UFA's adoption of STV in the cities is sometimes seen as underhanded political scheme to.
The ulterior motive ascribed the move was the government wanting to divide the opposition.
There would be grounds for this if the government benefited - won more seats - through the use of a different electoral systems in different places.
As Robert Jarman, an Edmonton electoral system scientist, noted "see if the rule of proportionality is constant across constituencies. If the government uses something like plurality at large in ridings with a plurality for them and STV everywhere else, dial S for suspicious. Otherwise, provided the district magnitude makes sense, it is probably honestly a kind of electoral system that does have reasoning" behind it.
But such was not actually the case in Alberta in the 1920s as I show below.
Aspersions of the UFA government seem to me to be based on cynically thinking the worst of the government, when in my mind it brought in STV so as to address long-standing complaint of city Labour of being unable to get elected. A valid complaint - no Labour was elected in Edmonton until PR was brought in.
There was also no UFA MLA in Edmonton until STV was brought in. The election of a single UFA MLA in Edmonton/Calgary in 1926 and 1930 probably was the only direct positive result to the government of the move to STV.
However, city representation (10 seats out of 61 in the Legislature) was too small to be critical, as I demonstrate below.
In 1924 UFA government brought in STV in Edmonton and Calgary (and temporarily in Medicine Hat) and Alternative Voting in the other parts of the province. One secures representation for all parties small and large (as produced through votes cast directly for candidates); the other ensures that successful candidates must have majority support (although not necessarily proven by first-choice votes).
In the first STV/AV election (1926), the UFA won 42 of the 51 seats outside Edmonton and Calgary, a massive majority that the city seats -- however they were filled -- could not expect to overcome. The government might have brought in STV/AV despite any threat it might have posed to its majority, or it might have foreseen that its large majority of seats outside the cities, first achieved in 1921 under FPTP, would continue.
In districts outside Edmonton and Calgary, Alternative Voting replaced STV, but that had no effect on the size of the UFA majority - in most of the places where the UFA had won seats with plurality under FPTP, it now won under AV.
In Edmonton the UFA had not taken even one seat in 1921 - the Liberal candidates taking all the seats with minority of the city votes under Block Voting. so the UFA had nothing to lose in the cities. In 1926 under STV the UFA took one seat, so it did better.
The significant (but not majority) UFA vote in Edmonton in 1926 may have been due to the same cause as the strong Liberal vote in Edmonton in 1921 - a certain number of the voters oin Alberta's capital city wanted to vote for the party that was in power. (This does not account for the NDP landslide in Edmonton in 2015, though.)
STV in the cities did produce a split in the opposition seats. But this is not likely to have been important. With FPTP, likely the largest party in Edmonton - the Conservatives - would have likely taken all the seats. (A total single-party sweep was the result in Edmonton after FPTP was brought in in 1956.)
The same might have happened in Calgary.
So, Conservative party might have won 10 seats in Edm/Calg, (instead of that four that it did win in 1926), plus the zero it won elsewhere (zero under FPTP in 1921 and zero under AV in 1926).
So Conservatives would have won 10 seats at the most - not a a big deal when compared to the UFA's 40-plus seats.
Did splitting the opposition seats (spreading the opposition seats elected in Edm/Calg over two parties - Liberal and Conservatives (not counting the UFA-friendly Labour seats)) have any major effect?
Was the fact that the six opposition seats (the four Conservative MLAs plus two Liberal MLAs), or in the worse case 10 opposition seats, were spread over two parties so much less troublesome to the UFA government than if the 6 (or 10) seats had been concentrated in one party? I doubt it.
And note that we are not talking about vote splitting. None happens under STV (or AV). We are talking about splitting of the seats - that the (fairly) elected opposition members would be of a variety of parties rather than concentrated in one - but would not be elected in any lesser or greater number.
Much more likely that the UFA brought in STV in the cities to address age-old grievance out of fairness than to get any direct or even indirect benefit itself. There was also three environmental factors involved.
