Does electoral reform need to be a campaign issue?

Critics are calling for a change to the first past the post voting system. CTV Windsor’s Ricardo Veneza has more.

The provincial election is in the rearview mirror as the federal election takes centre stage with pollsters projecting the same scenario seen in the former playing out in the latter — a sweeping majority win with less than majority support.

That is, of course, a side effect — if not a function — of the first past the post, majoritarian, winner-take-all approach to elections used across the country and a longstanding issue electoral reform advocates are hoping to see addressed.

“It’s not doing the job that I think any democratic system should do, right? At the most basic level, a representative democracy should represent as accurately as possible,” said Dennis Pilon, a professor with York University’s Politics Department and contributor to electoral reform advocacy group Fair Vote Canada.

The latest poll released by Nanos Research shows the federal Liberals with 42.8 per cent support across the country in its three-day rolling sample ending April 6. According to 338Canada, that approximate level of support could see the party win 192 of the 338 seats, representing nearly two-thirds of the House of Commons.

This same scenario played out in February when Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives (PC) marched to a resounding victory on Feb. 27, winning 80 of the 124 seats in Ontario’s legislature with 43 per cent of the vote capturing 64.5 per cent of the seats.

“If the voting system is like a communication device, then what is it communicating?” asked Pilon.

“It’s not really communicating what people said with their votes.”

A particular perversion of the Ontario election results, as Fair Vote Canada outlines, is the NDP’s stronger seat count returning the party to Official Opposition status despite weaker popular vote performance than the rival Liberals.

The NDP won 18.6 per cent of the vote and won 21.8 per cent of the seats while the Liberals saw 29.9 per cent support across the province to earn just 11.3 per cent of the seats.

Fair Vote Canada argues a proportional system would more accurately represent the mood and will of voters than the current system along with fostering better political engagement.

“You’ve got parts of the country, regions of the country where one group has an advantage and everyone else just stays home,” said Pilon.

Fair Vote revised results

Progressive Conservative: 55

Ontario Liberal Party: 38

NDP: 24

Green Party of Ontario: 6

Independent: 1

Election Ontario reports unofficial voting results show 5,023,587 voters, or 45.4 per cent of registered voters, cast their ballot in Ontario’s 44th general election.

What we’ve got

“Ideally, if you are going to have a majority system, it does work best if you have a two-party system,” noted Lydia Miljan, the head of the Department of Political Science at the University of Windsor.

“Once you start having incentives or once you get smaller parties breaking through, it tends to dissipate the vote.”

Miljan points to the electoral system in Canada and Ontario as one that forces parties to engage the electorate in all its disparate parts to earn and sway votes.

She also argues it does a better job of hedging against extremist parties that can be given inflated prominence in proportional representative systems; not to say its ridings are fair and equal in how they distribute voters.

“If you’re a voter in Alberta, your vote doesn’t count as much as it does in P.E.I., simply because they get more seats per voter than we do, even in Ontario,” said Miljan.

But, for Pilon, paring down Canada’s multi-party system to fit its first past the post blueprint is a little like fitting a round peg into a square hole — it’s the wrong approach.

“I’m always a little dazed at this sort of suggestion,” said Pilon.

“So, the answer to the problem of democracy is to have less democracy? That’s how we fix this? We fix this by offering people less choice?”

Miljan suggests there is more majority support in Canadian elections than might be seen from an overhead look or what the popular vote can capture.

“I look at it on a riding-by-riding basis,” said Miljan.

“So, I think it’s more interesting to see how many ridings actually were above 50 per cent that the party won and it’s actually more than you would think.”

In Ontario’s recent election, 58 of the 124 ridings had a candidate win with more than 50 per cent support.

Seven of those cleared the bar with less than 51 per cent support, with Huron-Bruce going to the PCs with 50.01 per cent of the vote.

The PCs took 39 of those ridings while the Liberals followed with nine, the NDP with seven, the Greens with two, and rounded out by the lone Independent.

Local representation

When it comes to the longstanding tradition of local representation the current electoral systems offer across Canada, Pilon takes umbrage with the suggestion it is an integral part of a successful democracy.

“Who’s promoting this need for local representation?” Pilon ponders rhetorically.

“It tends to be the local representatives themselves who will tell you the best story about how important they are and what great work they’re doing as a local representative.”

Under proportional systems, party lists of vetted candidates determine who will be elected as opposed to the individual riding associations parties generally rely on in Canada to select candidates.

There was a flurry of candidates ousted in the first weeks of the federal election, including Windsor–Tecumseh–Lakeshore Conservative candidate Mark McKenzie, who was among the controversial party appointments that overturned the local riding association nomination process.

In B.C., former finance minister Mike de Jong was among those candidates to be brushed aside by a party appointment instead of respecting the nomination process of the local riding association.

Pilon suggested these are problems with the current system that can largely be addressed with a switch of voting system but doesn’t expect any switch to be a quick fix in addressing voter apathy or perfect representation.

“What people don’t understand is that our institutions were never designed with, ‘Hey, what should our systems do? What’s the best thing, what’s the right thing? What’s the fair thing?’ Instead, our system’s evolved through a process of political struggle where, initially, very few people could influence what was going on, only very powerful people,” said Pilon.

“We had to keep using the [systems] that we used before. And not surprisingly, they tended to benefit those who were opening the doors, rather than those who were coming in.”