Fair Vote Canada on Substack online: "Alberta had PR why'd we give it up?" Here's my comments
- Tom Monto
- Mar 3
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 9
Jasmine Roy Fair Vote Canada Edmonton
"Alberta had PR why'd we give it up?"
This is important message.
Not mentioned is that in 1924 when UFA adopted STV for the cities, it brought in instant-runoff voting (AKA Alternative Voting) in the single-member districts elsewhere. This was not PR but also was not FPTP.
Thus, when Alberta conducted its electoral reform in 1924, it became the first province in Canada to elect all its MLAs using non-FPTP systems.
Manitoba and BC later also did so.
(In USA/Canada, only Illinois gave Alberta a run for the record. It elected all its state legislators using non-FPTP starting in 1870, but in that case it was semi-proportional Cumulative Voting.)
When UFA brought in STV in the cities in 1924, it merely continued the city-wide multi-member districts that had been previously in use.
Unfortunately when those MMDs were used in the 1921 election, Block Voting was used, with no guarantee of proportionality.
In 1921, Liberal candidates with just a third of the votes cast were elected to all the seats in Edmonton. And a majority of the Edmonton votes were not used to elect anyone.
(The UFA were popular in the countryside in 1921 and took a majority of seats overall, so were put into position to fulfill their election promise of Electoral Reform.)
The writer says the Social Credit suffered from hubris and that brought about its collapse in the 1970s.
But actually the Social Credit likely stayed in power an extra decade due to switching away from PR in 1956.
In 1956 when they dropped STV, they had already been in power more than 20 years continuously, and their appeal had definitely begun to fade.
In 1955 and again in 1967, they received less than half the votes so proportionally were not due a majority of seats.
By switching to FPTP, they benefitted and retained their grip on power. At least it is accurate to say, under full PR, they would not have been elected to a majority of seats with only the 45 percent of the votes that they took in 1956.
If they had foreseen their drop in popularity in 1971 election and had resumed PR, they would have received a larger share of seats than they did win under FPTP.
(but that is predicated on the assumptions that the government recognized their drop in popularity, that they understood that PR would give them their fair due of seats, and that they would benefit from PR as opposed to FPTP. It is fair for a government to make those assumptions (perhaps NZ in 1990 and BC in early 1950s are only examples that come to mind. And BC's reform was due to splintering of a two-party coalition and thus fear of vote splitting.)
But likely if they had won only their due share of seats in 1959 (56 percent), instead of the 94 percent of seats they did take, they would have begun to suffer from a drop in popularity, and perhaps been turfed from power even sooner than 1971.
By 1975, when the Social Credit party's seat total dropped to just 4 under FPTP, under PR they would have elected perhaps 14 MLAs, but still been in opposition. By then the P-Cs had 63 percent of the votes, and under PR would have taken 63 percent of the seats (all others things being equal), so definitely leaving the Social Credit to relative insignificance in the Legislature, pretty much the same as they had under FPTP.
Even under FPTP, it was not until 1982 that SC was denied any representation at all in the Legislature.
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