The 2019 federal election produced an unstable minority government that over-represented Conservatives and Liberals, under-represented all the rest, inflamed regionalism and wasted more than half the votes in two-fifths of the ridings.
Its reckoning was so loose that it nearly created a whole different situation. A shift of a fraction of one percent of the vote could have produced a Conservative government.
Many defend First Past The Post saying unlike a scientifically proportional system FPTP produces majority governments. But four of the last six federal elections produced minority governments. This reflects the reality on the ground - no one party took a majority of the vote. While many say the majority should rule, but what if there is no majority. In most ridings no candidate received a majority of the vote.
FPTP works best with only two parties. In today's elections where four or more major parties run in a district, in most cases representatives with only minority support in the district are elected. In the 2019 election most districts elected minority representatives. For every two representatives elected with majority support, there were three elected who had not the proven support of the majority of the voters. Thus in most of the ridings more than half the votes, in a few cases as many as two-thirds of the votes, were wasted. It is likely that in many of these cases the majority might have got together to elect someone different from who was elected with just a minority of the vote.
The lack of majority is not a passing thing - with three, four or more major parties running in most districts, a party winning a majority of votes at the district level or a majority of seats in the House of Commons is not to be counted on.
A system that depends on majorities when there is none produces bizarre results. The largest parties are over-represented; the smallest, even those with more than 10 percent of the vote, often get no representation. Overall the Liberals and the Conservatives received more seats than they were due, while the NDP and the Greens suffered under-representation.
Liberals should have won only 112 seats but won 157.
Conservatives should have won 116 but won 121 seats.
The NDP should have won 55 but won only 24 seats.
Greens should have won 22 but won only 3. And so on.
With up to three-fifths of a district's votes being wasted and with razor-thin differences between parties' standings, a slight shift in votes would have produced a very different result. 17.9M votes were cast in the election. If only one-2000th of them had gone a different way, Conservatives would have taken more seats than the Liberals. The Liberals would have lost 23 seats bringing their total down to 134 seats, while the Conservative seat total would have risen by 14 seats to 135 seats. The movement of one-20th of a single percent of the vote would thus have meant a minority Conservative government. (See my blogsite Montopedia for details.)
This shift does not include the effect of a small change in votes in Beauport-Limoilou, where a BQ candidate won with a lead of only 3000. An east-coast Green MP was elected in Fredericton with only 2600 votes over her nearest rival.
Outside AB/Sask, the Liberals received a million more votes than the Conservatives so it could be said they deserve to govern. There were 5.6M Liberal votes and only 4.4M Conservative votes outside of AB/Sask. Outside AB/Sask, the Liberal party reaped the reward that the FPTP system awards the leading party. The extra Liberal seats are all outside of Alberta/Saskatchewan. In those two provinces Liberals took no seats despite being due seven.
Overall more votes were cast for Conservatives than for Liberals, but 29 percent of the Conservative vote was in Alberta and Saskatchewan, only 14 percent of Canada's seats. Conservatives' regional base gave that party almost all the seats in Alberta and Saskatchewan where actually about a quarter of the seats should have gone to Liberals and NDP.
In AB/Sask, Conservatives hold 98 percent of the seats with less than 68 percent of the vote there.
Liberals in Alberta were due five seats. Liberals in Saskatchewan were due two. NDP In AB/Sask were due seven seats as well. Of these non-Conservative seats, FPTP delivered only one – the NDP MP in Strathcona.
The Conservatives' strong showing in Alberta and Saskatchewan (69 percent of the vote in the two provinces) left only a bit more than 70 percent of the country-wide Conservative vote spread over the remaining 86 percent of seats in Canada. The Conservatives with about 34 percent of the vote took only 26 percent of the seats outside AB//Sask – 74 seats.
Under the First Past The Post system many votes are wasted. It took 59,000 Conservatives outside Alberta/Sask to win a seat, while in AB/Sask it took only 38,000. 346,000 Liberal votes in AB/Sask were not enough to win even one seat.
With this kind of wastage and almost random results, is it surprising that a third of voters stay home? 27M voters were registered but less than 18M voted. If we changed the system perhaps the 9M stay-at-homes would get out to vote.
I suggest a system where voters cast two ranked votes. One for the district representative elected in a grouped district electing multiple representatives through Single Transferable Voting (STV). The other at the party level to see that only a party with the majority of the votes would form majority government. The party level vote count would be held according to Preferential Voting. If no party secured a majority of votes in the initial vote, the least popular parties would be eliminated one by one and their votes transferred until a party accumulates a majority of the votes. Extra MPs would be provided, if necessary, to provide majority of seats for the party that secures a majority of the vote. (see my blog `What do we want in our governments` for details.)
This Double Democracy system would ensure that the elected government would have the endorsement of a majority of the voters, a basic minimum of democracy.
Thanks for reading.
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