More ammo for blowing up f irst past post
Say what you will about first past the post, its defenders argue, but at least it delivers stable majority governments.
And once this was true. Whatever its other defects — the exaggerated or false majorities it confers; its tendency to disproportionately reward parties that can bunch their support geographically, at the expense of those whose support is more broad-based; the massive swings in policy that can result, election to election, often in response to tiny shifts in the popular vote; the bizarre inequities and Hobson’s choices this forces upon voters, constantly told they must not split the vote or waste their vote even in those few “battleground” ridings where the outcome is in doubt — it was at least possible to say that the beneficiaries of its funhouse distortions could govern without serious concern for the opinion of the legislature for up to five years. If that is your thing.
But even that is no longer the case. Nine of the last 20 federal elections have resulted in minority governments. Recent provincial elections have produced minority governments in Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and — the latest — New Brunswick.
First past the post works tolerably well when only two parties are in contention — not only does it necessarily produce majority governments, but many of its other anomalies recede — and indeed tends to favour the emergence of two-party systems, a phenomenon known as Duverger’s Law.
But once the two-party mould is cracked, it generates ever stranger and more unstable outcomes. We haven’t had two-party politics in Canada since 1917, with the arrival of first the Progressives, then the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (later the NDP). Currently there are no fewer than seven parties in the Commons.
As traditional partisan loyalties become unmoored, the same may be happening at the provincial level, with the NDP breaking through in recent elections in Atlantic Canada and the emergence of the Green Party as an electoral force in several provinces (it is now represented in the legislatures of New Brunswick, P.E.I., Ontario, and B.C.).
The result in some cases — B.C. in 2017, New Brunswick this week, perhaps Quebec the next — has been to produce exactly the sort of post-election mayhem that is supposed to be the exclusive preserve of proportional representation: hung parliaments, extended inter- and intra-party negotiations before a government can be formed, with small fringe parties holding the balance of power.
New Brunswick’s predicament is particularly entertaining. The governing Liberals beat the opposition Conservatives by six percentage points in the popular vote, 38 to 32, yet somehow emerged with one fewer seat, 21 to 22.
As in B.C. a year ago, it would seem difficult for either party to form a government. If the Liberals’ attempt to soldier on with the support of the three Greens elected Monday appears doomed, neither do the Tories’ chances look good: though the three members of the populist People’s Alliance (another recent addition to the electoral landscape) would be enough to give them a majority of one, that would disappear the moment a Speaker was appointed, unless one could be lured out of the opposition.
Of course, this is no more unrepresentative a result than the 1987 New Brunswick election, which handed all of the seats to one party, the Liberals. Or the majority the NDP won in B.C. in 1996, despite winning neither a majority nor even a plurality of the popular vote. Or the almost perfect split of the vote that delivered the NDP into power in Alberta, of all places. But that’s the point: it was bad enough when first past the post only stuck us with wildly unrepresentative majorities. Now it is increasingly giving rise to wildly unstable minorities.
But wait a minute: this is hardly an advertisement for proportional representation, is it? New Brunswick-style mélées, after all, are still comparatively rare in our system. Whereas, isn’t this the norm under proportional representation? Wouldn’t PR mean the end of majority governments altogether?
No: It would mean the start. Under PR, to win a majority of the seats, you actually have to win a majority of the vote (or something close to it). It’s true that this seldom produces a majority government of one party: it’s rare for one party to win more than 50 per cent of the vote in either system.
But whereas in our system the consequence, when no party wins a majority of the seats, is usually a minority government — in which a single party, outnumbered as it is in the House, nevertheless tries to nerve its way through by sheer brinksmanship — under PR the more normal result is coalition government: with a majority of the seats, but divided among two or more parties.
Minority governments, as we know them, are indeed unstable: the average duration of a minority government at the federal level in Canada is a little more than a year. But we should not mistake this for the very different experience of coalition governments typical of PR. It isn’t just that coalition governments actually do tend to have the support of a majority of the legislature. It’s that the incentives built into the two systems are completely different.
As mentioned, in our system it only takes a swing of a few points in the popular vote to lead to dramatic changes in the party standings. There’s every incentive, then, for whichever party happens to be up in the polls at any given moment to trigger a snap election.
Whereas under PR there’s no such “leverage”: small changes in the popular vote only lead to small changes in seats. So there’s less incentive to go to the polls. The average European PR country has held about 20 elections since 1945. Canada has had 22.
Moral: The case for electoral reform isn’t just about what happens on election day. It’s what happens every day in between.