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Tom Monto

UCP not addressing Alberta's real problems (Millwoods Mosaic, May 2024)

Here's a slightly longer version of my article published in Millwoods Mosaic, May 2024:


The UCP government of Alberta is on warpath. Pieces of legislation it recently introduced would see it get the power to fire city councillors and repeal city by-laws. The legislation would also make other amendments to existing city election laws that will give a leg up for supporters of the government. There is little we can do about it as Danielle Smith's party has a majority of the seats in the legislature. And the next provincial election is more than three years away. 


However, there are other forces than the legislature and the still-far-away reckoning on election day.


It is an unwise government that goes against a wave of general public sentiment - Smith's MLAs if they like their job that pays so well want to be re-elected but they will not be if only a 150,000 votes switch from the UCP to the NDP or if 150,000 previous UCP voters stay home out of disgust or if 150,000 of the 500,000 voters who did not vote in the last election get out and vote for the NDP. That figure is not that many when 1.7M votes were cast in the last election. If any of those htings happen, the NDP will have more votes and the moral right to govern, and those MLAs will be back at home looking for work.


Premier Danielle Smith might have said she will represent all Albertans if elected, but she certainly is not behaving that way now. Voters are now becoming aware of  how little they can trust her promises. The government's decision to re-open the possibility of mining on the cherished Eastern slopes of the Rockies, the headwaters of the Prairie rivers, has opened many people's eyes to the existential threat that the government poses to our province's future survival.


What type of city law is the Smith government planning to repeal? It could be that the government is laying the foundation for preventing cities from imposing COVID mandates. Such laws are the target of scorn by Smith's base within the UCP party, the small but powerful Take Back Alberta group.


The government 's Bill 20 also will ban electronic vote-counting machines. This is in line with Take Back Alberta's U.S.-style beefs as well.  It echoes claims that miscounts by vote-counting machines screwed up the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Biden won a majority of the popular vote and majority of seats in the electoral college (the thing that actually elects the president). But Donald Trump's people say those figures are phony. 


And even if not malfunctioning on that occasion, the vote-counting computers might be hacked or tampered with on purpose. Some say not possible, but some computer scientists said in 2012 they doubted that it is possible to make digital voting machines reliable and secure. 


This vulnerability is just one of the many ways that our civilization is now vulnerable to attack or accident. The recent week-long closure of London Drugstores across western Canada caused by a computer problem is evidence of that. There is danger in having our voting system as vulnerable to computer glitch or attack as our drugstores, telecommmunications networks, and so much more already are.


And anyways we don't need machines to count votes – people counted the vote in provincial elections just fine for decades. Who needs the whole "hanging chad" debate? 

A guy I know is so opposed to machines counting ballots that he opposes fair voting using ranked votes because he thinks it would necessitate use of machines. But in fact Ireland used simple hand-counting to elect 19 members in one contest using ranked votes back in 1925 so we know fair voting can be done without machines. 


Bill 20 also will put parties into municipal elections in Edmonton and Calgary. Not all of this is bad.  


Having party labels aids voters know who is who. It seems Smith believes party identification on the ballot will help right-wing voters know which candidates are Conservative and thus will aid them to vote “properly”. 


But the government could also use the label as easy way to identify who it should unseat after the election. Someone elected under the label “Raging Environmental”, or "Fight the Conservatives" would seem to be easy targets upon which the government could use their new powers.


Would Independent candidates be permitted at all? If not, then we will suffer a real democratic shortfall.


As well, party labels on the elected members means that the already-happening unfairness of elections will be more easily spotted. Currently, in Edmonton and Calgary members are elected through First past the post. Oft the one member is elected with less than majority support. Without labels, we can't easily see that a city council may be mostly NDP or Liberal, just as for decade previously city hall was controlled by Conservative party people. But having labels means we can see how and to what degree the majority of voters across the city are disenfranchised and unrepresented under the current election system.


Some oppose party labels saying party labels means elected members will be beholden to the party and not to the voters  so voters could lose their accountability to voter . 

But that is already happening - most of the members of the Edmonton city council, including the mayor, were elected by minority of voters in their district. 


