Losers in sports and in politics often want to change the rules of the game
Posted December 13, 2024
Former Liberal leader Zach Churchill’s swan song included a plea for changes to the electoral process, noting that his party had 23% of the vote but received less than 4% of the seats.
Such has often been the case for second or third place parties in decades past. Yet when their party wins under the current system, the enthusiasm for electoral reform quickly disappears.
In a full proportional system, the leading party would have to get more than 50% of the vote in order to have a majority in the legislature. Houston’s 50%+ win this year is the first since John Buchanan had 50.6% in 1984, though John Savage came very close in 1993.
Parties having a majority of seats are able to make decisions that are quick and cogent, for which voters will hold them accountable. In minority cases there has to be negotiations with one or more opposition parties in order to get legislation passed, especially budgets.
This often leads to ugly compromises. The federal Liberal government has less than half the seats in the first-past-the-post federal voting system. As a result, Jagmeet Singh’s NDP, which received 16% of the vote in 2021, has been able to dictate, as a price for their support, spending programs that the Liberals don’t believe in.
A full proportional system will mean minority governments almost all of the time. It can spawn single issue parties advocating for specific groups of voters.
Had Nova Scotia’s 2021 election been done by the proportionate system there would have been 22 PCs, 20 Liberals, 12 NDPs and one independent.
The Houston government succeeded because it was able to make decisions that were quick and clear. Likewise, the previous Liberal government under Stephen McNeil succeeded in its commitment to fiscal responsibility because it had a majority.
These would have been impossible in a proportionate system with both opposition parties vying to have their favourite ideas incorporated into legislation, leading to ugly compromises.
Imagine what the discussions around the QE2 hospital development would look like. They might have still been debating what was best until the recent election. Or chosen a decision that incorporates conflicting ideas from two or three parties. A camel is a horse that was designed by a committee.
There are many proportionate voting systems in European countries. Usually one or more minority parties add their support to a larger party in order to form a government.
In many cases they are able to demand cabinet positions as the price for their support. This amplifies the power of hard right parties such as Germany’s AfD (Alternative for Germany), which is Eurosceptic and opposes immigration.
That being said, there is an argument for some tweaking to the first-past-the-post system, which leads to polarization between regions. In the 2021 federal election Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives received 1% more votes than Justin Trudeau’s Liberals.
Trudeau received 160 seats to O’Toole’s 119. This difference in voting “efficiency” is the result of the Liberal strategy, which is to focus their program on Canada’s large urban centers and Atlantic Canada.
As the carbon tax became more unpopular, they took it off of fuel oil, which is commonly used in Atlantic Canada, while doing nothing for less polluting natural gas, which is prominent in the prairies. To make their values clear, Minister of Rural Economic Development Gudie Hutchings advised, “Perhaps they need to elect more Liberals in the Prairies.”
A watered down version of proportional voting might be useful. Make the constituencies 10% bigger, so that there are 34 fewer constituency seats. Those 34 could be distributed by the share of votes for parties whose votes are at least 10% of the total. Each party leader would appoint the number of members to which they were entitled.
This would enable a party to add members in areas where the party is underrepresented. It would also simplify the process of adding new talent to a party (hello Mark Carney) without having to find a constituency member willing to resign, to be followed by a byelection.
This would not have changed the 2021 outcome, but it would make the minority votes in lopsided constituencies count and facilitate more geographic representation within parties.
Nova Scotia could do something similar by distributing 6 of the 55 seats based on overall share of vote. In this year’s election it would have given two more seats for the Liberals and one more for the NDP.
Three of the six seats could be allocated to represent Acadian, Indigenous, and African Nova Scotian communities. That would obviate the need for awkward manipulation of constituency borders in pursuit of the same result.
Minority governments are rarely able to implement programs that are ambitious. Voters are best served by majority governments so they know who to reward or punish at the next election.
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