Next to free trade, electoral reform is simplicity itself
Let’s pause for a moment to reflect on what has just occurred. In the past election the Liberals became the first major party in Canadian history to campaign and win on a platform explicitly calling for reform of our electoral system, colloquially known as “first past the post,” in time for the next election.
Now an all-party committee appointed to study options for reform has reported back, with another historic first: four of the committee’s five parties have formally recommended the public should be asked in a referendum to endorse reforming our system on the basis of proportional representation. The lone dissenters: the Liberals, who rejected both the proposed reform (“too radical”) and the timeline (“rushed”), which is to say the very promise on which they were elected.
Then the minister who had asked the committee to report, Maryam Monsef, dismissed its findings and insulted its members, presumably including the Liberals, for not doing what she had not asked them to do, namely to recommend a specific model for reform — proportional representation apparently not being specific enough — at the same time claiming to be unable to detect a “consensus” among the four parties and 87 per cent of witnesses before the committee that recommended it. She concluded this performance by mocking the committee’s use of a mathematical formula to measure the proportionality of different systems, falsely claiming that this was what they were suggesting the public should vote on.
The next day the Prime Minister’s Office, having ordered the minister to deliver these talking points, sent her out to apologize for them. But no retraction was issued for the lies she told, nor any reason offered why the promise of reform should not be considered among them. Sophisticated observers nodded and cackled. It’s too complicated! No one cares! It’s a solution in search of a problem!
By way of contrast, consid- er how the Canada- U. S. free trade agreement — another big, complicated proposal for change — came into being. The Mulroney government received much expert advice, notably from the Macdonald Royal Commission on the Economy, recommending it pursue a free trade deal. It agreed, consulted widely, entered negotiations and reached an agreement.
It did not sit around waiting for a “consensus” to magically materialize on what the treaty should contain. Neither did it issue vapid questionnaires asking the public what “values” they would like to see reflected in some hypothetical trade deal. It put a concrete proposal before the people, ran on it and won. In a word, it led.
Yet all of the lazy nonarguments made against electoral reform could have been made against free trade. Complicated? The free trade agreement ran to hundreds of pages, with thousands of clauses and sub- clauses, in every line of which, opponents assured the public, lurked some hidden peril to the nation’s very existence.
As with electoral reform, there was no great clamour for it beforehand. Free trade was at that time an abstract economic theory, the sort of thing academics and other nerds obsessed over, but of no relevance to the average person. Plus it involved math.
And Canada could have lived without it. We were among the world’s most successful countries for a hundred- odd years before the agreement. We would likely still be among the most successful had it never been passed.
But we’re a better country with it: richer, more confident, more outward-looking, with more opportunities for our people. Looking back, we can see how much smaller and shabbier things were before it: the pinched scale of our industries, the abysmal range and quality of the goods on our shelves. Now that we have something to compare it with, we can see the problem to which it was a solution.
Next to free trade, electoral reform is simplicity i tself. Under any reform that has been proposed, we would still be a parliamentary system, with MPs elected to represent us in local ridings, who in turn would decide what government to support and what legislation to pass.
The only thing that would really change is this: rather than elect just one MP per riding, we might elect several, say three to five. Or we might, in addition to electing MPs from single-member ridings, elect some from larger regional districts. That’s how you get to proportionality: rather than only one MP representing all the voters in a riding, even if only 30 per cent of them supported him or her, representation is shared among several, in proportion to their share of the vote.
That, in turn, is how you get a Parliament that is proportional — not by some statistical trick, but by building up from proportionality at the riding level. Parliament would then more accurately reflect the actual range of views in the country, rather than just that narrow slice of opinion that happened, by the accident of the vote splits, to be the largest block in each riding.
It wouldn’t mean perfect proportionality, nor should it: life is about trade- offs. But it would be more proportional than the absolutely unproportional system we have now. Neither does PR mean — I don’t know how some opponents have got it into their head that it does — that all parties get to share in the government. We elect Parliaments in this country, not governments; proportionality is about representation in Parliament, the body to which the government is responsible, not the government itself.
The majority of MPs would rule, as they do now. It’s just that they would also represent a majority of the voters.