Karl Nerenberg’s Hail Mary urging the NDP to pressure the Liberal Party to force through a ranked ballot, is misguided, short-sighted, and could produce outcomes that hurt all Canadians.
His “realpolitik” proposal boils down to a well-intentioned (for progressives) attempt to keep the Liberals in power by whatever means possible―long term consequences be damned.
To be clear, ranked ballots can be used in both proportional and winner-take-all systems, but what Nerenberg is proposing here is Prime Minister Trudeau’s favourite gambit: simply pasting a ranked ballot onto our winner-take-all system.
Unfortunately for those desperate for quick fixes, replacing one winner-take-all system with another as Nerenberg suggests would not, in fact, achieve his immediate goal of keeping the Conservatives from forming a majority government, based on current poll numbers.
More importantly, apart from being unfair to all Canadians, It could also be potentially damaging to progressive policy gains in the years to come.
Let’s be clear: For progressives, it’s not easy to face the next election with any degree of hope or optimism.
Canadians on the progressive end of the political spectrum are understandably living in dread of the consequences of a Pierre Polievre “majority” government—one that first-past-the-post will likely hand to him with 40 per cent or less of voter support.
Justin Trudeau’s broken promise to “make every vote count” is a festering wound that will never fully heal. Each election adds fresh injury, and for progressives, the most painful moment will come when Canada inevitably reverts back to a Conservative “majority” government.
Justin Trudeau’s obstinate refusal to adopt evidence-based policy on electoral reform (which he once claimed was so important to him), to listen to the wishes of the majority of Canadians, or to respect the policy endorsed by the membership of his own party, is both discouraging and infuriating.
As he famously said in 2017, “It was my choice to make.”
That’s what all winner-take-all systems do: they concentrate power at the top.
Replacing one winner-take-all voting system with another won’t change that pattern.
There’s no doubt: A winner-take-all ranked ballot is a self-serving reform for the Liberal Party.
If it had been used in the 2015 federal election at the height of Trudeaumania, the Liberals would have increased their seat share from 54.4 per cent to a whopping 63 per cent—213 seats out of 338 seats―all on 39.5 per cent of the vote. The winner-take-all ranked ballot would have further inflated the already false Liberal majority, denying fair representation to even more voters.
Expert testimony to the federal electoral reform committee revealed winner-take-all ranked ballot to be the one system that, no matter how people vote, can consistently produce results that are even less representative of all Canadians than first-past-the-post.
Nerenberg should have crunched the numbers before grasping at straws. For those motivated purely by the immediate fear of a Pierre Poilievre majority, a winner-take-all ranked ballot wouldn’t even do the job.
Not even close.
The Liberal Party is polling at 24–25 per cent. When they’re so grossly unpopular that 85 per cent of Canadians feel it’s time for a change in Prime Minister and Pierre Poilievere is preferred over Justin Trudeau by 55 per cent to 45 per cent, no voting system―even one that gives the Liberal Party a bonus―is likely to prevent a Poilievre majority.
When the winner-take-all ranked ballot was used at the provincial level for decades in rural areas of the prairies, it changed riding outcomes from first-past-the-post a mere two per cent of the time. Most people didn’t even bother to rank a second choice.
In Australia, where voters are forced to rank candidates, the ranked ballot changed only six per centof riding results in the 21 elections between 1919 and 1996.
Winner-take-all ranked ballots tend to help Liberals and New Democrats less and less as they become farther behind in first preferences. Conservatives are now projected to win 210 seats―40 more than needed for a majority―so the boost this system would have conveyed to the Liberals in 2015 would now be greatly diminished due to the massive Conservative polling lead.
At best, winner-take-all ranked ballots in the current circumstances could hand the Liberals a handful more seats.
And that’s gambling that swing voters aren’t so thoroughly disgusted with the Liberals and the NDP for “rigging the system” with a self-interested reform that they end up voting Conservative.
More importantly, progressives looking for short-term fixes need to consider the long-term consequences of Nerenberg’s proposal on issues that Canadians care about.
Winner-take-all ranked ballots have a proven track record in Australia (the only OECD country to use them) for one thing: reinforcing a two-party system. For most of the past 100 years, they virtually shut out voters for third and smaller parties.
As others have noted, the average vote share of the two big parties increased from 87 per cent to 96 per cent after Australia switched from first-past-the-post to winner-take-all ranked ballots.
In 2019 in Australia, parties other than the big two parties got over 25 per cent of the vote – but only three per cent of the seats.
Over 100 years of winner-take-all ranked ballots in Australia have provided only one minority government. Only one time in a century where any third party had a say over policy decisions.
If progressives don’t like the monopoly that two big “corporate” parties currently enjoy over policy in Canada, why lock that in by adopting winner-take-all ranked ballots?
Most progressive-minded Canadians are not deeply partisan. They don’t have a membership in any political party. They see electoral politics and parties as means to an end, vehicles to work within for progress on the issues they care about.
This is where the evidence against winner-take-all systems, including winner-take-all ranked ballots, is especially damning: policy outcomes.
Nerenberg laments that a Pierre Poilievre government means facing “ideological and governance whiplash in Canada”, and singles out the Conservative plan to kill the carbon tax.
He is right.
What he neglects to mention is that this is exactly what happened over ten years ago in Australia under winner-take-all ranked ballots.
In a classic case of policy whiplash, the conservative party in Australia grabbed the carbon tax as a politically advantageous wedge issue to run on in a winner-take-all system.
The carbon tax that was brought in by the Labor Government in 2012 resulted in the biggest annual reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in 24 years—and was promptly reversed by the Liberal-National (conservative) government in 2014.
The effects of a hostile, two-party system had a long-term, devastating impact on climate action in Australia. The 2020 Climate Performance Index ranked Canada seventh from last and Australia sixth from last among 57 countries. Despite suffering catastrophic wildfires, Australia scored zero—dead last—on the Climate Policy Scale of the Index..
It’s not just climate policy that can stagnate over the long-term under winner-take-all systems.
The evidence from peer-reviewed research is clear: on climate, population health, democratic participation, tackling income equality—on almost anything most Canadians care about, even on economic growth—winner-take-all systems produce worse outcomes than proportional ones.
Concentrating power with winner-take-all ranked ballots never leads to proportional representation, so why is anyone pushing for a voting system that merely replicates the problems of first-past-the-post, and risks locking them in?
Nerenberg paints Fair Vote Canada and many proportional representation supporters as “high minded” and “dogmatic”—as if we’re unable to recognize the value of pragmatic compromise.
In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
Fair Vote Canada’s recent work in collaboration with Professor Dennis Pilon shows that around the world political compromise between parties was the key in almost every country that adopted proportional representation.
While the systems adopted and degree of proportionality varied a lot, the compromises reached by the implementing coalitions all have one thing in common: they made the electoral system better, for all voters.
The voices of Canadians also have a role to play in shaping a better electoral system. A National Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform, an idea that has much broader support across party lines than a winner-take-all ranked ballot, could kickstart or enrich the conversation on the road to a political compromise.
Fair Vote Canada will continue to push to restart the conversation between parties on electoral reform in ways that are pragmatic, evidence-based, and put the long-term interest of all Canadian voters first.
As Eleanor Rosevelt famously said, “When it’s better for everyone, it’s better for everyone.”
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