In another installment of his podcast series on the effects of electoral reform/ proportional representation/STV, Graham Lettner interviewed a frequent podcaster on Alberta political topics - Deirdre Mitchell-Maclean of Strathmore.
Deirdre ponted to the recent decision by the Alberta government to have political parties in municipal elections in large cities, saying it is way for Take Back Alberta spokespeople to sneak into office disguised under the Conservative party label or some other less-known label. She did not say it quite that way but that is how it sounded to me.
She said she fears that party labels will make party allegiance more important than representation of the riding.
And I think worth noting that one person cannot represent all the voters in a riding anyway. The best an elected rep can do, if a district has just one seat, is to represent the largest body of voters or the majority, leaving all others without representation.
And in fact many reps. are elected with only minority support, and it is to those voters -the minority of those who voted - that the elected member repressents - if he/she wants to be re-elected with support from those same voters anyway.
Graham puts the case that multi-member districts should be established with five members in each, and each voter having one votem and that the vote be a ranked transferable vote. (thus STV)
She said in such a case she hopes that policy lurch would be prevented by building consensus.
She pointed out that it used to be that Alberta had the most stable political culture in Canada
- the SC were in power for 36 years, the Conservatives for 44 -
but now Alberta is the most unstable.
i believe FPTP is partially to blame. With the new two-party structure many districts are fairly evenly split between the two parties and a slight shift produces major shift in seats won by the UCP or NDP. it is said, I think offhand, that a shift of less than 10,000 votes would have given NDP majority government.
With majority in such "easy" reach, there is little need to establish consensus. just wait and the plums of power will fall into your lap.
Conversely government in power has no need to negotiate or soften its stand in more concilitory fashion because majority government may go on and on.
Deirdre says she never saw such variety in the legislature as in 2015-2019.
I had not thought of it but it makes sense.
Five parties in the Legislature - Wildrose, NDP, Lib, Alberta Party, Conservative
the wide range of NDP members easily suprassing previous legislautre which were almost all older white males.
More women in the chamber for sure that before and many working class and younger than 40.
that is wider range, but even in 2015-2019 there were democratic failings.
many members won with only minority of votes in the district.
party seat shares had little to do with vote share -
Conservatives took more votes than Wildrose but took only half the seats.
Liberals took twice the votes of Alberta Party but both parties each took one seat.
NDP took about 1.5 times the votes of Wildrose but took 2.5 times lthe seats of Wildrose.
Five-seat district PR
With Graham's five-seat districts, and single transferable voting, it is expected that members of five parties as in 2015 would be elected, representing the will of the five largest groups among the voters. And that this would be without accidental disproportionality as seen under FPTP
and with dependable result time after time
--in 2019 under FPTP the leg was filled with members from just two parties and that happened again in 2023. The usual 20 percent of voters who voted for other than the two main parties had no representation at all.
I am not saying that five partis would be represented in each district (there is no "five and five rule"), but that overall repreaton would be at least as fair as the scatter gun FPTP system. Five parties would have representation in the legislature, perhaps even adding the Green Party, which is in top fifth or sixth slot in national elections today.
Now I expect that in the five-seat districts in Edmonton, the NDP would take three or even four seats in each district, because the NDP does take 2/3rds of votes cast there. (of course the FPTP-caused binary toe-to-toe UCP-NDP battle would be softened under STV.)
And in rural areas, Cosnervatives would take three or four seats in the five seats in a rural district.
But overall smaller parties would have more chance and representation in the leg would be at least as shared out among multiple parties as under FPTP.
And with STV, each city or region would produce mixed representation, reflecting the true hues of votes as cast in the region, instead of the un-natural one-party sweeps in regions that we now see - in Edmonton for example.
(The region "outside Edmonton and Calgary" is not cleanly "swept" by Conservatives --- two suburbs and one small city (Lethbridge) did elect NDP MLA. NDP was actually due about 14 seats there so it did come close to a one-party sweep.)
As each district in city or country produces mixed repesentation, and any small or large party with at least1/6th of the votes in the district (concentrated on the electable candidate(s)) taking a seat, there would not be the artificial off-balance that we now suffer under - the Conservatives would have city representation in each major city and the NDP would have representation in each region as well, including taking likely about 14 seats outside Edmonton and Calgary, and and so forth.
