FPTP: It lets you know who to blame

The utterly biased case for why everybody should stop hating first past the post

First past the post is the voting system everybody loves to hate. The Liberals have called it “unfair.” It was invented in a time when “people thought the Earth was flat” says Green Party leader Elizabeth May. NDP MPs have straight-up denounced the system as “illegitimate.”

First past the post, in short, is the system in which whoever gains the most votes in a riding wins the seat, even if the candidate didn’t capture a majority of those votes. There’s quite a few anti-FPTP arguments, but the general thrust is that it’s inherently unjust for Canada to be constantly ruled by governments who only scored about 40 per cent at the ballot box. But as the Liberals prepare to send Canada’s British-imported voting system straight to the curb, the National Post called up political scientists to get their favourite arguments in favour of FPTP. Discussions of “false majorities” and “wasted votes” will have to wait — below, find the utterly biased, “ra-ra” case for why first past the post might well be a national treasure.

It lets you know who to blame

Frequent majority governments are the signature aspect of FPTP. Under a proportional representation system, Brian Mulroney and John Diefenbaker would have been the only prime ministers of the last 70 years able to obtain the 50 per cent plus one of the electorate needed to command a majority. Majorities, even false majorities, are good because they ensure maximum accountability. If Canada’s in tatters in four years, voters can lay the blame exclusively on Justin Trudeau, and he can’t weasel out by pointing the finger at some coalition partner. Other countries don’t have this luxury. If Israelis take issue with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy planks, for instance, he could easily pass the buck to one of the hardline religious types holding his coalition together. This has been a problem for some time in Israel. As far back as 2008, this exact charge was being levelled at Netanyahu’s predecessor, Ehud Olmert. “The need to satisfy the narrow and often contradictory wishes of his coalition partners made it almost impossible for Mr Olmert to pursue coherent policies,” wrote the Financial Times.

It throws bums out

Canadians don’t just vote out governments, they vote them the hell out; the Progressive Conservatives reduced to two seats in 1993, the B.C. NDP reduced to two seats in 2001, etc.

But under a system in which the share of MPs perfectly represented the popular vote, the 2015 election might not have decisively blown Stephen Harper into the political wilderness.

Rather, the ex-Conservative leader could have commanded a respectable caucus of 108 seats staring down a Liberal minority holding only 39 per cent of the House of Commons.

“I can’t imagine anything much worse than a voting system that leaves half-dead governments living on life support,” wrote U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron in a 2011 op-ed in support of FPTP. Incidentally, that year the U.K. put their own electoral system to a referendum vote, and FPTP won.

It keeps the Queen out of our business

It’s very, very rare that the Canadian governor general is actually called upon to do anything. For about 100 years, all they’ve really needed to do is rubber stamp majority governments and — in the case of minority governments — swear in whichever party got the most votes. But in a more fractured parliament, where majorities would be exceedingly rare, the governor general would be in the frequent position of deciding the rise or fall of Canadian governments. (This might be fine, but Canadians have a history of freaking out whenever it seems like Rideau Hall is about to do something that actually affects us.)

It’s not fair — but it gives government cover to do fair things

This is the argument that pro-FPTP types roll out when someone calls it unfair: Yes, it’s inherently unfair for people to become MPs with only 33.4 per cent of their riding ’s support, but the system does have a track record of (generally) doing the right thing. Arguably, first past the post is at its best when a government has to do something that is right, but not politically popular. Successive majority governments, for instance, gave the 1990s Jean Chretien government sufficient cover to slash the deficit. This would have been far trickier if, as would have been the case under proportional representation, Chretien had been leading a Liberal minority that could have fallen at any minute on a budget vote. “I do think that the kind of security that governments enjoy with a majority government, it’s an important part of the distinctiveness of Canada,” veteran political scientist David E. Smith told the National Post.

149 years without a revolution

It’s a bit tricky to definitively rank the world’s oldest continuously operating governments. But Canada — tiny, young, unassuming Canada — is easily in the top 10, noted Peter Loewen, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto. Every other country in the G20 save for the U.S. and the U.K. has had to rejig their government at least once in the last 150 years, sometimes violently. France, for one, drew up an entirely new republic as recently as 1958. It’s admittedly easier to keep a country stable when it’s rich and has secure borders, but parliamentwatchers like Loewen urge Canadians to appreciate the staying power of the current system. Just like an Ikea dresser, that European-style proportional representation system might look good now, but it’s a whole different story if the handles break off in a few years.