A hundred years ago Alberta went through something it seldom experiences - a government change. The year 1921 had the first instance of such a thing - the outgoing Liberals had been in power since Alberta's start as a province 16 years earlier. The incoming government - the United Farmers of Alberta - were exceptional in that they were a third party, being neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives, and in that they promised many reforms and went through with them.
Perhaps foremost among its promises was electoral reform - it promised to replace the existing system, one similar to what we use today, with "proportional representation and preferential voting in single-member districts."
Proportional representation at the time meant Single Transferable Voting, where each voter casts one vote in a multi-member contests, that one vote being transferable by the voter marking back-up preferences to be used where the first preference is un-electable.
Preferential Voting (what we call Instant-Runoff Voting) used the same kind of ballots as STV used but only to elect a single member in a district. STV ensures representation of variety of parties; Preferential Voting ensures that the one elected will be the choice of a majority of the voters in the district. Both use ranked transferable preferential votes.
The very first plank in the UFA's election platform called for Proportional Representation in some districts and Preferential Voting in single-member constituencies.
Thus as I see it, the party never said how much of the province would have PR nor how much would have Preferential Voting (also known as IRV).
This flexibility may have been a strength. Certainly with no assurance that they would be elected government, there might have seemed to be little point in nailing down specifics ahead of time. And no matter what was promised, the government might do nothing, a little or a lot once in power anyway.
In 1921 the UFA government was elected and in 1924, it brought in quite a lot of reform, even if it was not STV everywhere.
A similar flexible stance might be very effective today.
The UFA's election campaign "Declaration of Principles" included this expression of reasoning,
"Believing that the present unsettled conditions in Canada politically are due in large measure to dissatisfaction with the party system of government, and
Believing that present-day political institutions fail to measure up to requirements of present-day conditions in that the present system has failed to develop a sufficiently close connection between the representative and the elector and that the people desire a greater measure of self-government,..."
Thus, it said, it was promising "Representation of all classes in the community in the Legislature according to their numerical strength" through PR and Preferential Voting.
Thus the party was promising PR in multi-member districts (PR-STV), and in other places elsewhere (where there were not to be multiple members in a district), it was promising Preferential Voting (IRV).
And in 1924 the UFA brought in just the system it had promised - bringing in PR-STV in the Edmonton, Calgary and Medicine Hat and Preferential Voting elsewhere where single MLAs were elected.
For the next eight elections, mixed representation was elected in each city each election, sometimes as many as four parties being represented among a city's MLAs, and with 80 percent or more of the votes being used to elect someone.
And outside the cities, each time, the successful candidate in the district election was the choice of a majority of voters, maybe not the first choice but someone preferred over others. Both very fair results, much better than the results under First Past the Post where often the the MLA is elected with just the support of a minority of the votes cast.
A party with a mind to address the dis-proportional mis-representation that happens so often in elections nowadays could use the UFA plan.
Under such a "UFA-style plan", when running for election a party would promise that it would bring in transferable votes everywhere, IRV in single-member districts and PR-STV at the district or city level only where it is seen as needed or where it is wanted.
So from the start there would immediately be PR-STV in some cities or other places. This would be a more positive first step than to go to IRV overall and then at some time further on, move to PR in the cities.
In the cities, the government would bring in PR-STV in any city where a majority of the people vote for such in a referendum (Victoria has already done so, in 2018), or where a single party takes all the seats in a city, leaving no seats to the other parties (and thus the system is causing appreciable mis-representation). Such is the case in Montreal, Toronto and Saskatchewan. Alberta does not have a single-party sweep - there is one NDP MP among the province's Conservative MPs. But the Liberal party has been excluded from Alberta seats unfairly under FPTP. Thus the province's representation is unbalanced and undemocratic and strong change in the form of PR reform is needed to address this unbalance.
This un-balance can be addressed by bringing in PR-STV in the cities as was done a hundred years ago in Alberta and installing properly democratic elections. It is time for a political party to step up and do again what a hundred years ago the UFA showed can be done.
Thanks for reading.
See my other blogs on UFA-style electoral reform if you are interested.
============================================
Comments