It is rumoured Trudeau is set to call a federal election this autumn. This would be two years earlier than the set federal election date. This election would not be caused by the defeat of the government (unless another party votes to bring it down) but Trudeau will cause it by resigning his government and asking the Governor General to call an election.
If the GG (or her stand-in, the chief of the Supreme Court judges) refuses to call an election, instead announcing that he/she will give the Conservatives a try at government, Trudeau may try to present it as un-democratic.
This could then be a repeat of the so-called King-Byng affair of 1926.
The King-Byng Affair happened when King resigned his government in order to allow/force the Governor General Byng to call an election but Byng refused saying that the Conservatives should have a crack at running government.
As the Canadian Encyclopedia puts it
"Byng instead asked the opposition Conservatives — the largest single party in the House — to form a government..."
That government soon lost a vote (perhaps due to mis-communication among opposition MPs - one Farmer MP was not supposed to vote unless his Conservative equivalent did, but did anyway and the government lost the vote and was brought down. or was that a different time?).
King then went to the people saying that Byng had had no right to refuse him an election earlier.
The Canadian Encyclopedia:
"King ran largely on the constitutional issue; what he framed as the interference by a British governor general with the rights of Canadians to govern themselves. In his diary on 2 July, he had written that “I could not believe [Byng] would deliver himself so completely into my hands." Later, he noted that the “great issue . . . that the people will respond to . . . is the making of our nation." Out of 245 House seats, King’s Liberals took a majority of 128 seats to the Tories' 91. The Progressives and others had 26 seats. The Liberals would govern until the 1930 election."
It is doubtful if Canadian voters would be so put out by being denied the chance at voting in an election (especially during an epidemic) - they might not view it as a case of the GG overstepping his/her powers.
Is voting so important anyway? Not when a majority of voters in a a good portion of the districts are ignored in the result. So not many view voting as such a prized duty as some politicians might imagine. But Trudeau could be hoping to do the same kind of thing as King succeeded in doing in 1926 - calling an election and winning a majority of seats (although King did so with only 43 percent of the vote).
Conversely, if he called an election, Trudeau could do worse - his party could win fewer seats.
In 2019 a shift of just a small number could have produced a Conservative government instead of a Liberal one. From Montopedia blog "small change = big diff in 2019 election" 17.9M votes were cast in the 2019 election. If only one-thousandth of them had gone a different way, Conservatives would have taken more seats than the Liberals. The Liberals won 157 seats to Conservatives' 121 in the election. But if only 17,000 votes had shifted, the Liberals could have lost 23 seats, bringing their total down to 134 seats, while with some of those votes switching to Conservative candidates, the Conservative seat total could have risen by 14 seats to 135 seats The movement of less than one-tenth of a single percent of the vote would thus have meant a Conservative minority government, instead of a Liberal minority government." In fact in 2019 the Conservatives received more votes overall than the Liberals, so they had more right to government-ship than the Liberals. But in 86 percent of Canada (the area outside of Alberta and Sask), the Liberals received 1 M more votes than the Conservatives so they had more right to govern, if you look at those voters. But at neither scale did either the Liberals or the Conservatives have majority of votes so actually neither party had the right to govern -- solely. Meanwhile with the government having taken no action to address regional electoral unfairness, it is possible the Liberals will be barred out of seats in AB/SK, just as they were in 2019. (This explains why there are no Alberta MPs in the federal cabinet -- there just are no Alberta Liberal MPs. (my recent blog on a province-based MMP system presents an alternative system that would mitigate this artificially-produced apparent regionalism.) In 2019 the Liberals lost the four MPs they had had in AB. The Liberal party took no seats in the province.
This was due to moderate-sized shift in votes in the four ridings that had elected a Liberal MP: Calgary Skyview The Liberal vote dropped from 21,000 in 2015 to 14,000 votes in 2019. Conservative vote rose from 18,000 to 27,000. Calgary Centre Liberal vote dropped from 28,400 to 18,000 votes. Conservative vote rose from 28,300 to 37,000 Edmonton Centre Liberal vote dropped from 20,000 to 18,000 votes. Conservative vote rose from 19,000 to 22,000 Edmonton Millwoods Liberal vote dropped from 20,400 to 18,000 votes. Conservative vote rose from 20,300 to 27,000. Irrespective of those district defeats, in 2019 there were some 280,000 Liberal votes cast in Alberta and some 66,000 cast in Sask. None of these were effective -- they did not elect a single Liberal MP. This despite the fact that in one riding (Lethbridge) a Conservative won a seat with only 41,000 votes. So compared to that, the Liberal vote should have been enough to win eight seats. Liberals cast 14 percent of the Alberta vote so based on that (and Alberta's total of 34 seats) their votes should have been enough to win four or five seats.
Instead of four or five or eight, Liberals won zero seats in Alberta and none in Saskatchewan. Will the happenstance and random effects of single-member plurality elections mean the Liberals will take those four Alberta seats back? Or will they take more than those four? Or none at all again? With the Trudeau government having done nothing to change the election process, the result could be quite the same -- or could be quite different. It seems likely that with the FPTP system still in place, hundreds of thousands of votes will be wasted in the next election. The only question is, whose? Which party will suffer outrageous misfortune and which will receive un-natural success? On whom will the usual winner's bonus of 60 seats be granted, if any? (A UK voting reform website says: Winner’s bonus: A winner’s bonus occurs when FPTP exaggerates the amount of support that the most popular party received. A winner’s bonus can make a minor lead in the percentage of votes turn into a large lead in terms of seats therefore strengthening the legitimacy of the majority party." (What is First Past The Post (FPTP)? | Voting Counts) In Canadian FPTP elections, the winner's bonus is normally about 20 percent of the seats. (I think so anyway.) Federal elections, including the one in 2019, do not always provide the winner's bonus - perhaps because different parties lead in many regions.
But even where it does not create a winner's bonus, FPTP wastes 40 to 65 percent of the votes in each district and produces un-democratic results more often than not. Note that Canada is the only country in the world that holds its legislative elections through just FPTP. (For sure, it is the only major country to only use FPTP.)
Even the U.S. elects some Congressmen through Alternative Voting (IRV).
UK uses a variety of systems including STV for some Scottish and North Irish elections.
And other countries do not use FPTP at all or use it only partly.
Australia uses AV to elect some of its national government.
Malta, another British Commonwealth country, uses STV totally.
One Commonwealth country -- Vanuatu in the South Pacific - uses SNTV as well as FPTP. So does Puerto Rico.
A great many European countries use party-list PR of one sort or another.
Even Canada did not always use just FPTP. There was a time when MLAs in two provinces were elected through STV.
So there are many models for Canada to copy from, instead of being the lone man out, instead of being stuck like we seem to be in FPTP confusion and unfairness.
Thanks for reading.
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