Despite our present use of single-winner First Past The Post, readers should know that prior to 2010 city councillors in Edmonton were never elected through single-winner FPTP,
And trustees of the separate school board were not either.
The public school board has been elected through FPTP longer, but even its trustees have been elected through FPTP just since 1995.
The use of FPTP since 2020 (and 1995) has meant that often a choice of just a minority of voters in the ward have been elected, leaving the majority of voters without representation.
The separate school board's use of a more fair system than FPTP meant that in one election every vote cast in a specific ward was used to elect a member. This is a record not equalled in any real-life election conducted using a purposeful PR system. This happened in 2004 in Ward 2, where the only two candidates running - Janice Sarich and Jim Urlacher - were both elected.
We used to have more fairness - and we should have it again - we should not use FPTP today to elect our city and school board representatives, in my opinion.
And now, as I explain below, for the next two years there will be no elected member at all in the public school board's Ward H and the separate school board's Ward 73 at all.
Here's an article I wrote on the recent school board shenanigans and how we used to do things more democratically.
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School Boards reject appeal to Democratic Will
By Tom Monto
Canada is a democracy and voting matters. That at least is the story we are told. If that is true, it must be based on the election of members in city, provincial or federal districts because that is the only time we cast votes.
It is said that it is very important to have this local "representation." But lately we have seen several instances where local representation has been blurred. A candidate living outside a district was elected. Voters were asked to seek help from members elected outside the district.
And now we see another instance. This is related to the Edmonton Public School board whose trustees are elected as single members, each said to represent a different district. Nathan Ip was elected as the Ward H trustee in 2021. He ran and was elected in the last provincial election so he resigned as trustee.
Normally when an elected member resigns (or dies), a by-election is called to fill the empty seat. In this case, the school board voted to have the trustee of an adjoining district fill in and cover both Ip's old ward and her own. Jan Sawyer of Ward I is to be paid something extra to cover her extra trouble.
If the board believes that a trustee can comfortably represent an area the size of two districts, then let's switch to two-seat districts. If one person can serve that large area, then surely two can serve the same area. Then if one member resigns, the district would still have a member.
In a two-seat district where each voter has just one vote, the two largest groups in the "super-ward" will each elect one member. That would increase the fairness. More of the votes cast would be used to elect the members; fewer of the voters would be ignored. These are all good things compared to the last election, when as much as 75 percent of the votes cast in a single-member ward did not go to the winner.
If the board is just going to appoint someone to fill in for Ip's absence, you would think it would choose from among the candidates who actually ran in the ward in 2021. The second-placed candidate - William Haines - is the obvious choice if voters cannot have Ip. Haines received 26 percent of the votes, which is more than Saadiq Sumar had when he won in adjoining Ward G. So appointing Haines to fill the position would not be un-democratic.
The Ip/Sawyer situation is not the only case of a school board refusing a by-election. Edmonton Separate School trustee Carla Smiley has resigned, and Calgary Separate School trustee Pamela Rath has resigned, as well. In both these cases the respective school board has ruled not to call a by-election. Like in Ip‘s case, cost-saving is the given rationale.
The democratic thing to do is to call a by-election. Maybe it would not cause an expense. All but one of the trustees on the Edmonton Catholic school board were elected by acclamation in 2021. No expensive election was needed to elect them. So if the same lack of interest prevails, only one contender will step forward in a by-election and the ward will have a member who is just as "elected" as most of the trustees serving today, without the cost of an election. Democracy sometimes means as little as allowing the opportunity for an interested person to come forward to serve as representative.
Without democratically-elected members, who will protect against the waste of government money? The public school board oversees a yearly budget of $1.3B (1300 million dollars!). A new Ward H trustee may save taxpayers one-tenth of one percent of that, which is more than the cost of a full by-election. And the benefits of democracy hold true for the separate school board as well.
The rotation schedule of elections - city and provincial - seems likely to produce future Ip-style vacancies. School board trustees and city councillors will run for provincial office. If we want to avoid the need for by-elections caused by such resignations, we should hold the school board elections a short time after provincial elections. So in the next school board elections (2025) we should elect just for two years. Then the next school board elections would be in October 2027, just six months after the next scheduled provincial election. Then whether or not we have a vacancy caused by a trustee or a councillor being elected to provincial office, we would have a scheduled election lined up to deal with such.
And maybe at the same time we can address the callous electoral system that we use to elect city and school board politicians. The mayor, councillors and school trustees are elected through First past the Post. In 2021 many of the city councillors and public school trustees were elected with less than half the votes. We can't know for certain that if it had come down to just two candidates, that the candidate who was elected would’ve been the choice of most of the voters. So we are seeing members elected who are not proven to be the actual choice of the voters.
As our city's problems seem more complicated with each passing month, we need to elect politicians who reflect the views of the voting public. Our current voting system - First past the Post - again and again elects the choice of a minority of voters, leaving the majority un-represented.
The cause of this is the single-member wards, which break down the city elections into sub-battles conducted separately across the city, with no overall standard used to select the winners. In 2021 public school trustees were elected with wildly varying vote tallies. The unsuccessful runner-up candidate in one district was often more popular than the successful candidate in another district. There was no parity, no equality. Fifteen candidates across the city each got more than 3945 votes, the vote tally for Jan Sawyer, elected as Ward I trustee. Six of them were not elected. One of them, Ken Lister, got more than twice the vote tally of Sawyer but was not elected.
To elect those who were the choice of the people, we need to break away from our single-member wards and have some overall comparison of vote tallies.
School board elections used to do this. The public school board elections in 1989 and 1992 had the special feature that six were elected through First past the Post in districts separately, and as well the most-popular unsuccessful candidate in each pair of wards was elected.
We see the same attempt at fairness in separate school board elections held between 1989 and 2010. Six were elected through First past the Post in districts separately, and the most-popular unsuccessful candidate across the city was elected as well. This “consolation seat” was dropped in 2010, the same year that the Edmonton city council began to be elected through single-winner First Past The Post contests scattered across the city.
Accountable democracy depends on having a member elected for each district, every voter having one vote, each vote (or at least say 80 percent of them) being used to elect someone, and each vote being valued the same as the next vote. With our use of single-winner First past the Post, we don't see much of this when we do hold elections - and in the case of the missing trustees in Ward 73 and Ward H we do not even have elected members at all. I say it is time to return to the at-large contests we mostly had prior to 1989 or to the multi-member wards that we mostly had prior to 2010. If we do that and each voter can cast just one vote, many votes would be actually used to elect someone - and more voters would be represented.
If one of the members resigns, someone else elected in the district could carry the load. This would be more fair than not having an elected member at all, which due to recent school board decisions seems to be the future for some. =============================================
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