People who have seriously studied electoral systems — which is to say, people who are not journalists or politicians — have concluded it's impossible to devise a perfect one. A guy named Kenneth Arrow even won a Nobel Prize for describing what he called the "impossibility theorem" of voting; basically, democracy only works as a mathematical concept when someone wins an absolute majority. If there's no majority, no matter what convoluted style of balloting you use, the outcome will always be unfair and imperfect.
The Trudeau administration has great faith Dr. Arrow can be outsmarted by 12 politicians sitting around a table.
The government's electoral reform committee, unveiled by the Prime Minister amid great fanfare last week, is itself a fascinating illustration of the difficulties of democracy. It contains five Liberals, three Conservatives, two NDPers, one member of the Bloc, and Elizabeth May. The premise is this elegantly curated delegation accurately reflects the preferences of the public. But does it?
Five of 12 is 41.6666…%. According to the official numbers from Elections Canada, the Liberals won 39.5% of the popular vote in the 2015 election, so, after rounding, we see the Liberals are over-representing themselves on the committee somewhere around 2%. A similar comparison finds the Conservatives under-represented by 6.9% (25% vs. 31.9%), and the NDP by 3% (16.7% vs. 19.7%). The Bloc and Greens, in turn, are dramatically over-represented by margins of 3.6% and 4.9% (8.3% vs. 3.4%, 8.3% vs. 4.7%) respectively. Added together, that's around 20 percentage points of deception.
The fact that Elizabeth May gets an entire seat to herself is particularly preposterous when we consider the 0.7% of Canadians — over 130,000 people — who voted for equally small, pointless parties have no representation whatsoever. And let's not forget the millions of Canadians who didn't vote at all — around 31.7% of registered voters representing 47.5% of the national population. The committee claims it is interested in placating Canadians who "don't engage in or care about politics" yet it consists entirely of representatives of Canadians who do.
(Just as an aside, there is absolutely no evidence anyone stays away from the ballot box because they dislike the electoral system. A 2003 study commissioned by Elections Canada found the most oft-stated explanation by non-voters for their behavior was a broad dislike of politicians, political parties, and government; a mere 1% cited the mechanics of the elections themselves.)
The Liberals never wanted to change our electoral system this way. They only embraced the paradox of using an unrepresentative committee to change what they claim is an unrepresentative method of electing parliamentarians because their previous paradox — we'll just use our unrepresentative parliamentary majority to ram through whatever — was too galling. The Conservatives have proposed a national referendum as a rational solution, to which the Liberals have offered a series of increasingly bizarre, if not dadaist, rebuttals, from accusations of racism and sexism (women and minorities don't vote in referendums, scolds the democratic reform minister) to the Prime Minister's dishonest, but revealing claim that referendums are too often used to "stop things."
I bear no romantic illusions about Canada's present electoral system. Like everything else in government, it is a flawed creation of man. But it is not an actively evil system, and its existence is not an unambiguous crime for which some self-evident solution exists. Canadian democracy is worse than that of many other western nations, but a slightly inaccurate tally of MPs hardly tops the list of its most pressing problems. Indeed, changing the electoral system will almost certainly make what's truly bad even worse.
As discussed previously, a ranked or list-based voting system will deform the process of electing our all-powerful prime minister from something relatively intuitive and predictable into something chaotic and obtuse over which the public will exercise little control. It will even likely fail to make parliament as representative as promised, given the constitutional barriers preventing effective rep-by-pop. It will, however, almost certainly make it easier for Liberals to get elected, and it's on those grounds the government mounts the barricades.
The progressive drive for electoral reform is motivated by anxiety that government's right to exert power over increasingly large realms of life is compromised by public doubt about the method in which that government is chosen. A conservative would respond that an easier solution would be for government to simply do less. That is, alas, another forbidden tangent in the tightly scripted conversation we're supposed to be having.
Photo Credit: CBC
Written by J.J McCullough