These remarks are more funcional and mechanistic than Graham steers his podcasts so it seems I am getting off-topic of discussing Deirdre's comments in the podcast.
her idea of consensus is interesting - many people think that under proportional representation parties are more willing to co-operate I am not sure that that is true. certainly under PR ofgten no one party takes majority of seats so to get a working majority in the chamber, parties of shared sentiment do join together out of necessity.
But I doubt that under PR that Conservatives will listen to NDP or NDP will listen to Conservatives - that kind of co-operation is not achieved by PR in my opinion.
Having multi-member districts will produce some softening according to previous "Physical Copy" podcast but that is more about personal interaction between members of different parties who are repranting the same district than I think Deirdre is postulating about how the legislature will operate and that. And those kind of inter-personal relationships forming by those same-district members is not really about PR at all, except that under non-PR voting systems it is very likely that one party will take all the seats in a MMD.
Those are some thoughts that occured to me from listening to just the first 16 minutes of Graham and Deirdre's podcast, so it seems the podcast will prove to be full of interesting points.
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33:12 Deirdre says we calti Redmonton becuase in 1993 Edmonton went totally Liberal.
[actually Redmonton is adherence toany shade of left (Communist Red) IMO, so the 12 NDP MLAs elected in Edmonton in 1986 and re-elected in 1989 was actually start of that nickname.
and actually in 1993 Edmonton did not give all its seats to Liberalss - NDP and Conservatives took two seats each.]
39:11
vote split caused NDP election victory in 2015.
"Far more votes for Wilrose and Conservative than votes for NDP."
yes, 770,000 and 600,000 for NDP.
yes, it was false-majority government.
for once, NDP got more than thier due share of seats while in all - all - previous Alberta elections NDP got less than their share or no seats at all.
39:31
Deirdre seems to defend right-wing outrage against the NDP winning government with minority of votes.
[It seems she forgets 1993 when Klein's Conservatives won majority government with fewer votes than Liberal and NDP vote combined.
FPTP does not look at how right or left compare but only at how parties (or candidates) compare in the little sub-battles.
Notley was not the first party leader to become premier with support from minority of the voters!]
40:18
Deirdre says that five-member distrcts would be huge, perhaps extending from Strathmore all the way to Brooks or Medicine Hat.
[But that is an exaggeration
Strathmore is on edge of Calgary; Medicine Hat is almost at Sask. Border.
there are actually nine districts running from Strathmore SE, to Medicine Hat and to the U.S. border.
(Medicine Hat is actually split between two distrcits, showing the artificial-ness of the single-member districts we are using.)
say five-member district of "Greater Strathmore" would be Drumheller, Little Bow, Highwood, Strathmore and Livingstone
size altogether is an estimated 200 kms by 100 kms. = 20,000 sq. kms
I can find no measure of sizes of Alberta provincial districts, but looking at federal districts we see that many federal ridings in Alberta are larger than 20,000 sq. kms. and each of them is represented by one MP - if one MP can represent an area of that size, then surely five MLAs should be able to.
Yellowhead riding is 76,000 sq. kms in size - just one MP!
So I would say Deirdre is expressing normal attitude of people when they first consider 5-seat district -- that it is too big. but I say a look at what northern MLAs actually do gives you a clearer idea of what one member can do, and therefore what a several elected members should be able to do.]
41:58 Deirdre: say you have five-seat district.
86 percent vote for UCP, 14 percent for NDP
[Graham noted that 86 percent Conservative vote is high, but Deirdre said it is not high for rural districts.
But actually in last election (2023) there were no districts even in rural areas where UCP got 86 percent of the vote.
There were just a few (14) where UCP got more than 70 percent and nowhere more than 83 percent -- Athabasca, Bonnyville, Cardston, Notley Peace, Drayton, Ft. McMurray, Drumheller, Innisfail, Grande Prairie, Olds, Peace, Taber, Vermilion, West Yellowhead.
In the other 73 districts, UCP got even less than 70 percent support.
Deirdre's idea echoes the great myth of Alberta politics -- that almost all vote Conservative.
That myth is helped by the great super-majoroties that the Conservative take in the Legislature with less than two-thirds of the votes or even less, or the majority governments that Conservatives take sometimes with even less than half the votes.
Those dis-proportional results are due to First Past The Post, in use since 1959, or even earlier when most MLAs were elected by Instant-Runoff Voting, which is not proportional at all -- majoritarian but not proportional.
And vote percentages of winners in 2015 were lower - it was rare for any winning candidate to get as much as 60 percent of the vote in that election.]
45:54 she makes good point that MLAs of a mixed district will be more chummy than the MLAs of the single-member districts of today.
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