DEMOCRACY SUPPRESSED BY FIRST PAST THE POST
Rallying for electoral reform can help turn tide against cynicism, Samir Gandesha says.
Much ink has been spilled on the crisis of democracy in recent years. Across the globe, democracy seems to be on the defensive and appears to be in real trouble in states as varied as India, the Philippines, Brazil, Venezuela, Egypt and Turkey. Of course, one need look no further than south of the border to gain an acute awareness of the travails of representative democratic institutions under the now one-year-old presidency of Donald Trump. According to a 2014 study conducted by professors Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, the U.S. cannot, in fact, any longer be considered a “democracy.”
Of course, in our own country, the fate of democracy seems no less perilous. Since 1979, the average voter turnout for federal elections, according to a study cited by the Globe and Mail, stands at 67.63 per cent. The most recent election, that saw Justin Trudeau’s Liberals sweep into power, saw turnout somewhat higher, at 68.49 per cent, considerably above the previous election of 2011, which returned a majority Tory government, at 61.1 per cent. I shall return to this below. Given that representative (as opposed to direct) democracies entail an already low level of citizen participation, i.e. voting for federal, provincial and municipal representative every four or so years, such a relatively low level of participation is concerning for political orders that consider themselves “democratic” in anything more than in just name.
Yet there are forces that wish to make our societies even less democratic — discouraging citizens, particularly younger, poorer and more marginalized, from voting. For example, the Fair Elections Act brought in by the former Harper government in response to their own malfeasance — namely the so-called “Robo-calls” scandal whereby Liberal and NDP voters were provided with false information as to the whereabouts of polling stations — sought to do this. It did so by eliminating the vouching system whereby citizens with no fixed address could still register to vote if someone “vouched” for them, that is, confirmed their identity. It also did so by expressly prohibiting the chief electoral officer from encouraging Canadians to vote. These tactics could be understood as a slightly more benign version of the explicit racially motivated voter suppression that one finds in the U.S., particularly in the southern states, as well as what Michelle Alexander calls the “New Jim Crow” which entailed the systematic incarceration and disenfranchisement of African-Americans.
But there are also more subtle means by which Canadians can be dissuaded from voting and this has to do with the cynicism that is injected into the body politic every time a government is elected on a particular platform and then immediately disregards that platform beyond election day. One could argue that the upswing in voter turnout in the federal election of 2015 had much to do with the growing disaffection with the Tories, but perhaps it had even more to do with the promise to change the “single member plurality” (“first past the post”) electoral system to some version of proportional representation. The need for electoral reform was made especially clear under the previous government, which demonstrated the discrepancy between the popular vote and seats in the last few elections. Harper’s government rested on a scant 37.65 per cent of the popular vote in 2011 and, let’s remember, he sought to fundamentally transform the institutions of Canadian democracy on that basis.
At the provincial level in B.C., we have a provincial government that had similarly promised before the election last spring that they would seriously review the project initiated by its B.C. Liberal predecessor to dam the Peace River at Site C, to produce “green” and supposedly cheap energy despite widespread agreement that there was “no business case at all” for the project. It has also pledged a new nation-to-nation relationship with Indigenous peoples (as had Trudeau) based on the implementation of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the core of which is echoed in the Plan of Action stemming from the TRC Commission’s report. This is “free, prior and informed consent.” The NDP has reneged on both, much to the horror of most of its supporters.
What can be done? There are basically two outcomes that follow my description of the state of democracy in Canada. The first is an ever-deepening crisis of institutions and political will in which voter participation spirals ever downward and, as has been amply demonstrated, when this happens it favours the political right. This further opens the doors for the rise of a Trump-like figure in this country.
The second is that citizens take the initiative and rally for electoral reform, promised by the current government, in this province. Naysayers and odd bed-fellows such as Bill Tieleman, a lobbyist for construction unions and NDP backroom boy, and Susan Anton, former attorney-general in the B.C. Liberal government, would have us believe that proportional representation opens the door to extremism. This is patently false, most of the countries listed above as teetering on the edge of authoritarianism employ the “first past the post” voting system with some form of proportional representation as well. Indeed, the very polity which had a built-in safety valve in the form of an Electoral College, namely, the United States, now has an authoritarian demagogue as its commander-in-chief. What proportional representation will do, however, is make the expression of the popular will more democratic and governments more accountable, and will therefore go a long way toward combating the deeply corrosive effects of cynicism in politics.
There are forces that wish to make our societies even less democratic.