Canada's Lopsided Parliament

Now that it's approaching a month after May's historic federal election, parliament will soon be convening. As is typical in Canadian politics, however, the body count in the lower chamber will look quite different from how the public as a whole actually voted.

In the graph below, the results of the May 2nd election (left) are compared to a hypothetical proportional representation system (right) in which seats are distributed to mirror popular vote share. As you can see, there is a wide discrepancy. 

Why might this be the case?

Most noticeably, Canada is one of the only advanced electoral democracies in the world that still uses first-past-the-post (FPTP) for its voting system. In each of our 308 ridings, the candidate who wins is simply the one who receives the most votes. This approach means that any votes in a riding where your favoured candidate didn't win are useless, as are any votes for a candidate who is at least a single vote ahead of all other opponents. Under FPTP, therefore, a party does not even have to win the most votes to win the most seats, if their support is concentrated in just the right way.

This arrangement benefits parties with strong regional support (e.g. the Bloc Quebecois, at least until this election...) at the expense of parties with moderate national support (e.g. the Green Party). Canada is notoriously regionalistic, and FPTP exacerbates this by allowing candidates to perform better by targeting swing voters in individual ridings than running a broadly appealing national campaign. The Conservative Party is highly adept at this, and they thus have the most efficient vote base out of any party. To illustrate:

This explains why the Conservatives have a majority with only a plurality of the vote, but it also explains why the Greens, with nearly as high a vote percentage as the Bloc, was only able to get one seat this election. It it because their support is spread more or less evenly across the country, but is not concentrated enough in any one riding (except Saanich-Gulf Islands) to win a seat. This makes a vote for the Greens, on average, worth 1/16th of a vote for the Conservatives.

Often it is the voters in the centre who tend to shift their preferences, and these voters tend to live in swing ridings. The result of this is that a minor shift in mainstream public opinion can cause a number of contested districts to change hands, and in Canadian political history has often led to landslide majorities without even a majority of public support.

However, this understanding of the limitations of FPTP does not tell the whole story. The Americans also use this voting system, most recently on a federal level in 2010's congressional elections. Their results, while slightly skewed toward the Republican Party, are still relatively balanced in the whole scheme of things. The main difference between us and them is that while they do indeed use first-past-the-post, they also have a two-party system. We in the Great White North are familiar with a phenomenon which they are not, known as vote-splitting.

Let's say that in the riding of Canadaville, 60% of voters are dissatisfied with Steve Tory, the incumbent MP. However, they cannot agree whom to vote on as an alternative. The voting might play out like this:

• Steve: 40,000
• Jack: 30,000
• Mike: 20,000
• Gilles: 5,000
• Liz: 5,000

Under FPTP, Steve still wins. If this happens in enough ridings (as has occurred particularly in urban BC and Ontario) then a party can win many seats even if most people despise them. First-past-the-post does not allow a "lesser of two evils" option.

As an alternative, we have only to look at other advanced democracies, particularly in Europe. A system of proportional representation (pick one, there's hundreds) would potentially mean that your vote would mean something even if you weren't in a swing riding or voting for a regionally appealing party. It would also have the advantage of making it easier, with more evenly distributed seats, for parties to cooperate and focus on issues with broad national appeal. To be certain, the current system does have its advantages insofar as having a local representative, et cetera, but I think the day has come where regionalistic majority governments without a true majority mandate no longer represent healthy democracy. Canada should take that step forward and make a system where all voices count for something.

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On a side note, since it has been in the news recently, I wanted to briefly mention the per vote subsidy that Harper has announced they will be phasing out as of this year's revised budget. Abolishing it really does fit in with that Canadian history of rampant regionalism. Since extra votes in winning ridings (or any vote at all in losing ridings) do not count for anything, and now that parties have no financial incentive to gain the support of as broad a public base as possible, expect more of the same district-by-district bribery that has been perfected under the Harper Government(TM). This also makes parties more beholden to the diehard partisans who contribute money, especially with the raising of the personal contribution limit almost a given. Parties like the Greens (and now the Liberals) with nascent or floundering fundraising capabilities will find themselves unable to keep up with those who have wealthy and generous donors.

To be honest, that last point really burns me. Regardless of what you think of the rest of his time as Prime Minister, Jean Chretien did a very noble thing in choking off his own party's funding stream by banning corporate and union donations. With the per-vote subsidy and the subsequent lowering of the personal contribution limit, it meant that people without money who voted for a particular party (and the party that spoke for their needs and concerns) had a more equal voice. Now what we are once again saying is "if you have money to spare on politics, your voice counts more". I didn't think that was the kind of society we were, but it goes to show what I know.

