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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