If you want to know why Canada's electoral system needs to change, election reform advocates will point you to the last federal election.
Just 39.5 per cent of Canadians supported the Liberals in the last federal election. Due to the current electoral system, they ended up with 54.4 per cent of the seats.
"Somehow or another, 40 per cent of the vote equals 60 per cent of the seats equals 100 per cent of the power," says Wilfred Day, electoral analyst with Fair Vote Canada.
This wasn't an isolated incident. As Day notes, the last time we had an election where the party with the majority (i.e. more than half) of the popular vote won more than half of the seats at the federal level was 1984. In every vote since (and most of the ones before then), a majority of Canadians did not vote for the party that won control of the government.
"You don't have a democratic government when you have minority rule," he says.
Simple system, weird results
Canada has a first-past-the-post electoral system, says Dennis Pilon, a professor of political science at Ontario's York University and author of two books on electoral reform: you mark an X on a ballot and whomever gets the most Xs wins. If you get even one more vote than any other individual candidate, you get all the power.
Day and Fair Vote Canada argue that this means your vote is "wasted" if it doesn't go to the winner – only those who back the winner get a representative in Parliament. About 54.8 per cent of the votes in St. Albert-Edmonton in the last election were wasted this way, reports wastedvotes.ca.
It also leads to strange results. Under proportional representation, where you win power in proportion to the votes you receive, 40 per cent of the vote gets you 40 per cent of the seats.
Due to first-past-the-post, the Liberals got 60 per cent of the seats in 1993 with just 41.3 per cent of the vote. The PCs, meanwhile, got 0.7 per cent of the seats despite having 3.6 per cent of the vote.
Another bizarre result occurred in 1993 when the Bloc Québécois – a separatist party – represented the official Opposition. Based on the popular vote, official Opposition status should have gone to the Reform Party, as it was the second-most popular party nationally.
We got the Bloc because first-past-the-post rewards regional concentration of voters, Pilon says. Under it, if you have enough voters in any one riding, you win it, so if you have a lot of voters in a place with a lot of ridings, you win big.
"Because of (the Bloc's) regional concentration of votes, they were able to turn less than 50 per cent of Quebec's votes into almost all of the seats in Quebec," he says.
Likewise, parties with dispersed support are punished. The NDP and the Green Party racked up 19.7 per cent and 3.4 per cent of the vote in 2015 but just 13 per cent and 0.3 per cent of the seats because those votes were spread out across too many ridings.
This means that the worth of your vote depends on who gets it. A 2006 study by Fair Vote Canada of the 2004 federal election found that the Bloc got one MP for every 31,000 of its supporters. The NDP, meanwhile, got one MP per 111,000 supporters, while the Greens got zero per 580,000.
Unrepresentative democracy
This emphasis on regionalism means parties can ignore regions where they don't have concentrated support, Day says. The Liberals long wrote off western Canada because they couldn't win seats there, for example, while the Conservatives ignored Quebec.
"You're not trying to appeal to the whole country," he says, which is bad for national unity.
This leads to wild shifts in policy, as each government tries to overturn the actions of the previous, Day says. Governments with proportional representation such as Germany have stronger policy continuity because their parties know to work together – unless there's a big shift in support, there's no point in triggering an early election.
Canada's system also contributes to low voter turnout, Day says. While the reasons behind falling turnout are complex, Fair Vote Canada cites research by political scientist Arend Lijphart that suggests nations with proportional representation systems had 7.5 per cent higher voter turnout than those with majoritarian ones, which includes first-past-the-post.
And it makes the system look as if its rigged in favour of certain parties, Pilon says. When the Green Party can rack up over half a million votes in an election (2006) without getting a single seat, it starts to raise questions about the legitimacy of the system.
Time for a change
"Our current system isn't very democratic and just about any other system would be better," Pilon says.
Next week, the Gazette will look at options for those changes.
