Electoral reform may not make Canada more democratic
Two questions emerge from the federal Liberal government’s decision to dramatically change the way Canadians vote.
The first, which dominated discussion in Ottawa following Wednesday’s announcement of a special Commons committee to study voting alternatives, is whether Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is sincere in his pledge to replace the existing first-past-the-post system.
“Are the Liberals conning us again?” one newspaper columnist asked.
But the second question raised by Wednesday’s announcement is considerably more important.
Assuming for a minute that Trudeau is not fibbing, would a new voting system be better than the one we have? Here the international evidence is mixed. Proportional representation is seen as the main alternative to Canada’s status quo. There are various forms of PR, but all result in elected legislatures that more or less reflect the popular vote.
If the winning party receives only 39 per cent of the popular vote — as the Liberals did in 2015 — it would be allocated just 39 per cent of the seats.
Opponents of PR say it produces unstable political coalitions. Proponents say it encourages more people to vote and also gives smaller parties — such as Canada’s Greens or New Democrats — more clout.
In fact, reality is more complicated. Some countries that use PR have a higher voter turnout than Canada. In Germany, for instance, 72 per cent of registered voters cast ballots in the last election compared with 68 per cent in Canada.
But in Japan, which also uses a form of PR, voter turnout in the last election was just 53 per cent.
New Zealand provides a laboratory example of what can happen when a country moves from firstpast-the-post to PR. In the five national elections before New Zealand’s 1996 switchover to PR, the average voter turnout was 89 per cent.
In the five after the switchover, New Zealand’s average voter turnout slipped to 82 per cent.
New Zealand’s experience also holds a cautionary lesson for leftish parties such as the NDP that hope to do better out of PR.
In that country, the move from first-past-the post led the country’s Labour Party to split into three parts. Two of the three later combined in a tactical alliance. That held for a few years until they split again over New Zealand’s role in the Afghan War.
Still, New Zealand Labour has done well enough in the PR era that it has been able to form coalition governments after three of the past seven elections.
Are countries with PR inherently more unstable than first-past-the post nations? Here too, there is no clear answer. Certainly, PR makes it difficult for a single party to obtain a majority of seats. As a result, governments are usually coalitions. In some countries, such as Israel and Italy, these coalitions can be fragile.
But in other countries that use PR, such as Germany, governments are relatively stable and coalitions tend to hold.
Often that’s because these countries require political parties to meet a significant vote threshold — say 5 per cent of the total — before being allowed to take seats.
In some countries using PR, the need to craft postelection deals gives inordinate power to extreme parties.
Denmark’s decision to seize the assets of refugees entering that country, for instance, is a result of the Liberal government’s reliance on the anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party to stay in power.
Of course, all of this talk of proportional representation may be moot. Trudeau has said he prefers the so-called ranked ballot over classic PR. Used in Australia, the ranked ballot tends to favour big, middle-of-the-road parties.
Poll analyst Eric Grenier calculates that if the ranked ballot had been used in Canada’s last election, the Liberals would have won an even bigger majority of seats.
In the end, I’m not sure if Australia or New Zealand or Germany or Denmark or Japan is any more democratic than Canada. I’m not sure that life will be any better here if Trudeau’s government presses through with what it calls democratic reform. But I’m not sure that it would be any worse either. Similar reform attempts have been defeated by voters in British Columbia, Ontario and Prince Edward Island. A nationwide referendum would probably defeat any scheme the Liberals came up with too, which is why Trudeau says he won’t hold one.
But if the politicians insist we abandon the firstpast-the-post voting system, we can probably live with the result. Other countries do. Thomas Walkom’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.