Canadian democracy is a quirky thing.
Under our first-past-the-post rules, it can seem to make sense to vote for a candidate you don’t really like in the hopes of. . .
preventing a candidate you like even less from getting elected. What we call strategic voting means many of us never vote for the candidates we actually want to win.
Welcome to the strange alchemy of Canadian elections where the winner-takes-all system can turn a minority of the votes into a majority of the seats in the House of Commons.
Take the last federal election. The 33 per cent of the votes cast for the Liberals translated into 157 seats, while the 34 per cent of the votes for the Conservatives gave them only 121 seats. By the same magic, with just 7.6 per cent of the vote, the BQ took 32 seats, while the NDP, with 16 per cent of the vote (more than double that of the BQ) got only 24 seats. As for the Greens, with 6.5 per cent of the vote, almost as much as the BQ, they got only three seats.
On election night coverage, political commentators are often heard to say that the people have spoken and gotten the government they wanted, as if we are all strategizing telepathically. More likely, the impulse to vote strategically in our first-past-the-post system produces results that do not reflect the will of the people. Not only can this be deeply unsatisfying for voters of all political stripes, it raises questions about how representative and how democratic our representative democracy actually is.
So, it seemed that Justin Trudeau might have been onto a good idea when he vowed in the 2015 campaign to reform our electoral rules once and for all, promising that it would be the last election under the old system.
Then, barely into the second year of his mandate, the prime minister stunned the country by turning his back on this key election promise, giving rise to much speculation as to why he had done so.
It was an unfortunate turn of events, to say the least.
It seems obvious that retaining an electoral system that enables substandard governments to get re-elected with only a minority of the votes cannot be good for the country. It functions like a subsidy for poor performance in a political marketplace that needs to be opened up to more competition.
It is conceivable that under a system of proportional representation, Canada’s diverse voices would no longer be subsumed under so-called ‘big tent’ parties, never to be heard from again, but would instead make it to the floor of the House of Commons where they could negotiate in broad daylight for meaningful progress on issues that have been too long neglected.
Under such a system, it would be easy to imagine that more Canadians would turn out for elections if they were able to vote their conscience and know it would still count.
Still, in the run-up to the much-rumoured fall election, we probably shouldn’t expect any of the big parties to speak up for electoral reform, given their apparent fear it might undermine their ability to remain big.
The experience of Jacinda Ardern sheds some helpful light on the matter. Her Labour Party recently won a landslide majority under New Zealand’s system of mixed member proportional representation, introduced a quarter-century ago, proving that all you need to do is provide good government to win.
Charles Dickson
