalists are bringing to the table besides clean air and clean water. If an oil company has more relevance in a certain area, they get more say over what is happening. It gives us a currency. Elected members of Parliament operate in a votes economy. If they get enough, they get into power; if they do not get enough, they do not get into power. People who influence votes have the currency of negotiation. What we do today may have ramifications in the future, in which case people will have to adapt.
I hope at some point that the elected members of Parliament, the people who can actually decide what our systems are, begin to look at those distortions and say that that is untenable. We cannot have elections where parties that get fewer numbers of votes wind up being in minority positions and disenfranchising people.
We cannot sit down. We are standing here. We are talking to you as people who have been involved in dealing with environmental issues, in my case since 1972, as abject failures, who have come to this after going through everything that people have talked about around this table. Ms White has been heavily involved in party politics with the NDP. We have done anything and everything you can imagine in terms of raising public opinion. It has all failed.
I was involved in the 1970s and 1980s with the Canadian seal hunt and was instrumental, along with Brian Davies and the IFAW, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, in making the Canadian seal hunt one of the most highly publicized issues in the world. Everybody wanted this thing stopped.
Senator Moore: The fishermen did not.
Mr. Best: I stand corrected. My point remains the same: Worldwide and Canadian public opinion was to end that seal hunt. Today, despite millions of dollars spent on banning it, the seal hunt is five times bigger than it was in 1970. Whether you are for it or against it, the seal hunt has grown.
In other words, I know from experience that all the things that one might like people to do in the traditional ways of doing things do not work. For example, there is a group across the street that just had a breakfast about adopting-out endangered species. I know from experience that such things do not work.
I ran a campaign in the European community to get a ban on the importation of seal products into the European community. It was a three-year campaign involving three elections, all of which, except for the U.K., were run by proportional representation, and we moved the vote to get that ban in place with politics. We were successful in doing that. That is just the way the system works. It is not a matter of being right or wrong: that is the system.
Senator Fraser: I did not hear an answer to my question, but I will stand down.
Senator Moore: Mr. Best, what is the nature of the entity Environment Voters? Is it a charity? What is it?
Ms White: The International Wildlife Coalition and the Animal Alliance of Canada, who are the parents of Environment Voters, are both non-profit organizations. Animal Alliance is federally incorporated. Our intention is to get Environment Voters up and running on the basis of the strength of other groups. It will ultimately become federally incorporated, a not-for-profit organization and probably incorporated in all of the provinces as well.
As you know, charities cannot be involved in political action. That is why many of us have chosen organizations that have no charitable arms or any connection with charities. Our experience is that charities simply do not push the issues.
Senator Moore: You said that two groups are your parents. What was the first one?
Ms White: The International Wildlife Coalition was the first group I mentioned.
Senator Moore: Where do you get your money? How do you operate? What is the source of your funds?
Ms White: At present, the money comes through Animal Alliance. We receive all of our donations from private individuals. We raise between $650,000 and $750,000 a year.
Senator Moore: Is Animal Alliance a Canadian entity?
Ms White: Absolutely, yes.
Senator Moore: Is it a registered charity?
Ms White: It is a federally incorporated, not-for-profit organization.
Senator Moore: Is it a charity?
Ms White: No.
Senator Moore: I am talking about receipts.
Ms White: We issue no receipts, absolutely not. In fact, our experience is that individuals who really want to make a difference do not need receipts. That is our experience. I think that will be true of Environment Voters as well.
Senator Moore: I want to touch on something that Senators Murray and Pearson touched on as well; that is, your mission of targeting people. I want to use your examples of people like Charles Caccia and Karen Kraft Sloan.
Ms White: They are not in vulnerable ridings, by the way. Thus, they will not be targeted.
Senator Moore: You said you would be targeting them.
Ms White: No, I said that they have taken positions contrary to the Liberal Party policy. That is how their names came up. We have not targeted them and they are not in vulnerable ridings.
Senator Moore: I thought you said you would.
