This past weekend marked the one-year point before the next planned federal election, presuming that the fixed election date is respected.  During an ensuing Twitter debate about ways in which the date could be changed, either through the prime minister advising an early election or by somehow advising for a later one given that the constitutional limit is five years between elections and not four, one fairly prominent political commentator insisted that fixed election dates were "more democratic."

Nonsense.

The received wisdom is that allowing a government to call an early election gives them too much power over the process, and that they can time an election to as to catch the opposition unaware or when they're not ready, and thus try to gain an unfair advantage, or to simply take advantage of favourable polls.  Fixed election dates, they insist, allow for opposition parties to plan and fundraise ahead of time, so it balances out the government's advantage of being in power when the date comes.  None of this is actually true, and instead what we get are governments that shift their incentives to the point where they backload their agendas, and campaigns that now last in excess of a year, necessitating bigger pre-writ budgets for even more advertising, much like the interminable campaigns we've come to expect south of the border.

To start with, fixed election dates don't really work well with our system of government, because it's one that's based on confidence rather than fixed election cycles.  Why this is important is because fixed election dates can work to undermine the principle of confidence, particularly in minority parliaments, when the people treat "early" elections as a threat to be avoided under the rubric that people are apparently so fatigued by the act of marking a ballot that they can't possibly do it more than once every four years.  Regardless of that fact, we need to remember that because we have largely avoided a fixed election date in this country, it has allowed us to go to the ballot box on significant issues, like free trade agreements.  By ensuring that we time elections to a calendar rather than to events, it has a means of reducing the ways in which governments can go to the people over the pressing matters of the day.

Of course, a government still could under the current fixed election date legislation, since the statute can't actually bind the Governor General in her exercise of her reserve powers.  As has been demonstrated during the Harper era, when he advised an early dissolution in 2008 despite his own government having passed the fixed election date law, the law is merely symbolic (a fact that was backed up by the courts when Democracy Watch attempted to litigate the matter), but it carries moral weight on the part of the media and adherents to the notion that fixed election dates are good things.  As such, it has the power to derail an election called to address a matter deemed important enough for public consultation.

When it comes to the notion that governments can conveniently time elections early in order to capitalize on good polls, that's also something of a myth that has been disproven by history, perhaps most famously when Ontario premier David Peterson went to the polls early and was resoundingly defeated, including in his own seat, because the lack of a defining issue had the electorate (quite correctly) assuming that he cynically called an early election to take advantage of good polls and to get it out of the way before the economic downturn got much worse.  The other oft-cited example was when Jean Chrétien called a snap election shortly after Stockwell Day was made leader of the Canadian Alliance, but that forgets that Day both dared Chrétien to make the call, and that Day's shortcomings as party leader soon exploded in a party schism that eventually led to the formation of the modern-day Conservative Party.  In other words, the loss gives Chrétien a little too much credit for the early election call.

Something else that has metastasized as a result of the fixed election dates are party leadership campaigns that have gone from a couple of months, to ones over this current electoral cycle that were between a year and 18-months long.  Because those parties didn't have to worry about an election that could come at any point, they dragged out their leadership processes, which exacerbated their corrosive effect on our democratic system.  Such a lengthy process, that results in a separate electoral process for a party leader that garners thousands of votes to provide a false "democratic legitimacy" that obliterates accountability within the party, has not only effectively paralyzed parties through the duration, which hurts the practice of Responsible Government and holding government to account, but in some cases like we're seeing with the NDP currently it means that they've allowed their fundraising and readiness to lapse, which hurts them in the longer term.

I would also add that we're seeing this effect around the artificial four-year election cycle that has riding associations hobbled, having gone from being able to run open nomination races during the unpredictable calls, to being barely able to run them in a fixed election cycle without having to rely on protected nominations for incumbents something which was distasteful enough when they needed to be ready for an election at any moment during the minority years, but is especially offensive during the fixed cycle.

For any observers of the current government, it should also become perfectly obvious that they've backloaded their agenda to such an extent that there were few early wins, and we can expect the rollout out any number of spending promises and goodies for voters the closer we get to the fixed election date.  After all, they need to be reminded about why they need to vote for this government again.  It hasn't made the system more democratic, but it simply let governments shift to different incentives for voters to return them.  Different calculations and machinations aren't necessarily better ones, but proponents for a more Americanized system seem to forget this, to our collective detriment.