Canadian Democracy Needs Electoral Reform
Reformers Must Redouble Their Efforts After B.C. Referendum Defeat
However, Canada's democracy needs their efforts now more than ever, at a time when a poor economy and a precarious minority parliament breeds poison and division into our politics.
For many, the story is familiar: we had chosen for us an electoral system called First Past the Post (FPTP). FPTP aggravates regional divisions, propagates false consensus within the country, wastes many thousands of votes each year and forms governments which frequently bear poor resemblance to the political will of the Canadian electorate. It confounds the very representative democracy it was supposed to serve. But we put up with it because, hey, it's simple and a clear winner emerges from the election.
Canadians are given this rationale time and time again. It's shocking how few of us really understand the price our politics pays for a failed voting system.
Only FPTP can perpetually exaggerate the support and influence of the separatist Bloc Quebecois while simultaneously neutering the NDP and the Green Party, two parties which have consistently achieved moderate levels of support equal to or higher than that of the Bloc, but whose votes are spread out over a geographically massive country. FPTP cannot reflect this (essentially Canadian) reality.
Take the case of the 1993 federal election. The now defunct Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, a party which formerly enjoyed the largest majority government in Canadian history, was reduced to a meager two seats from 169, a 98.8 per cent plummet. By contrast, the party’s popular support in that election only dropped from 44.1 per cent to 16.04; hardly a proportional, parallel relationship. Preston Manning’s Reform Party fared much better with only a handful more votes (18.69 of the vote) because the bulk of its support was conveniently situated in the Western provinces, not scattered over the whole country.
Meanwhile, a separatist party formed the official opposition with fewer votes than either Reform or the Progressive Conservatives. It doesn’t make sense, but this is how the system works.
The politicians in this country may feel the system suits their needs quite well, but the public should be outraged. The scholar Simon Sterne put it well: "The machinery of representation, of voting, and of election is designed to accomplish this end [accurate representation]. If it does not accomplish it, it wastes up to one-fourth to one-half the votes of a community: to the extent that it does so, it as effectually disfranchises the citizen as though a positive law disqualified him from going to the polls; it gives him the semblance, but deprives him of the substance, of his right."
The vast majority of Canadians suffer this fate at the polls, and worse still, have come to accept it as normal.
The STV defeat in B.C. was a setback. But those of us committed to democratic reform in this Country cannot let this stand. On, bravely, into the night...
What do you think about this article?
More in Politics & Society
Latest Articles