Alberta had a small population at the time of the first provincial election. The first election happened shortly after Alberta became a province on Sept. 1, 1905. The election was organized by acting premier A.C. Rutherford and Alberta Liberal MP Frank Oliver, a federal cabinet minister at the time and thus the most powerful Alberta politician.
They decided that 25 MLAs was enough for the first Legislative Assembly. In the election, the Liberal Party received more votes than any other party and was elected to a majority of the seats. It received the majority of votes and and thus rightly formed majority government.
From 1905 to 1924 with only a few exceptions MLAs were elected by First Past the Post where each one was elected in a single-member district using bare plurality.
There were a couple of cases where members were elected outside of the geographical districts and did not represent any districts. Such was the case in the world wars when Albertans serving overseas voted for their own representatives.
In 1921, Calgary and Edmonton were made into multiple-member districts that encompassed whole cities. The city MLAs were elected by Block Voting, where each voter could cast as many votes as seats to be filled. In Edmonton, the large Liberal voting block took all the seats, leaving no seats to the other blocks who made up a majority of the city voters. (Despite this, the powerful farmer movement took advantage of the leverage provided by FPTP and captured more than its fair share of rural seats, taking a majority of seats in the legislative assembly. The United Farmer government was elected partly on the promise to implement electoral change.)
The UFA government, elected in 1921, brought in Single Transferable Voting in the cities and Alternative Voting in the other districts.
From 1924 to 1956, Calgary and Edmonton MLAs were elected in multiple-member districts encompassing whole cities that used Single Transferable Vote to elect five to seven members. In 1926, Medicine Hat was a two-member district. Under STV, some results were known as soon as the first vote count was done, but some seats took a couple days of vote transfers to fill. But the mixed representation elected in each city under STV, reflective of the mixed sentiment of the city's voters, was thought worth the wait.
Outside these cities single-member districts elected single MLAs using the Alternative Voting system. Vote transfers took place when no candidate had a majority of the vote in the first count. To be elected a candidate had to accumulate a majority of the district votes. (UFA candidates, and then Social Credit candidates after 1935, were usually the choice of a majority of voters in each of the rural districts.)
By-elections in the two big cities during this period were conducted using Alternative Voting.
There were no district changes between 1926 and 1940.
Single Transferable Voting in use in the cities was still going swimmingly in the 1950s, despite any delay it caused in determining the winner of the last few seats each time. There was no general call for its replacement. No newspapers editorials called for its replacement. But the Social Credit government felt threatened by the fact that the number of opposition MLAs elected in 1955 was double the number that had been elected in 1952. Premier Manning blamed it on the fairness created by STV and Alternative Voting, although he did not say it that way, of course. It was said at the time that the only people who wanted STV cancelled was the government itself.
In 1959 the government returned Alberta to first past the post elections in single-member districts. The city-wide districts of Edmonton and Calgary were fragmented into many single-member districts, with voting blocks broken up and thrown together arbitrarily or even in a gerrymandered way to serve the government's interest.
No government has since changed the electoral system, although the number of MLAs has increased in fits and starts since 1963, when there were 63.
The number of MLAs though has not increased in proportion to the growth in the provincial population. In 1905, 25,000 votes were cast across the province to elect 25 MLAs. In 1982, 945,000 votes, almost 40 times the 1905 total, were cast across the province to choose 79 MLAs, less than four times the 1905 seat total.
Prior to the 1986 election the number of MLAs was fixed by law at 83. Change to that number had to be enacted by the legislature. The population increased by more than 40 percent between 1986 and 2010, and the number of MLAs was increased by four, to 87, in advance of the 2012 election. Still the ratio of voters to MLAs is far higher than in 1905, and it seems to me addressing this would aid in improving the represenative-ness of our electoral system. It is even said that taken far enough we would have perfect representation - if every voters had a seat in the legislative assembly we would have perfect representation! Any move in that direction - any increased numbers of representatives - would, by and large, on the whole, improve our system of democratic representation.
Summary:
The number of Alberta MLAs, and districts, has changed since 1905. Even the electoral system has changed - FPTP, STV, AV all have been used.
Thanks for reading.
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