If you want my opinion, scrap donations altogether (talk about unwanted taxpayer support - most of it goes to the 75% tax deductions on political donations, which is far more generous than for charities), ban advertising between elections (no more smear campaigns, please and thank you), tightly define and limit the use of government resources to promote semi-political messages (such as the Economic Action Plan, which was heavily advertised and closely linked with the Conservative Party), and make parties solely dependent on a per-vote subsidy (if you want money, you've got to work for it, not just appease a wealthy core constituency). There's my two cents.


Thanks for reading!

-Matt

Election Aftermath: Dissecting the Results

"I'm not sure what hit me, but it was orange and had a moustache."

That might be what an astonished Liberal candidate might say at this point, having been thoroughly trounced in last night's election results.

I will admit that last night was not an easy time for me. Although there were elements of the results that I relished, several were quite painful and affected me emotionally in ways I didn't think politics could. I have committed myself in the past to being as neutral as possible when writing about these matters, but I am an opinionated (if not necessarily partisan) individual and I will express my feelings as appropriately as I can without skewing the factuality of this piece. Because the shifts we saw were so complicated and unexpected, I will break it down by party.

Conservatives


Well, Stephen Harper finally has his majority, and managed to eviscerate his hated Liberal Party in the process. I, along with many pundits and analysts, was surprised by this result. Polls had consistently shown him to be below both the vote and seat thresholds required to predict a majority government, so what happened?

In the starting days of the campaign, the party lost ground in the battleground provinces of British Columbia and Ontario. The Liberals had built up some steam and the contested seats that both parties were fighting for were looking like they might turn or stay red. When the NDP started its long upswing, however, the main impact of this outside of Quebec was to split the centre-left vote. The Liberals fell, and the Conservatives were able to gain enough votes to easily take advantage of their temporarily weakened rivals. Because they swept by narrow margins in Toronto, they were able to gain twenty or so seats with only a few percentage point increases in their popular vote share. Harper's strategy of running a low-key, consistent, and tightly controlled campaign was heavily criticized, but shored up enough of his votes to handily win against a divided opposition.

Will this lead to better policymaking and more civility in the government, or will this election have been a day of wild voting followed by a four year hangover? I'm inclined to think the latter, but I want to give Harper the benefit of the doubt in this new scenario so that it is not people like myself that start this new parliament on a sour note.

New Democrats


I guess since they are Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition now (well, soon), I suppose it's fitting to put them second on this list. For better or worse, anyone whose fortunes changed during this campaign (with perhaps the exception of Elizabeth May) owed it to Jack Layton. The NDP surge has remarkably redrawn the Canadian electoral map and, indeed, turned what was initially billed a snoozer into an exciting and unpredictable campaign.

For this party, the surge came around the French language debates, where Layton's casual (some say folksy) and endearing performance won him much support amongst Quebec voters. Additionally, his strong appearance on the popular show Tout le monde en parle cemented his viability as a social democratic alternative to the sovereigntist Bloc Quebecois. Given that his party and Quebec share many values, in a way it is not surprising that he connected - but the wider impact of this was to give the impression of NDP momentum in national polls when in fact they were only rising in Quebec. When voters elsewhere saw this rise, they largely jumped ship from the Liberals (some from the Conservatives) to a party they likely felt they could support without it feeling like a wasted vote anymore. This surge carried right to the end of the campaign, and in fact the NDP vote was even higher than polled. Many analysts predicted the opposite would happen - that these new New Democrats would not stick with their stated preference, since the young voters are notoriously volatile and the older voters might be concerned about fiscal responsibility and head back to the Liberals. This was a very reasonable prediction (one I shared) but it did not pan out, likely due to the weakened Liberal numbers at the end of the campaign and the belief that the Big Red Tent was about to be washed away by the Orange Wave.

The result of this was an unprecedented number of seats - the NDP's rise in the rest of Canada cemented their rise in Quebec and they soundly beat the Bloc Quebecois - the same Bloc, I remind you, that was thought to have a more or less permanent grip on two-thirds of Quebec's 75 seats. While they obviously did not form government, the NDP breakthrough in Quebec gave them more seats than the Liberals have had in years. Which takes us to...

Liberals


If there was any result of the evening I was most astonished at, it was probably this one. While the polls from the latter half of the campaign did not bode well for the party, I had no idea that their results would be this catastrophic. Talk of Ignatieff possibly reaching "Dion-esque" lows was quickly replaced by desperate attacks on health care later on in the campaign (which probably just helped the NDP), followed by a complete refusal to discuss polls and frantic urging for core voters to get out, followed by stunned and horrified silence. For those who passionately dislike the Liberal Party, I suspect this was a satisfying moment.

