Half of candidates in election ‘ dissatisfied’ with Canada’s system
• Half of the candidates in the last federal election say they’re dissatisfied with Canada’s democratic system, and nearly as many want the legal voting age lowered to 16 years old, according to a survey.
In the month following the vote last October, Elections Canada commissioned Ekos Research to poll as many of the 2,000 people who ran for federal office on their thoughts on the latest election.
In the end, the company interviewed 1,172 candidates across the country, only to find out that half of them don’t even like the first-pastthe- post electoral system they ran in.
“The two most frequently cited reasons for dissatisfaction in the way democracy works in Canada include the lack of proportional representation and that the first- past- the- post system does not reflect voters’ preferences,” reads the report.
In other words, dissatisfied candidates wish that Canada would replace the current system in which candidates are elected if they win the most votes in a riding with one where the total votes obtained by a party decides how many MPS they get in the House of Commons (proportional representation).
Thus, the party with the highest number of votes across the country would get the most seats.
That would have led to a very different outcome in the 2019 election, where the Liberal Party of Canada won 36 more seats than the Conservative Party of Canada, despite getting a smaller portion of the overall vote ( 33.1 per cent for the Liberals, 34.4 per cent for the Tories).
“Candidates most of the time are just like the average Canadian. You like the system that allows you to get into power and really dislike it if you are not in power,” said Mike Medeiros, a professor specializing in Canadian politics at the University of Amsterdam.
He said that both the NDP and Green Party have increasingly pushed for electoral reform since Justin Trudeau promised it back in 2015 and then abandoned it when he was elected prime minister. So their candidates would predictably be dissatisfied with the current system.
“Dissatisfaction stands out most prominently among candidates from a party not represented in the House of Commons, followed by those who were not elected, and those who were not incumbents,” the Ekos report says.
Nearly half ( 46 per cent) of the surveyed candidates also think that the legal voting age should be lowered to 16 from 18 years old, a proposition that has not been seriously discussed on the federal stage in recent years.
Unsurprisingly, the proposal was particularly popular among younger candidates.
“Agreement regarding lowering of the voting age is more likely to be favoured by candidates under 35, followed by candidates between the ages of 35 and 49, those in Ontario and women,” the survey says. Respondents from Quebec were the least likely to support the change.
Overall, the vast majority of candidates ( 81 per cent) say Elections Canada ran the vote fairly, think the results were accurate and trustworthy (86 per cent) and are satisfied with the administration of the election as a whole (74 per cent).
“Still, 13 per cent say the election was run unfairly,” Ekos warns.
But a sizable majority of respondents ( 64 per cent) believe that online disinformation was a problem during their campaigns, some going as far as saying that it had a “major impact” on the outcome.
“Over two in five felt that foreign countries or groups were using social media and other means to influence the political opinions of Canadians,” the survey highlights.
“I’m a bit surprised by that results, I find them high compared to the reality. But I think there was some contamination from previous provincial elections, like in Alberta, where you had issues last year with misinformation scandals or political scheming,” Medeiros said.
To his point, Ekos found that Albertans were the most likely to think that there was a problem “with both general spread of false information online (80 per cent), and foreign countries using social media to influence political opinions (57 per cent).”
On the other hand, Quebecers were the least likely to suspect rampant disinformation during the fall campaign.
Fake news and disinformation aren’t the only things that candidates fear online. Ekos also found that support for the idea of online voting fell drastically between the 2015 and 2019 elections.
“Over one- third ( 35 per cent) of candidates think that electors should be able to vote using the internet, down considerably from 54 per cent in 2015,” the report reads.