Anything but the will of the majority: democracy failed us under first-past-the-post

Canada's longest election campaign in a century has produced a first-ever result: a third-place party vaulting to a landslide win. As Western provinces will appreciate, this was not exactly the will of the electorate.

But that's political irony for you. As Eastern provinces would appreciate, the previous three federal elections did not exactly reflect the will of the people, either. And before that, the West spent a long time on the outside looking in.

In fact, in living memory, no federal election has ever fully reflected the will of the majority of Canadian voters.

Fortunately, that record has a good chance of ending soon. In this election, about 62 per cent of Canadian voters cast their ballot for a party that had promised immediate electoral reform as part of their platform. (That would be all the parties, minus the Tories, who reject any such notion and the Bloc which was silent on the matter.)

With just 39.5 per cent of the popular vote, the Liberal Party and leader Justin Trudeau secured 184 seats in an expanded Parliament of 338 seats. Proportionally, that's close enough to the result gained by the Conservatives under Stephen Harper last time around.

In each case, more than 60 per cent of Canadians had voted for something other than the party that won. In Canada we call that democracy, and it generally serves the incumbents pretty well.

In the hours before polls closed in Quebec, Ontario and the prairie provinces, pundits had a lot of time to watch the Red Wave gather in Newfoundland and the maritime provinces. A total Liberal victory in every riding, with popular support around 70 per cent. Anyone would call a result like that a democratic return.

The pundits and party reps around the shiny glass tables on the TV networks bantered at length whether Liberal support in the rest of Canada would prove a mile wide and an inch deep. They suggested solid core support in other parties in many ridings might rally over widespread but soft support for the Liberals.

Well, we found otherwise, didn't we? In Canada, an inch deep is all you need to form a majority government.

In the campaign, Trudeau repeated whenever asked that the 2015 election “will be the last conducted under the first-past-the-post system.” If his promises are to be fulfilled, look for an all-party committee to recommend changes to our election system within 18 months.

NDP leader Thomas Mulcair — whose support is deep but not very wide — lost the great gains made from wide-but-shallow support for Jack Layton in the previous election. Mulcair favours straight-out adoption of proportional representation, which would have given his party 66 seats this time around, instead of 43.

But even that would have been a drop from the 71 MPs the NDP would have elected in the last Parliament, if seats had been allocated according to national popular vote.

The Green Party under Elizabeth May are electoral reformers in a hurry. Under proportional representation, there would be 11 Green MPs in Ottawa this time around, instead of just one. She wants an all-party committee to come up with a full-blown report on electoral reform, including draft legislation, within a year.

My political acumen may be neither deep nor wide. But my impression of the campaign was that Canadians were not in the mood to re-elect a fourth-term Conservative government. No electorate in our history has ever elected four straight governments of the same party. Three terms mark the best-before date of any leader.

Just the same, the alternatives were never straightforward. My reading suggested Canadians were convinced that a minority government was the most likely outcome, and if so, a Liberal minority, backed by the NDP was the better choice. That's how I read it, anyway.

So it seems that enough people wanted a Liberal minority, enough in fact to give them a majority. Just a few ticks under 40 per cent of voters cleared the mark.

Under any type of reform, Canada would probably have a Liberal minority government today, instead of a majority. The dynamic in the next Parliament would have been different.

There would have been less “strategic” voting. People could vote for the party platform they preferred, knowing their wishes would be fully represented no matter who their local MP might be.

That's in contrast to what we saw: people voting against a party whose leader had worn out his welcome, even among many in his own rank-and-file.

Knowing that a new Parliament would require some co-operation between parties would also have tempered the personal attacks and base negativity of the campaign we've just endured.

And I think Canadians would have gotten more exactly what they voted for — which is a better democracy.