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