Millwoods Mosaic article May 2023:
Millwoods member likely to be minority choice
By Tom Monto
As we approach the upcoming provincial election, you might be surprised to learn that for the last 44 years the MLA who represented Millwoods has seldom been the choice of most of the voters. That sort of thing happens alot under the election system that we have used since 1959.
Pick any place in the province. Chances are good a Social Credit MLA represented it all through the 1960s. At that time the SC party was winning almost all the seats. In 1967 for example it took all but ten seats in the Legislature although getting less than half the votes. You might be surprised to learn that the SC government's so-called “landslide victories” in the 1960s were produced by its adoption of an unfair voting system in 1959.
Previous to 1959, MLAs in Edmonton and Calgary were elected by Proportional Representation, where in each city almost all the votes were used to actually elect someone and the parties received their due share of seats. The SC government cancelled that and brought in First Past The Post in 1959.
The government then began to get almost all the seats province-wide each time. With the change to First Past The Post, some parties with ten percent of the province-wide vote or more get no seats at all or just a couple. Again and again, Edmonton MLAs have been elected with the support of less than half the voters in their districts.
After the provincial district of Edmonton-Millwoods was created in 1979, that was the experience in that district too, most of the time. In the last 25 years, only one MLA has been elected with more than half the votes. NDP’s Christine Gray received 65 percent of the vote in 2015.
Every other time since 1998, the Edm-Millwoods MLA has been elected with support from less than half the voters. In 2012, a Conservative took the seat with only 35 percent of the vote, barely more than a third of votes cast.
Since 1979, only five times was the Millwoods MLA elected with the support of most of the voters. During almost all of the last 44 years, the majority of voters were ignored. The representative did not reflect their views. Under First Past The Post, voters are divided into 87 different districts and you can take a seat if you get more votes than any other candidate in a district. Voters outside the district cannot vote against you. And many votes that are cast elect no one.
When a district has just one member, that member just cannot represent the range of sentiment in the district. Sometimes a majority is represented, but quite often more than half, in most cases about half, and almost always more than a third of votes cast in the district do not elect that one member. With those sort of statistics repeated in every district across the province, the number of ignored voters is staggering. And results can be quite wonky as far as party representation goes.
But if say five districts were grouped together to elect five MLAs, and a fair voting system was used, almost all the votes cast in the district would be used to elect someone. And almost all the voters would be represented.
This is seen elsewhere. Many countries in the world use multi-member districts and fair voting.
Denmark uses multi-member districts, and the district members are elected based on party votes.
Ireland and Malta use multi-member districts and Single Transferable Voting - where each voter votes directly for a candidate. This is in line with existing practice in the British Commonwealth. The use of multi-member districts and each voter having just one vote ensures that all large voting blocks have some representation and most votes are used to elect someone.
Would such a district be too large? Hardly. Edmonton’s mayor, Amerjeet Sohi, represents all of Edmonton and he is just one person – although he does have the claim to fame of once serving as Millwoods’s MP. Despite this impressive background, I think it is safe to say that if that one person can represent all the city, surely five MLAs can represent one quarter of it.
Will Mill Woods lose their existence as a single-member district and become a part of something larger?
Perhaps it is inevitable.
Certainly there is growing discontent with the present system with its artificial definition of seats that are safe and seats where parties actually compete.
And there is discontent with how voters are pushed to vote for one of the two leading candidates who may not be the person they truly want to represent them. The upcoming May 29 election will be a strong case of this. Two main parties are fighting for supremacy. Any veering from the binary fight - by voting for say a Liberal or an Alberta Party candidate - would seem to abandon the best chance for local victory for the left or the right.
TV coverage is all about how the NDP and the UCP are fighting for Calgary seats. Edmonton and the rural seats are mostly thought to be un-contested. Nothing at all about how votes are cast by voters.
In 2019, did the NDP deserve to win almost all of the Edmonton seats, or the UCP deserve to win almost all the Calgary seats?
The answer is no,
But you would not know it from the way the upcoming election is being predicted. Once we lose the connection between our elected representatives and the voters - once the election machinery obscures the voters’ sentiment - we have less accountability. Laws passed by the government are not likely to reflect the views of voters.
And there is another hint that this might be the last Alberta election held using First Past The Post. A Court Challenge is being pursued in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on the question of whether the present unfair system is actually constitutional. Fair Voting BC and Springtide Collective for Democratic Society are pursuing this challenge. The challenge goes to court in September.
A ruling against First Past The Post is bound to eventually produce change across the country. Our Constitution gives each citizen equal political rights, but when a minority of voters get representation while others don’t, that is not equal treatment.
Alberta’s May 29 election will likely be as unfair as past elections. Many MLAs will be elected with the support of a minority of the voters in their districts. Across the province, the party that wins the most seats will likely have the support of less than half the voters.
Edmonton-Millwoods is regarded as a safe NDP seat. Gray’s past status as a cabinet minister in Rachel Notley’s government certainly does her credit. Last time she received more votes than the time before that.
But even if she is elected and even if the NDP gets say 44 percent of the vote province-wide, what will the next Legislature look like?
With 44 percent of the vote, the NDP could get 50 seats - a strong majority - or it could get its present 24 seats - in Opposition.
Under First Past the Post, when it comes to the overall result, almost anything can happen. FPTP is not based on science but on 87 separate little battles. It is time we return to the system of PR used in the 1950s - the one that gave each party its due share of seats in the cities, the one the Social Credit government found so troublesome, the one they actually had no moral right to take away from Alberta voters.
It is important to get out and vote on May 29. Even if many of the votes cast will be ignored, you can’t know your vote will be among them! So take a chance.
It is all we have – for now.
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