Despite not winning a majority of votes, the CAQ once again has formed a majority government, this time larger than the last.
This means a party that represents 41 per cent of Quebcers who voted will have 100 per cent control of the government. This is unacceptable for a society that calls itself democratic.
The Quebec Liberal Party (QLP), which came in fourth place in the vote count behind both Parti Québécois(PQ)and Québec solidaire (QS), is now the second largest party in the Assembly, again a result divorced from the reality of how Quebecers actually voted. QS, which received more support than the QLP, got half the seats.
The Conservative Party of Quebec (CPQ) got one percent less support than QLP, yet received no seats. That means a significantly large voting block in the province will be totally unrepresented.
The PQ came in third place and almost poetically received three seats.
But despite the nitpicking, all four opposition parties roughly received the same level of support, yet ended up with dramatically different seat counts.
The results of the 2022 Quebec election show just how broken the First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) electoral system is. It was a system designed for two parties, not for the ten that ultimately contested ridings across Quebec in 2022.
As usual with these results, some commentators, especially those who support parties that have no desire to change the system, would blame the electorate for not voting strategically. The argument goes that if you opposed the CAQ, you should have voted for the party that had the best chance to beat them, even if it isn’t your favourite party.
But when applied to this week’s election, it’s absurd. All four parties that had a chance to win seats this election- the QLP, QS, the CPQ and the PQ – didn’t even come within 20 points of the CAQ. And all four parties are far too ideologically diverse to expect any serious crossover from their supporters, unless they completely abandoned their core principles, something that should not be promoted in a supposedly free society.
No, the problem is that our system is not designed to represent the views of the voters fairly. Legault promised to implement a proportional system in 2018, but reneged on doing it, ostensibly due to COVID-19, but in reality because of the simple logic that FPTP allows political parties to win majority governments with minority support. This happened federally in 2015 after Justin Trudeau’s Liberals won a majority government on the promise of reforming the system, and it is what has happened in every province across Canada where efforts to reform the system have been promised.
A party like the CAQ winning a false majority and acting unilaterally is how you get legislation like Bill 96 and Bill 21. With the CAQ alluding to further action to ensure French is spoken in the home and with their hostile rhetoric against immigrants, the consequences of this false majority could have dire consequences in the coming years.
This must be a unifying factor for Quebec’s opposition parties going forward, regardless of their ideological stripe, both out of principle and a recognition of practical reality.
While it’s possible one party might rise to have enough support to challenge the CAQ in the next four years, it is unclear which party that will be. As these election results show, Quebec voters seem to be polarized between irreconcilable positions, from left to right and from sovereigntist to federalist.
The one thing that unites the four opposition parties is that they have been shut out of power completely and have slim prospects of reversing that trend. That is, unless they advocate for adopting a system that gives parties the support they deserve, along the lines of Mixed-Member-Proportional or Single-Transferable-Vote system, and then actually seriously work towards implementing it.
Then, not only can politicians pride themselves for actually making democracy better, but also ensure that they might reliably have a say in how the province is run, that is as long as they have enough support and other parties are willing to work with them.
In a democracy, people have diverse values and principles and that should be reflected in our government. It will be messy and require people to be cooperative and pragmatic to work at its best, but the alternative is far worse.
Changing the electoral system to a proportional system wouldn’t be the silver bullet that solves all of Quebec’s problems as, among other things, the hard edges of Quebec nationalism would still have a lot of support. But at least a proportional system would allow those who have a more inclusive vision a fair shot.
A more democratic future is possible. All it will take is for us to force the change.
Brett Thoms
