The U.S. was mired in its election process for the last week and the drama will continue until the electoral college votes next month, although at a less heated level.
Some applaud the Canadian election process by contrast.
But perhaps we should not derive much pleasure from comparing our system to the system used in the U.S., a system invented in the 1700s.
Instead we should compare ourselves to European countries, most of which use party-list proportional representation.
Or we should compare ourselves to the countries in the world that use Single Transferable Voting - Australia, Malta and Ireland. STV in these countries produce governments that are proportional to votes cast. And they do this within a reasonable time period. Maybe not within hours of the end of voting but within days, much better than the months it takes the U.S. to resolve its election cycle.
Months if you include the primaries. STV in the early 1900s was heralded as a system that would make primaries un-necessary. Heck, in Canada most don't even know what primaries are. But they - plus the electoral college - add months to the U.S. election process. The U.S. system is so outlandish that it does not even bear comparison.
But Canadians can applaud ourselves for having a better system than the U.S. Some parts work very well - a constitutional monarchy and the House of Commons with its parliamentary structure and efficient honest elections.
Our First Past The Post elections in single-member districts system does give us election results by midnight of election night, after only a month campaign, unlike the months and months it takes in the U.S. Note though that our vote count would be considerably slower if we had to count 140M votes, the U.S. total, instead of the 16M votes cast in our elections.
There is a similarity between the two systems. Both the U.S. and Canadian systems are similar in that they each create un-representational governments and massive vote waste, though in different ways. The longer time it takes in the U.S. does not produce any more representational government.
How does the Canadian system create un-representational governments and massive vote waste? A third or more of our representatives are elected by a mere minority of the votes in the district, sometimes by as few as only a third of the votes. 40 to 65 percent of the votes in a district are ignored and wasted. This despite the fact that many voters try to prevent this waste by casting their votes where they have a chance instead of voting for the candidate they want elected (so-called strategic voting). The waste does not only decrease representation of opposition parties. It often prevents any representation at all of a small party Even a party with 10 percent of the vote may be denied any representation at all under our present system. The leading party always has far more representation than it is due. Not only is this true across the province in provincial elections or across the country in federal elections but also at the city level. The leading party in a city will take all or most of the seats in the city, far out of proportion to its vote share in the city, thus creating generalizations about the voting sentiment of others at that level. The same holds true for the leading party in a collection of rural seats. Most rural seats at least in Alberta are filled by Conservatives. So nowadays it is said that rural voters vote Conservative. Thus their voting sentiment appears to be far more different than that of a nearby city than is actually the case. But many rural Conservative representatives win with only the support of a minority of the voters in their district. The perceived difference arouses fear of rural-urban disparity of representation. If that city was made into a multi-member district, and if the rural districts were grouped into a multi-member district, and each voter given only a single vote (transferable or not), the representation elected in each would be far more similar than under the present system. Or if party-list pro-rep or MMP was adopted, the same would result. On the subject of western grievances - WEXIT,
Proportional representation, if it is proportional to votes cast - the usual interpretation, will do nothing to aid Westerners' lack of importance in Canadian federal elections. The West (if taken to be the area west of Ontario) has fewer votes than Ontario. The West if taken to be Alberta and Saskatchewan - the current fictitious Conservative nomenclature - has even fewer than that.
Ontario and Quebec do have the most voters and the most seats. Our present system actually over-represents rural areas compared to cities, and over-represents less-populous provinces compared to most populous ones.
A strictly proportional system, based on votes, would give more seats to Toronto, Ontario and Quebec than even they are given at present. A system where seats were allocated proportionally (equally and fairly) to each province would give six-tenths of the votes to the six provinces east of Manitoba and leave only four-tenths of the seats to the West. This would be no great help to Westerners. It would also be seen to create massive disparities and unequal votes-to-MP ratios. It would also be unconstitutional. If self-named "Westerners" are upset that not enough "Easterners" vote Conservative, maybe the government could pass a law saying that Easterners have to vote Conservative. No, that would not work either. I'm sure it is unconstitutional, for one thing. But some Easterners do vote Conservative -- they just do not win seats. If only there was a system that allowed fair representation, where a certain percentage of the vote received about that same percentage of the seats. Oh, yea - there is - proportional representation, the system discussed when I started on this topic. Proportional representation would not give the West more seats, as I said, but it could allow Conservative voters in Ontario and Quebec to win the seats that they fairly deserve. Unfortunately if pro-rep was adopted in the East, it would also be adopted across the country and not just in the East. If adopted in Alberta/Saskatchewan, it would allow Liberal voters in Alberta and Saskatchewan to win the 7 seats they were due in 2019, none of which they won. It would also allow the NDP to increase its seat count, from the one seat it won (with 235,000 votes overall) to about 7 as well. Perhaps even a Green candidate might win inland under a proportional system and not just on the two coasts. But out of fairness and equity, proportional representation should be adopted. Pro-rep based on grouped districts, no district extending past a provincial boundary, would create in each province more mixed and fair representation. Thus, ensuring that a majority of voters in each district have representation ensuring that each substantial group in an area (a city, a county, etc.) would have its due measure of representation. ensuring that each major party in each province would have some representation (except maybe the smallest of provinces). reducing the waste of votes reducing the feeling of regionalism revealing basic truths of our political culture now hidden by or blamed on electoral inefficiencies.
A basic truth of our political culture now hidden by electoral inefficiencies is this: in 86 percent of the country (the area outside of Alberta /Saskatchewan - both east and west of AB/SK) there were a million more Liberal votes than Conservative votes.
This is hidden in the vote results as usually tabulated.
But it is instructive as to how it would take a fundamentally undemocratic system, one even more fundamentally undemocratic than our present one, to give a Conservative party with that kind of support government of this country.
Thanks for reading.
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