The Wetaskiwin federal riding went from electing a labour/farmer radical to Conservative after Conservative after Conservative. Could some of this be due to the First Past the Post voting system that we have used in federal elections since the mid-1800s?
Like most federal ridings in Alberta, Wetaskiwin elected an UFA MP in 1926 and 1930. This was labour/farmer reformer William Irvine, formerly a radical Calgary minister, newspaperman and author.
Then from 1935 to 1945 Wetaskiwin elected Norman Jaques of the radical monetary reform party. William Aberhart's Social Credit party.
The SC government under control of Ernest Manning turned right-wing. Wetaskiwin elected that sort of SC-er in 1953 and 1957.
Then it took the slight plunge to elect a so-called Progressive-Conservative. James S. Speakman was a former WWII army officer, accountant and farmer. He was related to James Speakman, UFA MP, and Alfred Speakman, UFA MP and anti-SC Unity League MLA. They were both stalwart leaders in the Alberta Farmers' movement so perhaps the name had a certain cachet among Wetaskiwin voters.
Like most other ridings in rural Alberta, since WWII it appears to have tilted strongly to the right. It has elected a centre-right MP (SC or P-C) without interruption from 1949 onward.
Individual centre or left-wing candidates have seldom approached 20 percent of the vote in Wetaskiwin.
The last time a candidate from a non-right wing party touched that mark was in 1968.
The 1968, election was only a three-way race with a Conservative, a Liberal and a NDP running. The Conservative took more than 3/5ths of the votes, leaving a fifth to the Liberal and 14 percent to the NDP.
But comparison of the 1968 and 1972 elections shows something odd.
In 1968 the successful candidate received 65 percent of the vote. And an opposition candidate received more than 20 percent of the vote.
In the next election, the successful Conservative received a lower proportion of the vote - only 62 percent of the vote - but no other candidate got more than 17 percent of the vote.
In part this was due to three candidates running in 1972, more dramatically dividing the larger opposition vote.
So a non-rightist candidate got more than 20 percent of the vote in the 1968 but none did in 1972, despite more opposition votes cast in the latter. This was obviously not due to greater popularity of the Conservative 1972 versus 1968, but to the un-natural focussing of the opposition vote in 1968.
To have traction in First Past The Post winner-take-all elections, there is often a loss of range of choice for voters. We see this with the very existence of the United Conservative Party. This produces a lack of choice for voters. The many votes cast for Reform and Wildrose candidates, federally and provincially respectively, shows that there was - and probably is - is a diversity of opinion even among conservatives.
Under a system that uses transferable votes, no such focussing is necessary. Any votes cast in dead ends will be transferred out to where they can do some good for the voters who cast the vote.
For supporters of parties other than Conservative, Wetaskiwin is what might be described as "no-hope" riding. But the repeated consecutive Conservative victories were not the result of majority support for Conservative candidates.
Note that in every election from 1940 to 1957 and in 1962 and 1965, the successful candidate did not win a majority of the riding vote. More votes went to the unsuccessful candidates than went to the successful one. The minority was represented; the majority of voters were unrepresented.
In 1958, 1963, 1968, 1972, 1974, 1979, 1980, 1984 and 1988, the successful candidate did take a majority of the votes.
But who is to say that the vote for non-Conservative parties might not have been larger if there had been a hope that a non-Conservative would be elected?
Thanks for reading.
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