Our electoral systems in Canada at both the Federal and provincial level are Single Member Plurality (SMP), where the electorate is divided by geographical locations and whoever gets the most votes in each location is deemed the winner. The SMP system means that all the votes that don’t go to the winner in a riding have little value. If you’re a liberal in a strongly conservative riding, or a conservative in a very liberal riding, your vote ends up being essentially meaningless.
An alternative to SMP is Proportional Representation (PR), where all the votes in the country or province are counted and then seats are prorated according to a formula. A couple of examples will illustrate how these two systems differ. On a straight PR formula (There are many variations of PR and some are quite complicated. I’m using a simplified method for illustration.) using the total popular vote with a minimum 2 percent threshold (must get at least 2 percent of the total popular vote to get any seats), these are the results from the 2021 federal election and the results from the last Alberta provincial election, respectively.
Federal election in 2021:
SMP results: Liberals 158, Conservatives 121, Bloc Quebecois 32, NDP 24, Green 3, People’s Party 0
Projected PR: Liberals 111, Conservatives 115, Bloc Quebecois 26, NDP 61, Green 8, People’s Party 17
Alberta election in 2019:
SMP results: United Conservatives 63, NDP 24, Alberta Party 0
Projected PR: United Conservatives 50, NDP 29, Alberta Party 8
You can see that the results are much different. Federally, the Liberals lose a lot of seats, enough so that we would have a Conservative government. The NDP, Greens and People’s Party all gain a significant number of seats. In Alberta, the Conservatives lose seats while a second opposition party, the Alberta Party, enters the Legislature.
These exact results wouldn’t necessarily have happened this way because simply having a PR system changes things in very material ways. Firstly, having PR mostly eliminates strategic voting, where voters vote for their lesser preference because they believe that preference has a better chance of winning. It’s also well documented that having PR significantly increases turnout (various studies find increases in the range of 6-10 percent), because more people feel like their vote makes a difference. Who knows what that would do in Alberta, where conservative victories are usually a foregone conclusion, especially in ridings outside of Calgary and Edmonton? Lastly, implementing PR always creates more political parties, because it makes smaller parties more viable since they can have a presence in the legislature, and this helps attract supporters and funds for campaigns.
Elections are supposed to represent “the will of the people.” While this is a somewhat amorphous concept, I think it means that a proper electoral system is one that creates results that best reflect the views of the entire electorate. Right now, Canada has a government that only one-third of voters supported. By the time of the next election, a scenario in which the Conservatives form a majority government while getting less than 40 percent of the vote, while left of center parties comprise almost the entire other 60 percent, is a distinct possibility. These kinds of results, I would argue, do not represent the will of the people.
The SMP system is a winner-take-all setup, which then ends up creating a small number – usually two - of 'big tent' parties. In a nutshell, big tent parties try to be flexible enough in their views and polices that they can attract a large number of supporters. The main selling point of big tent parties is that they have access to power. The federal Liberals, Canada’s “natural governing party”, are a perfect example. The Liberals are a moderate left party which moves further left when they are in opposition but then usually governs closer to the center. This flexibility means that positions on issues are often adjusted and that promises are frequently broken. For people with strong ideological beliefs, this creates anger and frustration.
In general, the SMP system works best when a society is relatively homogeneous, less polarized and lacking in contentious issues. Once the electorate fractures into more extreme sub-groups, once ideological and regional divisions become more pronounced, the SMP system leaves many people unrepresented. You can see this in the results above. I despise the People’s Party and its smarmy opportunist of a leader, Maxime Bernier. But they got almost 5 percent of the popular vote in the last election, more than twice what the Greens got, and yet didn’t get a single seat in the House. In Alberta, only 2 parties have seats in the Legislature, and I would bet a lot of people don’t feel that either – a hard right party and a hard left party - represent them. The centrist Alberta Party got almost ten percent of the vote in 2019 despite every one of those voters knowing full well it had no chance of even winning a seat, much less forming a government. How many votes would they have gained under PR? It’s impossible to say for certain but it’s likely it would have been significant.
Of course, there are downsides to PR. It creates near-constant coalition governments, and this can lead to instability. SMP elections are more decisive, with frequent majority governments who last until the end of their term. Coalitions can collapse, causing more frequent elections, which no one really wants. Coalitions are sometimes frozen into inaction if the parties can’t agree on a course of action; a majority government under SMP has fewer impediments to implementing its agenda. Whereas SMP systems veer towards tyranny of the majority, PR can do the opposite, allowing stubborn minorities to block policies.
While surveys show that Canadians hold our democracy in comparatively high regard, there are worrisome signs. Discontent is rising significantly in Alberta and amongst working class voters. Trust in politicians is extremely low. The average rate of turnout for the last five federal elections is an abysmal 63.5 percent. Only one in ten Canadians was happy with the outcome of the 2021 election. But perhaps the best evidence that elections aren’t working properly in both the US and Canada is the fact that the courts now play far too large a role in our politics. People don’t view legislative outcomes as legitimate, so they take their arguments to the courts on flimsy constitutional grounds (the best example is what happened with the Transmountain Pipeline). This reliance on unelected judges as the final arbiter of what should be a democratic process is dysfunctional and dangerous. When the high courts inevitably become completely politicized, they lose their independence and their credibility. Once that happens, what’s left?
Democracy is faltering all over the world. Events in the US – the gong show Trump presidency, the bitter fights over Supreme Court appointments, and most alarmingly, the refusal to accept election results and the subsequent storming of the Capitol – are ominous signs. While the US situation hasn’t manifested itself in Canada yet, I fear it might be only a matter of time. While Proportional Representation is not a cure all, it can provide a way to keep more extreme views and polarization in check by funnelling them through an electoral system that does a better job of representing all viewpoints and concerns. It's easy for extremists to pander to their base and criticize the status quo but they inevitably learn that it's much harder to govern. A PR system forces politicians of various stripes to compromise to find workable solutions to problems. And it is compromise, above all else, that makes democracy work.
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