Jennifer Smith, March 22 2022
As evidenced by the recent Freedom Trucker Convoy protests, Canada is in a democratic malaise. Citizens can keep knocking or honking at the political door, but are their voices ever heard? Whether the topic of concern centers on foreign policy, climate change, social issues, or pandemic restrictions, Canadian citizens have become outsiders in their own political house where power appears to increasingly rest with the prime minister and the executive branch of government. This isn’t democratic governance, and the nation knows it. In the recent 2021 federal election, a disengaged and disenchanted citizenry showed itself through lower voter turnout (including a decline in youth participation), displays of civil unrest on the Liberal campaign trail (including gravel throwing at the Prime Minister), and the rise of populism (with a marked rise in support for the People’s Party of Canada).
While many solutions have been proposed to address citizen disengagement, one solution has stood out for at least one hundred years –adding proportional representation (PR) to our voting system. It is past time for an upgrade to Canada’s electoral system to reflect the diversity and values of a twenty-first-century Canadian society more accurately. Canadians need to courageously join with other developed nations that have already added a degree of proportionality to their electoral systems. An evidence-based approach, including consensus building through the appointment of a National Citizen’s Assembly, can help Canada to design the PR system uniquely suited to its needs, and build the more accountable, inclusive, and effective Canadian government and legislature that all Canadians deserve.
Politicians have been promising Canadians proportional representation since 1921 when Canada ceased to be a two-party system. In two-party systems, the current first-past-the-post (FPTP) or winner-takes-all system works well, as parties need over 50 percent of the vote to win. In systems with more than two parties, voters often split their vote between the candidates on the ballot and a candidate can win with well under 50 percent of the popular vote. This distorts results and leads to false majorities. For example, Trudeau’s Liberals earned 32.6 percent of the national vote in Canada’s 44th federal election but gained 159 seats or 44.9 percent of parliament. The Liberals have the highest vote efficiency among all political parties because they excel at turning fewer overall votes into a higher seat count.
First-past-the-post also has other negative effects. It creates a zero-sum contest that fosters nasty adversarial politics that turns many voters off. It also promotes parties formed along regional lines, exacerbating regional division and tensions. For example, in 2019, distorted results meant no MPs of the governing Liberals were elected from Alberta or Saskatchewan. This meant no voters from these provinces had representatives at the Cabinet table, leading to what is known as “western alienation”. In 2021, there were two Liberal seats won in Alberta and none won in Saskatchewan.
But the pattern is always the same, the promise of electoral reform works like magic to garner voter interest in election campaigns, but once the campaigning party gains power electoral reform no longer holds its sparkle. In 2015, Justin Trudeau’s campaign platform included a commitment to select a preferred electoral system (“not based on preconceived notions”) to replace the first-past-the-post system. The year 2015 was to be the last first-past-the-post federal election. This promise was repeated 1813 times! But once in power, Trudeau revealed that his position all along was a winner-take-all ranked ballot or nothing. Perhaps Trudeau could have been upfront about this before his government commissioned the Special Committee on Electoral Reform (ERRE) to investigate alternate electoral systems to first-past-the-post.
In the end, after five months of cross-country consultations that resulted in a resounding “Yes” to proportional representation, the ERRE met a flat-out “NO” from the Liberals who argued that first-past-the-post is simple and effective and proportional representation would be bad for the country. The reality is that FPTP is more comfortable for the majority party and the ranked ballot or preferential voting that Trudeau prefers would only work more to his advantage. This self-serving narrative sowed seeds of confusion on electoral reform and prioritized partisan interests over Canadian interests. This is exactly the lack of accountability that Canadians can address by adopting a new electoral system.
One concrete alternative to the first-past-the-post system advocated by many experts and grassroots organizations like Fair Votes Canada, is the mixed-member proportional voting system, known as MMP. This is commonly used in some highly regarded democracies such as Germany, New Zealand, and Scotland. MMP combines the best of our existing winner-take-all voting system with an element of proportional representation. A split ballot allows a vote to be cast both for a candidate for the riding, and a party-list candidate for the region. The result of using MMP is that the number of MPs elected to parliament matches the share of votes cast by the electorate and limits the number of discarded votes. This would help eliminate strategic voting, which distorts the true diversity of votes. It would also hold politicians to account, as voters would be empowered to cost them seats in the next election. For these reasons, countries with proportional representation typically see a 7 percent higher average voter turnout.
Countries with PR are also more satisfied with their democratic institutions because they lead to more inclusion of under-represented voices such as smaller political parties, women, and minority candidates. In New Zealand, they have seen a substantial increase in the election of women and the Maori and ethnic minorities traditionally underrepresented in parliament. PR also encourages inter-party cooperation and sharing of diverse ideas through coalition governments, reducing the nasty climate of adversarial politics. They also produce more regionally balanced caucuses. PR would likely make governments more fragile, but this may be what Canadians want, especially if it means governments are more willing to listen and compromise.
There are many details to be worked out in setting up an MMP system, but a representative National Citizens’ Assembly can help design the right system and build a national consensus on electoral reform. Extensive education and consultative sessions with the public would help citizens to trust the process and believe in the power of electoral reform to reignite their political engagement and Canadian democracy. Now that would be something all Canadians could honk about.
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