Without France's safety back-up, Canada's next election may be like the recent election in the UK but with Conservatives getting windfall majority position.
Here's how.
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As France approached its recent election, many had the feeling France was driving toward the edge of a cliff. Many feared a far-right party would game the election and get into power even though only a third of voters supported that party. Such did not happen.
Meanwhile the United Kingdom also had an election. In that election we did see a party with support from only a third of voters take an overwhelming lion’s share of seats. In that country, a cliff was not feared but now the car is going down a road that was not chosen by a majority of voters.
The recent elections in United Kingdom and France can be taken as advance viewing of our own next federal election. Not maybe in result but in general structure.
In all three elections, no party has a majority of votes overall.
That was for sure the fact in UK and France.
Expecting that in Canada is an educated guess that is in line with historical patterns. It has been 40 years since any one party took more than half the votes cast country-wide. We have had many governments where one party took a majority of seats but all were artificial creations of our election system. Not since 1984 has any majority government been the actual choice of a majority of voters.
In France, UK and Canada, elections are fought in hundreds of sub-battles where just one candidate emerges triumphant. Only votes cast for the district’s winner are used to elect anyone. The others are no more used to elect anyone than if they had never been cast.
That waste of votes means each party’s share of seats varies massively from the party’s share of votes. A party can be less popular or more popular than previously and receive vastly different numbers of seats.
The recent UK election has been called the most dis-proportional election result in its history. Labour received fewer votes than it had received in 2019 and took about twice the number of seats. It fluked off lots of close district contests and won what has been hailed as a landslide victory even though the party was the choice of only a third of voters.
France was saved from such minority rule by its use of a just-slightly-more-safe system. France’s election system shares many aspects with the First Past The Post system used in UK and Canada. Like UK and Canada, France elects single members in each district. But to be elected in France, a candidate has to win a majority of votes. If no one takes a majority of votes in the district in the election, a second vote is held with only two competing (or sometimes as many as four. The candidate with the most votes, usually a majority of votes, is declared elected in the second round.
The two rounds of voting and the reduction in candidates means that voters have a chance to redirect their votes, to compare the two front runners and vote for the one who is least objectionable. This is what Canadian voters have to do on a regular basis.
In France it meant that the far-right Rally National party, the cliff in people’s imaginings, was held out of power.
In the first vote held June 30, the RN with only about a third of votes, was the leading party in about 55 percent of districts. In Canada or UK elections, that would have been enough for RN to secure a majority government - despite getting support from only a third of votes.
But the RN candidate actually had a majority of votes only in 38 districts.
In the other 260 districts where RN led the votes, it was not the majority choice. No one was.
To determine the majority choice, another round of voting was held on July 7. This allowed the anti-RN forces to come together and assert their joint majority support.
That saved France from experiencing its first far-right government since the German occupation of WWII.
Canada cannot look for any such avoidance of an undemocratic result. If no change is made in our election system before the next federal election, the Canadian voter will have just one chance to pick a winner and a district may see as many as eight or more candidates splitting the vote. This process may give the district seat to a candidate with as little as a third of the vote. In one district a candidate may take 80 percent of the vote, far more than needed to win, while next door another candidate of the same party may lose by just a few votes.
Such waste and un-scientific method produces dis-proportionality and unfairness.
If we spread the seats a party wins over the votes that it receives, we might see one party take a seat for each 40,000 votes it receives while another party needs 400,000 votes to take a seat.
And a party with about a third of the vote may be lucky enough to take a majority of seats in the HofC.
Any party with a third of the vote could be vaulted into power or could have to occupy the opposition benches in the HofC. It is really just a matter of luck.
Luck for the party but bad luck for most of the voters who bother to vote - their vote will not be used to elect anyone and likely their party will not be the one in power.
We compare that kind of happenstance result to the government elected in Ireland, Denmark or Germany. As almost never does one party take a majority of votes, almost never does one party take a majority of seats. In those countries seats are allocated according to a scientific methods.
But the government chambers of power require majority support to pass laws and budgets, so a working majority is formed by various parties working together. Not all the parties though - parties that want to be part of government will be ones that share somewhat-similar beliefs on the environment, climate change, taxation, government spending, public or private medicine and such. Other parties with an opposite view of such things will not be invited into government.
Generally the most-popular party will be the basis of the governing block. (If no working majority can be formed, a new election will have to be held.)
Coalition governments work in Ireland, Denmark and German and other countries that have proportional representation, just as it is working in today’s House of Commons.
First Past The Post often produces a majority government, but that does not reflect voter sentiment - seldom does any one party have support from a majority of voters.
In the next Canadian election, like in the recent UK election, we might see a party with only a third of the votes take most of the seats. In Canada’s case it will be Conservatives, while in UK it was Labour. At least this time around, that was the result. But perhaps next time it will be Conservatives who win an accidental government in UK, while in the 2030 Canadian election it might be Liberals again.
Such changes of government are created out of nothing and lead to constant “policy lurch”. Irrespective of voters’ sentiment, there is no constancy in who is in power, in how the country is managed.
France is likely to form up a government made up of the anti-fascist New Popular Front, the party with the most seats, working with centrist parties. And unless there is significant change in voting behaviour, that sort of government is likely to be re-elected in the next French election.
The same sort of fair single-winner system could be established in Canada. But France’s Two-Round System is not that great - it means holdinf two rounds of voting.
