This
truly Canadian phenomenon struck the New Brunswick liberals, then
led by Frank McKenna. It was a magnificent mixture of bunk math
and sweet luck for the Grits, but an unintentional threat –
calm and smug – to the rest of us. With 60 percent of the
popular vote from that year’s provincial election, the McKenna
liberals stormed the legislature like a flash flood, taking all
55 available seats and unwittingly making a pathological travesty
of parliamentary debate in general, to say nothing of Question
Period in particular.
With the memory of such spectacles comes a very rare creature
– consensus, the kind that captivates the whole spectrum.
Suddenly, ultraconservative National Post columnist Andrew Coyne
is reading from the same scripture as the Communist Party of Canada.
It’s the voting system they don’t like. It tends to
create an impenetrable bottleneck of values somewhere on the road
from grassroots to Parliament. Coyne, the Communist Party of Canada,
and a host of others represent a lush crop of diverse ideas, all
mashed in that bottleneck. The procedural intrigue behind this
jam is called the first past the post system, and Canada is one
of the few countries still using it.
As might be expected, Canada’s voting system comes from
Britain. It’s a single-winner system that elects only one
representative from each riding. The problem here is that said
winner is not necessarily the popular victor, but the one who
records a higher tally than the other individuals in the race.
The popular vote is splintered between the opposition candidates,
and someone strolls off to Parliament representing a minority.
Alternative viewpoints are left in the dust, the votes they garnered
wasted.
“Obviously the first past the post system introduces the
most distortion in terms of what the electorate desires,”
said Migual Figueroa, the Communist Party of Canada’s front
man.
Distortions are frequent in Canadian politics. Still, the connection
between the voting system and its manifestations seldom is drawn
by the public at large. After all, taking a gander at electoral
history is much like reading an encyclopedia of baseball stats.
The 1998 federal election is one of the most far-reaching democratic
missteps in national history. Brian Mulroney’s conservatives
campaigned almost solely on the issue of economic integration
with the United States, an effort that earned them 42.9 percent
of the popular vote. With the rest of the vote split between the
John Turner liberals and Ed Broadbent’s New Democratic Party,
the Mulroney gang secured a cushy 169 of 295 seats, quite the
majority for an evident minority. A few years later, Canadians
woke up in bed with NAFTA snoring like a pig and hogging all the
covers.
Fate came up behind the conservatives in the next election, and
they ended up swallowing the post they so recently had dashed
past. Canadians, reeling from a litany of Mulroney imbroglios,
punished the conservatives with 16 percent of the popular vote.
Sadly, this only translated into two seats, a distorted slap that
helped set the party spiraling to its recent demise. While the
conservatives were relegated to the parliamentary hinterlands,
the Bloc Quebecois, who only got 13 percent of the popular vote,
scored 54 seats. The Reform Party, with 19 percent, got 52 seats.
And then there are the liberals, who garnered 41 percent of the
popular vote and wound up sitting tight with 177 seats. The story
breaks down region by region with the Canadian Alliance generally
over-representing the West and the liberals doing the same in
Central Canada.
“It would be an advancement for the Canadian people to have
some sort of proportional representation system,” said the
Figueroa of the Communist Party of Canada. “For a certain
segment of the population that’s much more disposed to supporting
left policies.”
Proportional representation is a voting model used with variations
by around 75 of the world’s democracies, including other
former British colonies. Behind it is the not-so-radical theory
that a percentage of the popular vote should translate into the
same percentage of seats in the legislature. Federally, the thrust
for electoral reform is coming from the New Democratic Party,
and it’s a proportional representation system they’re
pushing for. In 2003, New Democrat Lorne Nystrom called on the
government to hold a referendum within a year asking Canadians
if they wish to replace the current voting system with proportional
representation by 2006. It was the first vote on the issue in
80 years. The motion was defeated 145 to 76, but it attracted
strong support from the Canadian Alliance and the Bloc Quebecois.
While the alliance has adopted policy that aims to improve the
voting system, the New Democratic Party is the only party to slot
the issue into their election platform. Under a New Democratic
government, Canadians would be faced first with a referendum asking
if the system should be overhauled, then another seeking the favored
replacement model.
“We think that our democratic system is in serious decline
and one of the reasons why is that people's votes don't end up
being represented by people in Parliament,” said New Democratic
Party leader Jack Layton. “So they've moved away from the
political system. That's something that we believe needs to change.
“[Electoral reform] may not be the issue most important
to Canadians, but it's the condition that'll allow the issues
that are most important to Canadians to be addressed.”
Were it to be addressed according to the design of the New Democratic
Party, political logistics would undergo a slight makeover. Depending
on what proportional representation system Canadians vote for,
the country’s 301 ridings could be amassed into one, provinces
could become ridings, or the whole system otherwise could be divided
into larger constituencies, each with several representatives.
Or, as in Germany, the original riding map could be left in place
with seats added to the House for proportional representation
electives; this is the system favored by the New Democratic Party.
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