Ms White: No, we did not say that. We have tremendous admiration for Clifford Lincoln and Karen Kraft Sloan and Charles Caccia. They have been spectacularly wonderful in the environment.
Senator Moore: If you were to target them, you would be shooting yourself in the foot.
Ms White: We are not targeting them.
Senator Moore: You talk about taking political action. One of the best ways to do it, as has been mentioned on the other side, is to become involved in a political party. If you do not do that, at least support somebody who is working for change within the political party.
Ms White: At the end of the day, the Liberal Party votes as a party. They have the majority in the House and it does not matter, with all due respect, what Clifford Lincoln's position is on many of these things.
Senator Moore: You do not know how wrong you are.
Ms White: I sat on Sheila Copps's endangered species legislation. I have been through this issue since 1994; I know very well about what I am speaking.
The Chairman: I am sure you do, Ms White. Perhaps you will allow Senator Moore to finish and then you may respond.
Senator Moore: My last point is on the example that Mr. Best raised with respect to the money being spent in B.C. at the time of the referendum on the Charlottetown Accord. Mr. Best pointed out that regardless of what you may do with Environment Voters or what people might do in terms of the amount of money they might spend to support other issues, you still go back to what Senator Buchanan said: It is the people. You can never not trust the people.
Ms White: Why are you limiting the amount of money that we can use to go and speak to the people? That is my question to you. Why have you the right to tell me that I can spend only $3,000 in a riding communicating to people when you can spend much more than that? I do not understand the discrimination.
You are telling me that I cannot go and speak to those people because I can spend only $3,000. With all due respect, anybody who has run a campaign -- and many of us have run many campaigns -- knows that $3,000 will not allow a candidate to speak to anybody in a riding in any real way.
Senator Moore: I do not understand why you do not function within a political party.
Ms White: As we have already said, none of the political parties has a good environmental record.
I can tell you, I am soon to be 51 years old. I have worked in the NDP since I was 14 years old. I have worked in many elections. I have been absolutely involved at every level of that party. I can tell you that the NDP's environmental record stinks. That is not from lack of trying, but the structures or obstacles in the party are exactly the same, with all due respect, as they are in trying to get the issues forward. All of the same pressures that play out in political parties play out at the political table in politics. It is not possible to get those issues in any real way onto the agenda.
Senator Moore: I should like to think that it is, in the Liberal party. I will leave that for another day.
The Chairman: I will perhaps interject here that you have been speaking about the B.C. case striking down spending limits. What about the Libman decision in Quebec? The provisions on spending in Bill C-2 are based on that decision in Quebec. That decision indicates that there is clearly a rational connection between limits on independent spending and the legislature's objective. The court, in that case, said that limits on such spending are essential to maintain equilibrium in financial resources and to guarantee the fairness of the referendum. The court went on to say that the evidence shows that, without such control, any system for limiting the spending of the national committees would become futile and that the limit on independent spending must also be stricter than that granted to national committees, since it cannot be assumed that independent spending will be divided equally to support the various options. Perhaps you might respond to that.
Mr. Best: Justice Brenner actually approached that, discussed Libman, listened to the arguments and struck them down.
Senator Fraser: You do not strike down a Supreme Court ruling.
Mr. Best: He actually did.
Senator Fraser: He said that the case at issue was not covered by the Supreme Court decision.
Mr. Best: I am not a lawyer. I read these things as a layman so sometimes my terminology may be incorrect.
I believe the argument put forward was that in situations where the only choice is between "yes" and "no", there is some sense involved in limitations. The other argument put forward by the B.C. Supreme Court was that you cannot simply apply that argument holus-bolus to every other situation, that there are complexities in election campaigns that go far beyond "yes" and "no" situations. I think I am fairly paraphrasing his argument.
You are taking a yes-no case and applying it to a highly complex situation where there may be as many as five parties running and there may be many more issues than simply a yes-no question.
The Chairman: That decision was based on the referendum, but in it they spoke of elections. It is quite clear in this decision from the Supreme Court that the limit on independent spending must also be stricter than that granted to national committees.