Three environmental factors involved
Would the UFA even be elected?
For one, no one thought the UFA would take the majority of the seats. So its promise of electoral reform was not so important.
What is PR?
The UFA had promised electoral reform when running for election in 1921. It had promised PR which in those days meant STV. STV involved multi-member districts. But was this functionally possible back then outside the cities?
The practicalities of electoral reform were not carefully thought out in advance of becoming government.
There were few examples to copy from. When the UFA government was elected in 1921, the main form of PR was STV. STV was the only form of PR used in Canada at the time, and in those days it was used in two situations - in Winnipeg where a city-wide district elected 10 MLAs, and in city elections where five to 12 city councilors were elected at-large. STV was not used anywhere else. Before 1921, the only other form of PR ever used in Canada was for election of Toronto MLAs through Limited Voting, a form of Single Non-Transferable Voting.
Those who thought PR was unworkable in rural areas perhaps thought a different form of PR rather than STV was envisioned; those who thought PR meant STV must have thought that STV was possible in rural areas. And it actually was possible technically if not politically. Local representation as usually defined would have been rendered obsolete with say five already-large rural districts grouped together in one district. The poor transportation methods of the time strengthened the case against such grouping but federal ridings were larger than provincial districts and they were considered to be able to create local representation.
In fact many times such grouping was exactly that was indicated. Clear calls were made for "PR through grouped constituencies and ranked ballots." But then after election, the UFA government did not do that, not there anyway.
It was easy promise to make
The basic fairness of PR was obvious. It was a great thing to promise. It appealed both to farmer and workers. It was a plank in the wide-ranging reform platform of the time that included prohibition, Single Tax, women's suffrage/political equality, Direct Legislation. How could a farmer movement bent on reform not call for PR? The farmers being the largest group of "blue-collar" workers in the province had the clout to effect change that would make Alberta better for all, and the government did much good for urban workers, including electoral reform in the cities.
(The bloody-mindedness of many of the left, held so long out of power, not to be willing, if elected to government, to give the right the justice that the left was so long denied is understandable but not laudable. We must realize that it is a short road that has no turning (except on the Prairies of course). FPTP may help us get into power but it will also help our opposition when the numbers shift even a little, as they inevitably will sooner or later. Fairness to all is fairness to all, in bad weather and good.)
UFA party members had been calling for PR (which meant STV at that time) for a decade or more by 1924. The Agricultural Council of Canada had been asking for it strongly since 1919.
But in the end STV was thought not to be doable in rural districts by many who lived there. Grouping say five already-large rural districts to make one multi-member district was seen as impossible. (Nowadays modern transportation mostly alleviates any such problem. One can easily travel in one hour what used to take several hours.)
But Edmonton and Calgary were already using multi-seat districts (under Block Voting) so STV was eminently do-able there. Just cut the number of votes that each voter could cast, from five down to one, and change it to a transferable preferential vote. Easy and a vote-getter as electoral reform was something the UFA had been promising when it was elected in 1921.
All the UFA believed it could do outside the cities was to ensure fairness to a degree through majoritarian Alternative Voting. Adopting AV there also ensured that voters across the province would use the same voting system, preferential votes. Uniformity of voting was seen as demonstration of fairness.
A recent idea I have had is to bring in PR in just a city or two in each province, as a foot in the door or as an experiment. It would allow voters to actually experience the effect of PR, something that only a few seem capable of visualizing now. But it would mean that voters in different parts of the province would use different voting systems, exactly the thing carefully avoided in Alberta back in the 1920s. So not great but likely better than waiting for the slow coming of full-on overall PR.
Manitoba used STV in Winnipeg and FPTP elsewhere, in 1920 and 1922 and only after that did it add AV elsewhere.
Did the two different voting systems arouse confusion?
That question is something only further research will answer....
Stay tuned...
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