In recent All In A Day interview, Real Lavergne, of Fair Vote Canada, was asked what he thought of PM Trudeau's stated approval of ranked ballots.
(link to interview:
Trudeau seems to be saying that ranked ballots are only used to elect one person. That is true of Alternative Voting or Instant-runoff Voting.
But ranked ballots, which he says he likes so much, are also used in a form of PR called Single Transferable Voting. PR-STV is single voting (with ranked votes) in multi-member districts. A district often covers an entire city.
The functional threshold would be something like a sixth or tenth of the votes in a city, so that could be either easier or more difficult for a party to get than two or three percent across a country or province. But politics under PR is naturally open-minded and co-operative. This is true also under PR-STV, in part due to the use of the ranked ballots that Trudeau says he likes so much.
PR-STV (or any other form of PR we would use) would be science based. The requirement to win a seat in the First Past The Post system that we use now is just getting more votes than the second-most-popular candidate in one of the 338 districts in the country, however many votes that is. Some win with many votes; many win with just a minority of votes in a district. Some parties get more votes than another party but still get fewer seats; some parties get 20 percent more of the seats than their votes warrant; sometimes a party with 10 percent of the vote gets no seats at all.
Lavergne in answer to the question, asked whether Trudeau had the moral right to exclude a party from representation just because he thought it was fringe or extreme. As Lavergne said, democracy means you should have due representation for the votes you receive. And that is the basis of proportional representation. Anything less than that is un-democratic, at least to the degree that it isn't proportional.
Trudeau could look at Canada's experience with pro-rep. - and we do have one.
PR-STV was used to elect city councils in 20 Canadian cities and municipalities in the 1917-1971 period. It was also used for 30 years to elect MLAs in Alberta and Manitoba. It allowed both small and large parties to get their due representation but did not cause chaos or disorder. in fact, it is said that Winnipeg had had pro-rep earlier, the Winnipeg General Strike would not have happened. (Perhaps the second Riel Rebellion would also have been prevented if the Metis as a people had had due representation, even a few spokesmen, in the House of Commons to press their cause, which pro-rep would have given them.)
About the time Manitoba and Alberta adopted provincial PR (the early 1920s), PR was adopted in Ireland and Belgium to calm the political situation and avoid rebellion and civil war in those countries.
Political emasculation of small parties is not the route to democracy or to a kinder gentler nation, but a move in the other direction.
===========================================
Comments