Canadian reform might instead look like this – forming up multi-member districts of say three to seven members elected in each, and fill seats by one person one vote, using an X vote, a ranked vote or a vote for party (list PR at the district level). Most votes would be used to actually elect someone; most voters would have someone that they believe in elected right in their district; parties would win about the right percentage of the seats. Such is done in Ireland and Denmark.
Or districts could elect just one member and then extra members could be elected based on party proportions. Such is done in Germany and New Zealand.
The UK election shows us the risk entailed by using single-winner FPTP. Some will be happy with the result or likely most will not be.
France shows us one mechanism that can be used to prevent the minority rule and the election of an unpopular government that could be yawning in front of us like a chasm.
But so many other countries - Ireland, Denmark, Germany, New Zealand and about a hundred more in the world - show us that fair voting can produce governments that are actually the choice of most of the voters. They do this without the scary feeling of driving toward a cliff, which voters in France felt - and voters in Canada feel when they think about a potential Conservative win in the next federal election.
It was definitely not democratic for Labour to take two-thirds of the seats with only a third of the votes. Perhaps such a result will trigger more talk about the need for proper fair voting in national elections in the UK, as Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland already use for their parliaments.
The RN party in France and the Conservatives in Canada do not have majority support. It would have been an undemocratic result if RN was elected in France, and it will be an undemocratic decision if Conservatives in Canada receive a majority of seats while receiving only 30 to 40 percent of the votes cast. Or for any party to take a majority of seats with less than a majority of votes overall.
For every “landslide victory” for one party, on the other hand there are millions of voters whose party is un-represented or under-represented. The media zooms in on the victors, but every voter should see his or her vote used to elect someone.
Such does not happen under First Past The Post. This we saw in the UK and in past Canada elections. It is time for a change so we don’t get that feeling of driving toward a cliff every time an election approaches.
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Some notes
2024, the most disproportional election FPTP has ever delivered: Labour won 63% of the seats with just under 34% of the votes. Reform and the Greens won nine seats between them (just over 1%), with a combined vote share of about 21%.
The playing field, never exactly even, now looks more like a wildly irrational assault course.
Twenty-four thousand votes would get you a Labour seat; a Reform candidate would need one million; a Green, 485,000; a Conservative, 56,000.
It is a cute paradox that the Liberal Democrats, the longest-serving proponents of proportional representation, are the only party that, had we implemented it for this election, would have ended up with about the same number of seats.
Making Britain’s voting system fairer won’t enable parties like Reform – it’s the only way to challenge them
the classic argument for a first past the post (FPTP) voting system was that it kept the cranks at bay and delivered a stable, two-party system, with a third, challenger party that would give the impression of alternative options. It smacked of a slightly imperfect democracy even in the 20th century, when political allegiances were more fixed at an individual level, and the dominant parties differentiated themselves quite effortlessly at an ideological level. It was a system of representation that justified itself mainly on the principle that it wasn’t broke so why fix it, and when really pressed, used the spectre of some outliers who were too dangerous to be represented in parliament.
Yet whenever a fringe group found its voice some other way – in a local election or protest movement – it was often overtly racist. The National Front had the fourth-largest vote share for parts of the 1970s, the BNP had 50 seats in local government and two MEPs in the 2000s. However strong the arguments for constitutional reform, it seemed there was always merit in keeping those views out, on the grounds that parliamentary time should be put to better use than constantly relitigating who was British and who wasn’t. If this approach had truly suppressed racism as mobilising force in our politics, OK, that would have been brilliant
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Quite a lot has happened to pervert the course of FPTP while simultaneously eroding its anti-crank justification. Labour is heralded for its win-at-any-cost election strategy and rightly – it did, after all, win – but that could also be called gaming the system. Its policy offer looked very much as if it had been shaped by the party’s target seats.
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And you can’t fault that because it worked, but it also delivered what people are calling a “loveless landslide”, having been designed not to stir the enthusiasts but to dull the fears of haters. It showed in Labour’s tactics, too, as the party ceased campaigning in safe seats and unlikely ones ploughing everything into marginals.
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Yet that win, a mile wide and an inch deep, won’t arrive in the same way twice. In 98 seats, Reform came second to Labour; on its other wing, the Greens came second in 39. Cleaving to FPTP means steering between two diametrically opposed threats, which just forces more caution and equivocation. Allowing the possibility of a new voting system would open up meaningful coalition-building with the Greens. The radicalism on the Green side, fighting for civil liberties, social liberalism, human rights and the climate, shouldn’t be seen as a threat by any progressive government; only under the current system does it necessarily become one.
Proportional representation would also demand a more open confrontation with Nigel Farage, who currently thrives on his own electoral marginalisation, which delivers him attention without scrutiny. Reform will certainly use net zero, as well as immigration, as its oppositional muster point – and it would be far better to take these arguments on rather than wait for a Conservative renewal with a ready-made offer.
If Ukip had got proper representation at its height, would the Brexit result have happened the way it did? If the Greens had ever been considered a serious electoral force rather than a nuisance, wouldn’t that have made all political parties less willing to dilute their environmental offer for short-term expedience? If power didn’t travel on so absolute a pendulum from one party to another, would it have been possible for so many of Labour’s last achievements, particularly on child poverty, to have been undone? Proving those counterfactuals is second to the principle, which Laura Parker, a spokesperson for Labour for a New Democracy, describes: “You can’t keep denying millions of people democratic legitimacy and hope they go away.” Even Labour members, people who’ve found their political home, can see this. The party needs to recognise a more proportional system as a way to deepen its power, rather than give it away
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