Like many Canadians, I was sorely disappointed this week when Justin Trudeau made it clear that he would break his oft-repeated promise that the 2015 election would be the last one held using the First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) voting system.
It has long bothered me that under FPTP a party with as little as 38% of the vote can win more than 50% of the seats in the House of Commons, because when a party has more than 50% of the seats, as Trudeau’s party currently does, it has 100% of the power. That strikes me as undemocratic, but even more it strikes me as unhealthy. By limiting diversity of opinion in debates, and by removing checks and balances on power, I think FPTP gives us ill-conceived and poorly-thought-out policies. And then a different party wins 100% of the power with 38% or 40% or 44% of the vote, and the scythe swings in the other direction for a few years. And that strikes me as the exact opposite of stability.
I was skeptical of Trudeau’s claim this week that electoral reform was being shelved because there is no consensus on the whether to make a change, let alone how. Four of the five parties on the committee studying the issue recommended a version of Proportional Representation (PR), where the percentage of seats a party gets is closely related to the percentage of votes it gets. As Fair Vote Canada, a group that lobbies for PR noted this week, 88% of the witnesses who appeared before the committee, and 87% of the public at its consultations, expressed a preference for PR. Only Trudeau’s party, the Liberal Party, was not swayed by the testimony.
And I was offended by the fear mongering Trudeau engaged in when he suggested that it would be “irresponsible” to proceed with electoral reform because it would harm “Canada’s stability” and might lead to “an augmentation of extremist voices in th(e) House.” Canada is a country of laws. It is as illegal to counsel someone else to break the laws of this country as it is to break the laws yourself. And the laws apply to everyone, including members of political parties and even religious groups. So I wonder just what form of “extremist” political party Trudeau is referring to.
Fear-mongering language about “radical or extreme” parties was also used in the MyDemocracy.ca survey the Trudeau government sprang on Canadians in December, shortly after the committee released its report in favour of PR.
The survey, in case your attention was elsewhere, like Christmas or Hannukah or New Year’s celebrations, was widely criticized and even ridiculed. Responding to the survey was voluntary and there was no obvious way to prevent extremely keen individuals from completing it more than once, so the sample wouldn’t necessarily be representative of society at large.
Then there was the issue of its vague language. The terms First-Past-the-Post and Proportional Representation were never mentioned in the survey; nor was preferential balloting (a.k.a. ranked balloting), Trudeau’s preferred option, an option that would likely make Trudeau’s party the governing party in perpetuity. Instead, there were vague questions about individuals’ values.
Yesterday I had a close look at the survey results to see if they justified Trudeau’s back-pedalling. And indeed, just as his new Minister of Economic Institutions, Karina Gould, said on Radio One yesterday, most Canadians who responded to the survey are satisfied with the way our democracy currently works: 17% said they were very satisfied and 50% said they were somewhat satisfied.
Then things got confusing.
In question after question, a clear majority of survey respondents indicated that they favoured a form of government in which several parties have to work together to make decisions and where no one party can act on its own. When given a choice between “A government where one party governs and can make decisions on its own OR a government where several parties have to collectively agree before a decision is made,” for example, 70% chose the latter. But this exactly not the kind of democracy we currently have.
Yes, there is debate in the House of Commons, but Members of Parliament are usually required to vote how their party leadership tells them if they want their political careers to continue. Yes, there are committees, but their membership usually reflects the distribution of the seats in the House, so again a party with more than 50% of the seats in the House gets more than 50% of the seats around the committee room table, even if they only got 38% of the vote. There is no way to ensure that diverse opinions are actually considered and that the governing party doesn’t blithely ignore opinions it doesn’t share.
I walk away from this experience with the nagging suspicion that a lot of Canadians don’t really understand how their government currently works, and the sense that a lot more work needs to be done to educate them about that and the alternatives to it before there can be a rational debate on this issue.
One thing that hasn’t changed is my belief that the percentage of seats a party gets should be closely related to the percentage of votes it gets and that government by coalitions of parties will increase the diversity of knowledge and experience involved and improve the quality of the decisions made. And for that I will continue to fight.