It was thought in almost all quarters that Ignatieff ran a very clean campaign, didn't completely humiliate himself in the debates, and at the very least had a more motivated and energized base than Dion did in 2008. I believe all of these factors to be true, so it raises the question of why the Liberal vote share dropped so dramatically. Once again, I believe the answer links back to the NDP, and to a lesser extent the Conservatives.

With the Liberals moving noticeably to the left in this election, Ignatieff's narrative was to define this race as between himself and Harper. This worked to a degree, and the NDP vote fell with much of it going to the Liberals in the first half of the campaign. The latter were especially competitive in Ontario by the midpoint, which, had the trend continued, could have allowed them to make considerable seat gains (I won't speculate, but a 10 seat gain wouldn't have been unreasonable).

However, the Ignatieff team underestimated the seasoned veterans they were campaigning against. By essentially throwing the policy ball into Jack Layton's court, all he had to do was pick it up and they were toast. Ignatieff did not do exceptionally in the debates, and so simultaneously failed to shore up his vote and failed to attract the crucial undecided crowd. That, combined with his stream-of-consciousness style speech-making, made it tough to stick to a central theme, and even tougher for the (shall we say 'lazy') journalists to pick out sound bites. Let's face it - smiles and one-liners work well on television, drawn out thoughts and stern lectures do not. When Jack began to climb the hill in Quebec, left-leaning Liberals and those frightened of a Harper majority sensed opportunity and calamity, respectively, and jumped ship.

What I can not explain is why the base just did not show. Possibly this was due to apocalyptic poll numbers and an increasingly desperate Ignatieff scaring people away from the party, but perhaps we will never completely understand all the factors that caused the Liberal vote to dry up. Since many of their ridings were narrowly held, the transfer of votes to the NDP and a moderately strengthened Conservative Party meant a number of losses that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Had the NDP surge not occurred, we would likely have had an Ignatieff-led minority government supported by the New Democrats. Funny how a French language debate can change things.

I will say as a final note on this party that I was saddened when I saw Ignatieff had not even won his own seat. As is Stephane Dion, Michael Ignatieff is an honourable man who was intent on serving his country. I have met him in person and he just does not fit the foul picture that Conservative ads have painted of him. He has given all his effort to the party and his leadership, and I had high hopes he would lead this country into a responsible and progressive future. For those who will gloat that he is going to move back to the US now, I shouldn't have to remind you that he only spent five years there, having spent most of his time abroad as a BBC journalist and teaching at Oxford and Cambridge. Additionally, although he did refer to America as "our country" (not that it wouldn't be Harper's wet dream to do the same...) he was always known as a Canadian and he referred to and understood himself as such. He has been involved in Canadian life from a very young age, having been the national youth director for the first Trudeau campaign. Although I understand that people's minds are largely made up on a man they barely knew, I hope that in his final days as party leader and leader of the official opposition we can be respectful and leave him to retire in peace. He has mentioned, by the way, that he wants to stay and teach in Canada. So there.

Bloquistes


This one is pretty easy to dissect. Over the years, as separation has become a less salient issue, Quebecers (largely a centre-left bunch) had parked their votes with the Bloc as a party that came closest to their values and brought the most benefit to their province. Duceppe obviously took these votes for granted, and looked almost bored during the campaign - there were times during the debates when I wondered if the usually feisty leader was asleep. When Jack Layton clicked, though, federalist Bloc voters found that they did have a choice, and it was revealed how little power the Bloc actually had. They were trounced by the NDP in almost every riding (including Duceppe's own) and reduced to a measly four seats. Much like the Liberals, this once-dominant party has now been more than decimated. What remains to be seen is whether they will be able to take votes back from the NDP (their drop was very sudden, unlike the Liberals, so they still have a powerful infrastructure), or whether they truly lack resilience and will cease to exist altogether (this largely depends on whether the NDP lives up to expectations, along with the random fluctuations of Quebec's bizarre psychology).

Greens


This was a satisfying moment for me, because the Green Party has broken a psychological barrier and is finally starting to make its not insignificant vote share count for something. Additionally, Elizabeth May is a courageous and honest campaigner whom I believe has the potential to build something of a centrist replacement to the Liberals if circumstances permit. However, the danger in their only having one seat is that while they have a moral victory, the Green voice is still very weak, and the fortunes of the party as a whole largely depend on the in-your-face May. If she ends up turning off too many potential voters, they could be out the door very quickly. Still, I see them having room for growth in the current political dynamic and this could well be the beginning of a bright future for them in Canada.

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Well, that's all for today. I realize I dipped a bit into partisanship, and for that I make no apologies. I am not afraid to divulge where my preferences lie when it will impact how I tell the story, and I will continue to do so where warranted.

For next time I want to focus on the failures of our voting system in this election, and I would also like to examine all parties but the Liberals in particular to see what kind of future is ahead.

Thanks for reading!

-Matt