Quebec has its own need for electoral reform
Action by province might create urgency in Ottawa, Henry Milner says.
In the 2015 federal election, persuading some typically apathetic young people to vote helped Justin Trudeau get elected, and his Liberals, unusually, won a few seats in the Prairies. That election also gave him an unexpected majority in the House of Commons, and led him, despite months of largely pro-reform testimony before a special parliamentary committee, to pull the plug on his promise of changing Canada’s electoral system.
After that disheartening experience for supporters of change, electoral reform at the federal level is not likely to return to the political agenda soon, despite the demands of the NDP and the Greens. Both, especially the latter, were unfairly treated in October’s election not only in their share of seats compared to votes, but also because their supporters in many places were pushed away from them to vote strategically, for the least bad alternative that had a real chance of winning their district.
Electoral reform is, however, on the table in Quebec, where the CAQ government has promised a referendum to decide whether we should adopt a mixed compensatory electoral system like that used in Scotland (though the version set out in Bill 39, tabled recently by the minister in charge, Sonia Lebel, is somewhat watered down and will likely be amended). In addressing the issue, Quebeckers need to draw a more profound lesson from the federal result than just the unfairness of the first-pastthe-post (FPTP) electoral system to smaller parties.
The federal result drew attention to Canadians being split regionally, with the Bloc’s success in Quebec and, especially, the Liberals being shut out of Alberta and Saskatchewan. But the contribution of FPTP to this state of affairs, something apparent to students of electoral systems for generations, hasn’t been given the attention it deserves. The electoral system can and often does dangerously exacerbate regional cleavages, in this case silencing the voices of more than one-third of Alberta and Saskatchewan voters who did not vote Conservative, and whose representatives will be absent not only from the government but from the House of Commons itself.
In Quebec’s political makeup, we face an analogous situation under FPTP, though it has been given little attention. Consider the provincial election results last year. In several regions where the victorious CAQ under François Legault won the largest number of votes, the 40 or even 50 per cent of voters who supported other parties are poorly represented in the Quebec National Assembly, if at all. Conversely, in the more mixed region in and around Montreal, CAQ representation is effectively non-existent, its voters voiceless. The party not only has no spokespeople from here but also, under FPTP, little or no incentive to invest scarce resources in this region since they are unlikely to result in winning any seats. This absence of representation of the Montreal region on the government benches has contributed to what has been called a “dialogue des sourds” on secularism under Bill 21.
Perhaps if we do move toward real electoral reform in Quebec in the coming years, it might even reopen the discussion in Ottawa. One can always hope.