Letter to editor, published in Alberta Views, April 2024
Regarding Rachel Notley's resignation, she deserves credit for leading the NDP to a position where it is a contender for power. Yes as she claims, Alberta now has two-party system.
But that was nobody's aspiration.
Her own father and many others valiantly opposed the Social Credit juggernaut and then the Conservative juggernaut. Those parties took massive majorities of seats in the legislature often with less than 60 percent of the vote. Those holding alternative views wanted to see competitive politics in this province but not necessarily a two-party system.
Modern democracy requires a multi-party system, not just an A-or-B choice for voters. The current voting system, single-winner first past the post, can only offer us a binary choice -- the almost-certain winner in a district or his closest contender to whom alternative-minded voters must flock, even though for many his only virtue is he is the least-disliked choice.
So, many don't bother to vote. Turn-out in 2023 was 200,000 lower than the election in 2019, when a third of voters stayed home!
And those who did vote in 2023 engaged in strategic voting as never before. Almost 97 percent of voters who voted in 2023 cast their ballot for the two main parties. This is a level never seen before in our province's history. And it is not a characteristic of a strong democracy.
Historically about 20 percent of Alberta voters vote for parties other than the two leading parties despite the uphill battle that "extra" parties face under FPTP. That shows the voters' true desire, only somewhat filtered by strategic voting.
But in 2023 with so much at stake, even more voters felt the need to self-censure and mis-represent their sentiment. Others, daunted by the limits of FPTP, just stayed home.
Let's free voters to vote for whom they truly want to see elected, by having multi-member districts and fair voting through each voter having just one vote. Even such a system without any embellishments such as ranked votes would give mixed representation within each district. [And with ranked votes, any candidate that takes 15 to 25 percent of the vote, more or less, in a district will be elected.]
By such fair voting and the multiple-party legislature it would produce, our politics would move from the kind of two-party system that many places had in the 1800s to the kind of diverse, flexible, multi-party democracy that many places in the world have had since the 1960s.
Tom Monto, Edmonton
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