Quebecers shouldn't just vote for the lesser evil

The party that best reflects voters' beliefs is the one they should support, Balarama Holness says.

There are 125 members of Quebec's National Assembly, and they are elected every four years on the first Monday in October (with some exceptions). Each represents a single-member district, also called a riding. Each riding is geographically defined, and in principle includes roughly the same number of eligible voters. Within each riding, the candidate who gets plurality of the votes, but not necessarily the majority, wins. This is known as the “first-past-the-post” system.

The political party that wins the most seats forms the next government and the leader of that party becomes the premier of Quebec. If it wins 63 or more seats, it forms a majority government, able to pass legislation without the support of other parties.

This type of electoral system tends to favour the emergence of two large parties, as was the case in Quebec for much of its history. Smaller third parties are at a natural disadvantage unless their support is geographically concentrated within a few electoral ridings. The latest polls in Quebec indicate that, if the current trends hold, the ruling Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) could win as many as 100 seats (80 per cent of the total) with about 42 per cent of the popular vote in the election to be held this October. The remaining four parties, even before the announced creation of Mouvement Québec — Équipe Balarama Holness (MQ) and the Canadian Party of Quebec (CAPQ), have all been polling in the teens. While supported by almost 60 per cent of the Quebecers, they are poised to fight for the remaining 20 per cent of the seats.

Premier François Legault and CAQ, while in opposition, promised electoral reform before the 2022 election to address this imbalance, and his government in 2019 introduced legislation to move to a mixed-member proportional representation system where 45 out of 125 seats would be selected based on proportional representation from regional lists. This plan was to be conditional on public approval in a referendum. However, Legault subsequently backtracked on his promise by postponing the reform. Although the proposed changes were modest, they were moving in the right direction to ensure that the government of Quebec is more representative of different voters, constituencies and regions.

The current system, while clearly advantageous to the CAQ, creates a particular challenge for anglophone and minority voters who are disproportionately concentrated on the Island of Montreal and in the surrounding municipalities. This situation is further exacerbated by the implosion in support of the Quebec Liberal Party (QLP) following their ambivalent stances toward Bill 21 and Bill 96, the resurgence of the Conservative Party of Quebec (CPQ) and the announcement of plans to create MQ and the CAPQ. Even though the election is still five months away, the political pundits are already in overdrive discussing vote splitting, formation of ad hoc alliances and strategic voting.

The biggest problem with the different scenarios and strategies discussed is that using aggregate results from previous elections or relying on recent opinion polls provides a very poor basis for informed decision-making. Unfortunately, as famously stated by Yogi Berra, “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” In order to make more strategic choices one would need valid, up-to-date and riding-specific data on voting intentions. And even equipped with that information, we are only scratching the surface of the complexities of voting behaviour and how our votes translate into seats in the electoral system based on the “first-past-thepost” principle.

In the absence of such information, and amid the proliferation of political parties and the current electoral system favouring CAQ, I urge all Quebecers to vote for the party that most closely reflects their values and ideas rather than placing a bet on who should form the next government or the official Opposition. Democracy should not be about voting for a lesser evil, but voting for what you believe in.