Imagine a House of Commons that actually looked the way voters wanted it to look when they cast their collective ballots.
On a national basis, instead of the current breakdown – Liberals, 155; Reform, 60; Bloc QuŽbecois, 44; NDP, 21; Progressive Conservative, 20; Independent, 1 – the new House of Commons would look like this:
Liberals, 117; Reform, 59; PC, 59; BQ, 33; NDP, 33.
There would be a minority Liberal government.
If the calculation was done provincially, the Liberals would have won 51 Ontario seats rather than 101.
In Quebec, the BQ would have been reduced to 29 seats, the Liberals would retain their 27 seats and the PCs would have risen from four to 17. The NDP would have two Quebec MPs.
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The discrepancy between voting results and political results comes because Canada uses the “first-past-the-post” system of elections. The candidate with the most votes, even if it is 21 percent in a five person race, wins. In that case, the 79 percent who voted for other candidates would lose their vote.
“It is a system that makes many Canadians feel powerless and alienated from the system,” said George Perlin, director of the Queen’s University-based Centre for Democracy. “If you have voted NDP all these years in Alberta but never elected an MP, you don’t feel represented.”
Nor do the hundreds of thousands of Ontario voters who opted for Reform this time without electing an MP, he said.
Conservatives lose out
In 1993, 16 percent of Canadians voted for the Conservatives and elected fewer than one percent of the MPs.
“I think that distortion is a factor leading to declining public confidence,” said Perlin. “I think it shows itself in declining voter turnouts. I think we are sliding toward a crisis in democracy.”
At Carleton University in Ottawa, political scientist Jon Pammett agreed.
“I definitely think there is a growing feeling that the present first-past-the-post system leaves a lot of people unrepresented,” he said.
Both men advocate a form of proportional representation, a system which apportions House of Commons seats at least in part on popular vote.
Variations of the system exist in most democracies of Western Europe, in Russia and New Zealand.
Perlin said the best system would be a mix of locally elected MPs with constituency bases and a portion of MPs appointed to the Commons from party lists, based on popular vote.
“I think a PR system would help us overcome the growing regionalization of parties and representation,” said Pammett. “Most parties would represent most regions where they have some measure of support.”
In most systems where proportional representation is used, a party must receive a minimum percentage of votes before it qualifies for seats. In Germany, it is five percent.
“With a threshold like that, we might get some different voices in our Parliament and public debate, parties like the Green Party,” said Perlin. “That would be healthy.”
For all their praise of the system, both said they do not expect it to happen soon.
“There will be a flurry of interest because this Parliament is so regional and distorted but then it will fall off the table again,” predicted Pammett.
Not all black and white
There are several problems.
It almost always would produce a minority government, since only three times in the past 80 years has a government been elected nationally with 50 percent of the votes cast.
Many Canadians equate minority government with instability and weak government, said Perlin. “I disagree. Some of our most effective and creative governments have been minority.”
But the main problem is that it would require action by politicians who benefit from the existing system. Only when the winner-take-all system throws a party out of office does it discover its unfairness.
Perlin noted the Conservatives, some of whom recently have talked about proportional representation, did not think it such a good idea in 1988 when 43 percent of voters gave the Tories 57 percent of Commons seats and a mandate to implement free trade.
