The road to electoral reform.

• Author: Reid, Scott

Electoral reform is on the agenda in at least five provinces and each has taken a different approach to the process of implemention electoral reform. The House of Commons has also examined the question and in June 2005 one of its Committees presented its report. This article considers why it has been so difficult to reach any consensus on electoral reform and suggests a way to allow the Canadian electorate to play a larger role in the ultimate decision.

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Given that the first-past- the-post system of electing MPs has had very few overt defenders in the past few years (1)--particularly among politicians, who are ever-sensitive to the ebb and flow of political fashion--one could be forgiven for thinking that it will be easy to develop a nationwide coalition in favour of a new and better electoral system. But such a coalition is unlikely to gel any time in the near future, if the country insists on using its traditional political processes for seeking change.

The reason for this is straightforward. Politicians are primarily concerned about getting reelected, and notwithstanding the failings of the current electoral system, every MP in the House of Commons understands that the first-past-the-post system (FPTP) has one redeeming virtue: it got him or her elected. So naked self-interest on its own will not predispose MPs to unite behind any single alternative to the status quo.

To be sure, most party leaders can point to an alternative electoral system with respectable antecedents in some other country, that would have produced more seats for their own party than actually were produced by FPTP in the most recent federal election. (2)

But any specific new system can only be beneficial to one or another of the political parties if it is at the expense of one or more of the other political parties. This is true whether the alternative under consideration is the Irish-style single transferable vote in multi-member ridings (STV), the Australian system of preferential or "alternative" voting within single-member ridings (AV), or the German multi-member proportional system (MMP). In the end, any change to the status quo must inevitably harm the interests of more sitting MPs than it helps.

The likeliest scenario is that MPs of all stripes will support electoral reform in principle, while shifting majorities within the House of Commons will remain opposed to any specific proposal in practice.

As is always the case when the status quo confronts a range of deadlocked alternative options, neither positive action nor public advocacy is required in order to keep FPTP in place. FPTP is simply the default solution that goes on and on, as long as majority support cannot be cobbled together for any specific alternative.

The irony, is that under such a scenario, no politician need stick out his or her neck to actually defend the FPTP system from which he or she is benefiting. Instead, each elected official need only point to his or her own preferred electoral system as the only truly acceptable solution to what ails Canadian democracy, and then vote against whatever other alternative is being placed before the House of Commons--in the name of democracy.

Being freed from the need to defend the status quo is liberation indeed, since the perverse results of FPTP in Canada are so widely known that they scarcely bear repeating. A sample of the oddities that this system has produced at the federal level includes:

* 1963-1980: the disastrous impact on national unity of the near complete freeze-out of Conservative MPs from Quebec prior to the Mulroney sweep of 1984, and the near-elimination of Liberal representation in Western Canada under Prime Ministers Trudeau and Turner.

* 1993: the reduction of the Progressive Conservative caucus to two MPs--even though the party had won a greater share of the popular vote (16%) than did the Bloc Quebecois, which captured 54 seats with 13.5% of the national vote and became the Official Opposition. This election, more than any other, proves the validity of Andrew Coyne's assertion that "the party that can cluster its votes geographically will win many more seats than a party whose support is spread more broadly and evenly, rewarding regional grievance-mongering at the expense of a national vision." (3)

* 1997: FPTP was responsible for turning Jean Chretien's very poor 38.5% showing at the polls into a majority mandate.

* 2000: I had a personal taste of how FPTP distorts electoral results when I first entered the House of Commons as one of only two Canadian Alliance MPs elected in Ontario, in an election where my party had won half as many votes as the Liberals--who were rewarded by FPTP with 100 Ontario seats.

Similar stories occur at the provincial level. Examples include the NDP victory in British Columbia in 1996, and the Parti Quebecois victory in 1998, in elections where both parties had lost the popular vote to their Liberal opponents. Equally peculiar has been the grotesque over-weighting that sometimes has occurred when a party has been awarded every single seat in a provincial legislature, as the result of an election in which it has won a much more modest percentage of the vote. This happened, for example, in the New Brunswick election of 1987, when Frank McKenna's Liberals won just over twice as many votes as their Conservative opponents, and took every seat in the Assembly.

So public opinion is not a...