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Tom Monto

Alberta under FPTP - governments with more seats than support

Updated: Dec 18, 2020

Alberta has been governed by governments that have had far more than their fair share of the legislative seats, if compared to their popularity. This has been due to the use of First Past The Post electoral system.


Under FPTP, many votes placed for smaller parties are wasted, while the leading party wastes relatively fewer.


In 1955 Alberta cancelled the province's partial use of proportional representation.


Manning's Social Credit Government split the province into single-member districts and adopted FPTP for its provincial elections.


From that time until 1986, a period of 30 years, the leading party (SC, then P-C) almost always took more than 90 percent of the seats in the Legislature.


Thus most of the time government MLAs had a ratio of nine to one against the opposition MLAs.


Only in two elections did the governing party caucus have less than 90 percent of the seats. The least it had was 65, which gave it almost a ratio of two against the opposition MLAs.


From 1986 to 2012 the Conservative government only once had less than 70 percent of the legislative seats. 70 percent gave it a ratio of more than two to one against the opposition MLAs.


The low of 61 percent of government seats, in 1992, gave the government a ratio of three to two against the opposition MLAs.


With this kind of imbalance, what kind of critical check on the government could the opposition MLAs exert?


This weakness is particularly galling because since STV was cancelled in 1955, an Alberta governing party has never received more than 63 percent support among Alberta voters. And often it has taken less than even a majority of the votes but still taken a vast majority of seats.


This is not proportional. This is not democratic. It is unfair. It should not be repeated.


Stats:

Government Government Total Government

percent of vote seats seats percent of seats

Social Credit

1959 56 61 65 94

1963 55 60 63 95

1967 45 55 65 85

Conservative regime

1971 46 49 75 65

1975 63 69 75 92

1979 57 74 79 94

1982 62 75 79 95

1986 51 61 83 73

1989 44 59 83 71

1992 44 51 83 61

1997 51 63 83 76

2001 62 74 83 89

2004 47 62 83 75

2008 53 72 83 87

2012 44 61 87 70


NDP

2015 41 54 87 62


UCP

2019 55 55 87 63

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Thanks for reading.

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