Instead
of voting for a candidate, voters would elect parties, each of
which would have a list of members, the leader being No. 1. If
Parliament had 100 seats for proportional representation, and,
say, the Green Party won 5 percent of the vote, it would get five
seats awarded to the first five names on its party list.
“We might also wind up designing something uniquely Canadian,”
said Ron Gray, leader of the Christian Heritage Party. “Something
that took into account linguistic and ethnic and geographic diversity.”
Critics of proportional representation cringe at this scenario.
They envision a Commons immobilized by its own diversity. Many
point to Italy or Israel as proof; the governments of both of
these nations chronically are unstable and their legislatures
are teeming with parties, each vehemently pursuing its own agenda.
Laws seldom are passed, because of infighting among coalition
governments, and elections, especially in Italy, occur with debilitating
frequency.
Kevin Peck of the Canadian Action Party disagrees: “It wouldn’t
look anything like Israel or Italy. These countries have social
histories that are entirely unique to their geographies and time
that’s different than Canada’s.”
“The trick there is how you do the proportional representation
and where the threshold is,” said Renan Levine, a University
of Toronto political analyst. A threshold is the minimum percentage
of the vote a party has to get before it can seat members in the
legislature. “If you set the threshold relatively low, some
of the fringe parties will cross it. Holland and Israel have very
low thresholds, but in Germany you have to have five percent of
the vote. I would expect that if Canada ever goes to proportional
representation, they would go fairly hard in the threshold, something
that the Greens would be lucky to cross.”
Peck figures Canada likely would adopt a threshold of between
2 percent and 5 percent. While he’s not sure if his party
would cross it, he still supports the idea, calling it “reasonable.”
Not so for the Communist Party of Canada. Figueroa said his party
is opposed to the idea of a threshold.
“We don’t think there’s any legitimate rationale
if a party represents 2 percent of the public’s opinion
they shouldn’t be represented.”
Not surprising. The Communist Party of Canada averaged between
1.5 percent and 2 percent of the vote in the dozen ridings they
contested in the 2003 Ontario provincial election. As coincidences
go, this one is pretty telling. On the reactionary side, self-interested
politics play a huge role in keeping first past the post alive.
“There are some people that are firmly against the proportional
system,” Peck said. “And despite Paul Martin’s
clever language, this includes the liberals, and purely for strategic
reasons. We have a government that certainly enjoys a privilege.”
While Paul Martin has spoken at length about Canada’s democratic
deficit, his party’s true feelings rang out when Nystrom
called for a referendum on the issue last year. Only two liberals
voted in favor of the motion.
Democracy Watch, a homegrown organization in favor of electoral
reform, rightly notes that change likely will spring first from
the provinces. Such is the case “with many other policy
innovations in the history of Canada.”
In Prince Edward Island, Pat Binns’ conservatives are studying
a report recommending the province switch to a “top-up”
system, something akin to what New Zealanders and Germans use.
But, in 2000, he told Globe and Mail columnist John Ibbitson that
“we don’t have any particular timeframe” in
mind.
On to Quebec, where change is more imminent. After Jean Charest’s
liberals took over the legislature in April 2003, Government House
leader Jacques P. Dupuis was given the responsibility for the
portfolio of Reform of Democratic Institutions. Since then, Dupuis
has recommended Quebec switch to the same type of system Prince
Edward Island is considering. His report will be made public in
the spring, after which public consultations will commence.
The best place to watch for change is in British Columbia. At
the behest of premier Gordon Campbell, former British Columbia
liberal leader Gordon Gibson designed the Citizens Assembly on
Electoral Reform, a body with 160 members, one man and one woman
from each of the province’s constituencies. From January
to the end of March, the assembly learned about electoral systems
through pro-and-con assessment and debate about minority and coalition
governments. At the beginning of May, the assembly plans to launch
a three-month campaign of provincewide public hearings. Its final
report is due Dec. 15, after three more months of deliberation.
If it recommends change, a referendum will be put to British Columbians
during the next provincial election, which is scheduled for May
2005. Should they vote to change the system, a new one will be
used for the 2009 elections.
Until then, it seems, we’re stuck with what we have: an
opulent room full of funhouse distortions populated largely by
straight, white men in nice suits. And many are quick to warn
that no perfect replacement exists. Levine points to the arrow
theorem, which states that voters are influenced by the way options
are grouped and the order in which they’re presented. Figueroa,
for his part, has no faith in capitalist democracies because of
the special-interest scenarios they create.
However, it was Andrew Coyne who wrote three years ago that the
system has a way of creating “a wholly false image of the
country” and that “just about any system would be
better than the one we have now.”
Coyne supporting the British Columbia liberals?
A
true Canadian phenomenon, indeed.
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