First Past The Post Is Preposterous

Canada's electoral system has been distorting the political will of the people for nearly 100 years. When will we finally get around to fixing it?

One could write that Canada’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system is bound to eventually fail, but let’s face it – it already has. It’s failing us right now. The question is, when is it going to be fixed?

It has failed by being unable to accurately reflect the popular vote outside of a paternalistic 19th-century two-party scenario. As soon as other parties began to enter the fray during the social tumult of the 1920s, FPTP began to produce wonky results. And Canadian voters of all stripes started to get ripped off.

Since then things have gone from bad to worse. During most of the 1990s there were five parties in the House of Commons, two of them almost entirely regional. The discrepancy between the popular vote and actual results became something of a joke. Things have improved marginally since the uniting of the Right in 2003, but the system is fundamentally broken; Canadians vote for one election result and get another.

And that is because, in Canada, there is essentially no national election. Instead we have 308 mini-elections. Each one of them does reflect the political will of the few thousand people living in each riding. But when the results are aggregated on the national stage, the will of the Canadian electorate is grossly distorted.

It’s not much of a surprise that against the growing calls for electoral reform, certain vested interests, aided by a chorus of the chronically uninformed, have vociferously denounced the obvious solution: proportional representation (PR). Among their claims is the assertion that PR causes political instability. Invariably they raise the examples of Italy and Israel, countries that have PR and whose coalition governments fall on a startlingly frequent basis. What opponents fail to mention of course is that the vast majority of democracies have some form of PR (and coalition governments to boot). To condemn PR because of only two countries is like condemning ice cream because there are a couple of flavours you don’t like.

In fact, it is the dysfunctionality of FPTP that has the potential to cause real instability in this country. There seems to be a clear correlation between our experience of casting a ballot only to get slapped in the face with distorted results, and declining voting turnouts. Why would a Liberal in Alberta bother voting? Why would a Conservative in Toronto make the effort? Their votes are wasted. When citizens don’t get what they voted for, when their votes become meaningless, they lose faith in their own democracy. That is exactly what we are witnessing today, and it bodes ill for all of us.

Falling voting rates, and a general decline in civic literacy and public participation, can set the conditions that lead to genuine volatility. Governments that hardly anyone has voted for have by definition a very weak mandate (e.g., only 21 per cent of Canadian voters actually voted for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives in the last election). When other centres of power arise, usually military and plutocratic groups in alliance, it is far easier for them to challenge governments that have iffy mandates. Moreover it is that much easier for them to do so in a culture of widespread civic alienation.

Fortunately there is a growing movement for electoral reform. Since 2000, Fair Vote Canada and some similarly-oriented provincial groups have been actively promoting PR, and have managed to involve Canadians from across the political spectrum. Fighting against powerful forces – again, from left to right – that spread disinformation and fear, Canadians working for some form of PR have managed to initiate referenda and keep the issue alive. While not yet successful in making systemic changes, these electoral reform activists have managed to make the inadequacies of our FPTP system a prominent topic in the public discourse.

There is no perfect system of PR, and certainly no magic bullet that will enliven our civic culture. But a demokratia that actually reflects the electoral will of the demos would be a giant step in the right direction. The disintegrative power of regional parties would be reduced, and the experience of other democracies that use PR shows it is almost certain more women MPs would be elected, an area where Canada lags. More than anything else, Canadians will finally see the popular vote manifested in election results – and begin to know their own democratic potential.

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