Senator Joyal: I have listened carefully to your comments about the electoral system in Canada. Two things strike me. Since patriation in 1982, we have had the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Although Quebec did not sign it, that is only a political gesture. It has no practical legal effect on Quebec citizens. They enjoy the same measure of rights and freedoms as all other Canadian citizen in the country. Moreover, the first government to invoke the Charter after enactment was the Quebec government. It did so in a Montreal teachers' strike. It is to speak from both sides of your mouth to say that politically it is unacceptable but to profit from it legally.
That being said, we must always distinguish between the law of the land and what is politically the best situation, depending upon how you define "best". That is part of the Canadian democracy.
You have very strong views on environmental issues, and you should be commended for that. I have no problem as a legislator ensuring that all views in an election campaign are put forward. Otherwise, there will be chaos. As Judge Estey said, the Constitution is the wall between chaos and civilized progress. I believe that you are looking after civilized progress. On the other hand, we do not want to fall into chaos.
You made an assertion that I believe is fundamental, which is that as a citizen you feel underprivileged because the system is conceived to serve and protect the big political parties. If you believe that strongly that your rights are not respected, why do you not challenge the very essence of the bill?
I remind you that on August 20, 1998, the Supreme Court of Canada said very clearly that among the four principles at the basis of Canadian constitutional order is democracy, and democracy is the will and the capacity of the people to express their will. There are many consequences of that.
If you believe that you are fundamentally aggrieved in your democratic rights, why do you not challenge the very essence of the electoral system of Canada through the courts?
Mr. Best: I have done that. My name is included as a plaintiff in a court case. We challenged provisions under the seal protection regulations that prevented access to the Canadian seal hunt, because we felt that denying people the right to film and photograph the hunt was an infringement on freedom of expression. In other words, if you censor something, you cannot make any expression on it.
At the Federal Court level, the judge held that our Charter rights had indeed been infringed upon, that denying access to people who wanted to film the hunt was an arbitrary decision. The judge also found that to be a perfectly reasonable infringement on a Charter right because it was more important for the government to maintain the seal hunt than to uphold the Charter right.
The appeal court struck that down. That court challenge cost $276,000. The government ran a scorched earth legal policy. The Justice Department did everything possible to make it expensive.
The next year, the government rewrote the law slightly. They changed the regulation ever so slightly and, although essentially it did the same thing, they said it would correct the problem. We had to decide whether to continue spending that kind of money fighting on that issue.
My experience is that access to the courts in this way is futile because at the end of the day the authority is with the elected representatives, and you talk to them through other means.
I accept what you are saying, but the required expenditure of money and time will not, from my experience, produce the effect that you are looking for if the political will is not there to support you.
Senator Joyal: If you believe that our single-post electoral system is fundamentally undemocratic because it puts into power governments that have not earned the majority of votes, as you have described, why do you not test that before the Supreme Court?
Mr. Best: I will go back to some fundamentals. We are not appearing here as advocates for a different political system. There are other people who have been doing that. In fact, there is group from the University of Toronto that is going to challenge the entire Canada Elections Act before the Supreme Court because of some of the discrepancies I spoke about.
We are here as a third party that has looked at the political system. We can disagree on whether the tactics work, but we have, in good conscience, studied our political system and decided that this is the strategy that will work. You are now considering legislation that would take that strategy away from us. We are not here because of some perverseness, but rather as a rational response to the political system we live under.
Environment Voters is Environment Voters, not electoral reform. There are other groups doing that. It is simply not our truck.
We will go to people and say, "We will use the political system as best we can to get strong environmental policy, so please give us your money." That is how we will do it. That is how we will participate in elections and those are the techniques we will use. We believe that if, after 30 years, we can sit around the table and say to the Minister of the Environment that we happen to control 21 seats in Canada, we will have a more interesting discussion about what environmental policy will be.
I do not think that it is a good system, but it is not our mandate to do electoral reform. Our mandate is to look at the rule book and ask how we might best deal with it. I think you should just change the rule book.
The Chairman: Thank you very much for appearing before us this morning.
The committee adjourned.