Here We Go Again On Electoral Reform

Inevitably, following an election as unusual and dramatic as this one, Canadian political discourse will focus on electoral reform and the perceived unfairness of the results, of the Trudeau promise to change the electoral system, and the need to throw the strategic voting baby out with the democratic bathwater by adopting Mixed Member Proportional. There are far better options.

In this election, the Conservative party’s vote count, vote share, and seat count all went up versus the previous election. They received more votes in both raw numbers (up over 2 million) and percentage (about 1.7% higher) than they did when Stephen Harper won a majority in 2011. But the party’s leader, Pierre Poilievre, was defeated in his own riding, leading to an ambiguous role as the leader of the opposition — everywhere except in the House, and the comical spectre of him parachuting himself into a safe seat after 20 years in office in a way normally only reserved for newly chosen party leaders.

NDP support collapsed as the left voted Liberal to stop the Conservatives, in spite of the NDP caucus support’s instrumental role in keeping the last Liberal government on the progressive straight and narrow.

Bloc supporters in droves realised that, while they maintain their grievances against Canada, there are bigger issues at stake in dealing with the threat from the United States. Their self-imposed truce is reminiscent of the Bedouin idiom: “I am against my brother, my brother and I are against my cousin, my cousin and I are against the stranger.”

People’s Party supporters, too, came home to the Conservatives, whose embrace of the far-right rhetoric of American MAGAism served its purpose. Not a single candidate for Maxime Bernier’s party obtained sufficient votes to qualify for Elections Canada expense reimbursements. By contrast, only seven Bloc and two Conservative candidates in the entire country, and all of them on the island of Montreal, failed to make that 10% vote threshold.

The Greens, too, saw their vote collapse in the interest of a progressive coalition to block Trumpism’s Pierrist invasion, leaving Elizabeth May yet again all on her own.

The obvious and inevitable conclusion to all this is that the country, at both ends of the spectrum, voted strategically in overwhelming numbers, driving the country ever further along the road to an American-style two-party system.

Voters by the hundreds of thousands voted for results other than the ones they wanted to see in the election. Whole regions ended up with monolithic representation on far more nuanced voting patterns.

The obvious answer, and the one you will hear with increasing fervour over the next weeks and months, is that Canada needs to go to some form of proportional representation. You will hear that every person should vote their conscience and every vote should be counted toward the representation of the party they chose. And on the surface it is self-evident.

It is also completely wrong. The whole premise of the discussion is wrong. The whole idea that we vote for parties and not individuals is the problem we need to be solving. That the parties we indirectly vote for don’t directly benefit from those indirect votes is not. That leaders have to sign the nomination papers of each of their party’s candidates and thus assert dictatorial power over their parties is the problem. That a leader of a rising party can lose his own seat is not.

The trouble with electoral reform

Our current system is indeed broken. That voters feel the need to vote for someone they dislike to stop someone they despise when there is a candidate available whom they genuinely support should never be the case. That backbench MPs serve at the whim of the leader is something that should be solved, not institutionalised.

Proportional representation takes us from one extreme to the other. In a pure proportional system, we vote directly for parties. The parties provide a list of candidates long enough to cover all the seats. If they get 40% of the vote, the top 40% of their list get seats. The leader, and those candidates the leader selects to be the top of the list, basically can’t lose. People at the bottom of the list have no hope of winning and exist as simple placeholders, without even having a constituency in which to campaign. Nominally, the resulting House looks exactly the way the voters want.

To get it, the individual representatives no longer serve any purpose whatsoever. A purely proportional Parliament might as well sit around a kitchen table with each party leader simply weighting their parliamentary votes to their electoral support, delegating random staffers to cast that single weighted vote on their behalf should they be out of the office.

In addressing the obvious failing of proportional representation that, in gaining proportionality, we lose local representation and any modicum of independence, reform advocates will once again tell us that we need Mixed Member Proportional in Canada. In this model, we keep the current, broken system that reform advocates say we need to be rid of. We continue voting for our local representatives through single member plurality (the correct name for ‘first past the post’). We continue voting strategically at the local level. But then, we look at the national total of votes, compare it to party seat counts, and award consolation seats to parties whose vote share exceed their representative seat share, creating representatives with no constituencies who serve as nothing more than assistants to the leader.

In a proportional world, if the leader diverges from the platform on which they campaigned or party doctrine, and a list-elected MP votes against the party but with the platform on a matter of confidence, can they be kicked out of their party? They have no legitimacy as an independent and would presumably be removed by their party with the next person on their party’s list replacing them to serve their party in the legislature. Who represents who to who in such a system?

In adopting MMP, we take the worst of proportional and the worst of plurality voting, put them in the blender, and offer Canadians a shit sandwich of an electoral system abandoned by nearly every country that’s tried it, with only four countries in the world still using Mixed-Member Proportional at the national level: Bolivia, Lesotho, New Zealand, and Scotland.

There are better options that don’t simply combine terrible systems. Preferential balloting preserves local representation while nearly completely eliminating strategic voting. Every MP would still represent a riding and have local accountability. Every voter could vote for who they actually want, followed by who they can tolerate, and clearly show who they do not want, all on a single ballot, by ranking them.

Under a preferential model, per-vote funding based on first-choice votes would be more meaningful. Public discourse would necessarily improve as candidates would not only have to woo their own supporters, but be acceptable second choices, to win in all but the most hardened ‘safe’ ridings. Unpopular leaders of popular parties could still lose their seats. Voters could finally vote for instead of against candidates.

The reason you don’t hear political parties and well-funded organisations that are backed by them like Fair Vote Canada advocating for preferential ballots is simple. Both single member plurality and proportional representation benefit political parties, but preferential ballots primarily benefit voters.

Canada’s political parties expect brand loyalty over nearly any other consideration. This undermines the very tenets of a representative democracy. Elections are not meant to be a professional sport where what matters is the jersey you wear rather than what it stands for, where outcomes don’t have any real-world consequences, where “owning the libtards” becomes a valid justification for anything. They are intended for the people to have a say over the direction of their country, how our shared resources are directed, and what we want to achieve as a people.

The parties know that preferential balloting is the fairest system. Since the death of delegated conventions nearly 20 years ago, all of Canada’s major political parties choose both their leaders and their local candidates exclusively through preferential ballots. Yet electoral reform advocates tell the general public that such a system is no good for the public.

Interesting.