Here’s a New Year’s resolution for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his governing partner, New Democratic Leader Jagmeet Singh: Revive the idea of electoral reform for Canada.
Replacing Canada’s first-past-the-post voting system was a signature promise for Trudeau when he first got elected, with a majority, in 2015.
For a while during his first term Trudeau acted as though he meant to fulfill the promise. Then, after a fairly protracted preparatory process, he pulled the plug.
Trudeau’s explanation, at the time, was that there was no consensus as to what kind of reform Canadians wanted.
Liberals favoured a ranked ballot; New Democrats, a system with a good measure of proportionality; and Conservatives wanted a country-wide referendum on any change.
The only realistic option, Trudeau argued, was to put the whole matter to rest and focus on other priorities. Among those were legalization of cannabis.
READ MORE: Liberals’ online survey is a tactic to derail electoral reform
Now would be a good time to bring the ghost of electoral reform down from the attic and breathe some life into it.
Current electoral system is unsuited to Canada
The drawbacks of Canada’s current first-past-the-post system, which Trudeau quite accurately perceived in 2015, still persist.
The two principal flaws of our winner-takes-all voting system are: it exaggerates regional political differences, and makes it possible for political parties to narrowcast to a minority of the population yet still win a majority of seats.
To get an understanding of how first-past-the-post unfairly creates the sense that regions of the country are more uniform in their political preferences than they really are look at federal elections over the past six decades.
During that period, we frequently had results where the Conservatives and New Democrats were almost or completely shut out in Quebec, despite each winning well over 10 per cent of the votes. That meant a quarter or more of Quebec’s voters had minimal or no representation.
Similarly, in some western provinces, Conservatives have routinely won all or almost all the seats with not much more than half the votes, sometimes less than half. That meant fully half of the electorate in those provinces had virtually no voice in Parliament.
Arguably, first-past-the-post contributes to national disunity.
It makes us seem as though we are more different from each other, province to province, region to region, than we are.
Our electoral system rewards parties that focus narrowly on one or more region, not the whole country.
The most extreme case is the Bloc Québécois.
In the last election, the Bloc ran candidates only in the 78 Quebec ridings. It won less than eight per cent of the national popular vote, far less than half the New Democrats’ 17.8 per cent. But the Bloc’s geographically concentrated vote gave it 32 seats as opposed to the NDP’s 25.
On the whole, first-past-the-post too often motivates federal politicians to focus excessively on their own regions, especially the grievances of their own regions, to the detriment of the national interest.
That flaw should be sufficient condemnation of our current system, but the other flaw of first-past-the-post is even more dangerous.
Unlike the United States, Canada is a not a two-party country.
We are a multi-party democracy, and have been so for more than a century, since the rise of the now-defunct Progressive party following World War I.
The first-past-the-post system, in a multi-party context, can quite easily deliver a majority of seats to a party that wins fewer than four votes out of ten. That has happened quite often in Canada, especially in recent elections. (See under: Harper and Chrétien majorities.)
Such results might not seem too awful when they benefit a centrist party which seeks to govern in a consensual manner. But they can be scary when they disproportionately reward a party which has more than a passing familiarity with extremism.
That latter outcome is a real possibility the country faces in the next election.
But it is not too late to make it much harder for a narrow-casting, divisive, extremist group to ever win a majority of seats with only a bare plurality of votes.
It is not too late to fire up the electoral reform process once again and come up with a better voting system – a new system most of us could live with, even if it were not our favoured option.
The NDP could accept Trudeau’s favoured option
The New Democrats could make electoral reform finally happen if they decided to put water in their wine and opt for the system Trudeau has long favoured, the ranked ballot, or instant run-off.
Currently, we vote for one candidate and the one with the greatest number of votes wins, even if that number is way below 50 per cent.
In a ranked system, we would indicate our first choice, but also our second, third, fourth, etc., choices as well. When a candidate fails to win 50 per cent plus one of the first choices, the electoral officials count second choices, and, if necessary, even third or fourth choices.
In this system, a candidate cannot win without gaining more than half the total votes.
Such a system would force parties to play nice with each other, to some extent at any rate, because they want the second choices of other parties’ supporters.
It would also make it difficult for candidates whose extreme positions attract an enthusiastic hardcore but repel the majority to win.
New Democrats and many electoral reform advocates oppose the ranked ballot option because they say it would excessively favour a centrist all-things-to-all-people party, like the Liberals.
In some elections that might be the case, but not in all, and likely not in the one that’s coming in 2025.
In a situation where the party of the centre has been in power for a while and has earned more than its share of battle scars, the ranked ballot system might, in fact, work to the advantage of another party which is ideologically close to the centre, but unscathed by the scandals and missteps of the governing party.
And then there’s this fact, which New Democrats should consider.
Aside from its two principal flaws, first-past-the-post also encourages the unfortunate practice known as tactical or strategic voting.
Many Canadians have in recent times held their noses and voted for the less-than-perfect Liberals rather than their first choices, to prevent the party they truly feared from winning.
The ranked ballot would take away the need for such aberrant voting behaviour.
It would allow, say, Green and New Democratic supporters to select their favoured option, then guard against the party they truly loath and fear by selecting the big-tent-party-of-the-middle as their second choice.
If Jagmeet Singh were to champion a switch from our current system to the ranked ballot now it would be a visionary act of true leadership.
Adopting the governing party’s favoured option would break the logjam on electoral reform. It would result in change to the way we vote for the first time in our history, but not radical change.
We would still have the same number of MPs, and we would still have one MP per riding. So, a ranked ballot wouldn’t be something difficult for Canadians to adjust to.
As an administrative matter it would take some time to fully implement any change to our electoral system.
But the 2025 election is more than two and a half years away.
There is still time to make this reform happen, if the two government partners put their heads together and get started on reform as soon as parliament resumes at the end of January.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