In Calgary the mayor and 13 of the 14 councillors were elected by just a minority, Terry Wong by just a quarter of votes cast. There already is no accountability - if a majority of voters were dis-satisfied with the candidate who was elected on election day, will it have any chance to push him or her out later, when the member behave against their wishes in city hall?


Having party labels will improve the picture by making it more clear. They will allow us to see that under our present system, not only are most of the votes cast disregarded when it comes to filling seats, but the party that wields power in the council chamber does not have support of a majority of voters. Without labels, we cannot see if that undemocratic disaster is happening or not. But if so, that shows how bad our democratic system really is.


An article in the National Post points to the unpopularity of the Calgary city council and says the population's election of certain types of "social progressives" is bound to cause money issues. But actually the population cannot be accused of electing the Calgary council - the opinion of most of the votes were disregarded and their votes were not used to elect anyone. In fact the percentage of the population that says they are happy with the mayor and with the city council is about the same as the proportion that elected them - that is, about a third or less of voters. 


The voters who elected the council are happy, and those that were unhappy on election day are still unhappy. Few of them, it seems, are unhappy enough to take the time to see where the problem lies - in our vote-wasting, un-balanced, almost-random election system.


With party labels used and the election system the same as it is now, we will open ourselves to the dangers of election interference - if a pro-business anti-tax councillor keeps getting elected in the tony part of the city and a working class warrior in the seedier part of town as can be expected, whoever wins the nomination of that party is the shoo-in for the seat. Easy then to game the system and push an agenda.


There is also concern that party systems in Edmonton and Calgary will mean talented people will not run, only highly-partisan will. But actually our FPTP system already does that. 


To win under FPTP, a candidate must beat out all other candidates in the ward. But if Edmonton council grew to 14, two wards each of 7 could cover city. With fair quota-based election system (STV), any candidate with more than an eighth of the vote in the ward would be elected. There would be no direct conflict. All popular candidates could win. It is the binary FPTP contest, where often a majority of voters are ignored and unrepresented, that keeps good people away. 


And if good people do run, they are in an uphill fight against any hard-driving self-serving political hack that is in the contest for the one seat. Every candidate is vote-hungry so when some group offers support in exchange for the candidate's promise of support for a construction project or a subsidy, the candidate greedily takes the bait. That is the real killer of economy and careful governance at the city level - and would be banished if fair voting based on quota is established. 


We don't need party labels to have fair voting - the election system known as STV does not require party labels  - but nothing will improve without a change to our election system - with or without party labels.


The reintroduction of corporate money interference with municipal elections is part of Smith's right-wing agenda. And similarly is a retrograde step in Alberta democracy.

Meanwhile Calgary has recently allowed all Calgary residents of age to vote, not just Canadian citizens. This makes sense -- they pay municipal tax just as much as Canadian citizens living in Calgary. The old slogan "no taxation without representation" should apply in a democratic society. However, without reform, the votes of the non-Canadian resident will be just as likely to be disregarded as the vote cast by a Canadian citizen living in Calgary. That is, there are better than even odds that the vote cast will not elect anyone. 


That being the case, such extension of the suffrage is a bit of a silly reform. Catherine Helen Spence, one of Australia's leading social reformers of the 1880s, was not big on the winning of women's suffrage. She did see women getting the vote as a step forward but also she believed that it would mean nothing if all it meant was that a woman's vote would be disregarded just as often as a man's vote was disregarded. She did not live to see Australis get fair voting but she nearly did. The first of the Australian states adopted STV on permanent basis shortly after her death. And it was only after that day that Australian women began to dependably have real representation on election day.


After the introduction of cars in Alberta, Alberta's election system came into the modern age with the use of STV to elect city councillors and MLAs in Edmonton and Calgary. About when the computer age started, those cities reverted to FPTP, an anachronism of horse-wagon days. 


It is past time for Alberta to once again get a proper voting system. Then the government in the legislature will be truly accountable to Alberta voters and will begin to address the province's real problems - climate change, low wags compared to food prices and rents, pollution in our rivers, homelessness - not the lack of party labels in city elections.


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