If STV is as good as I say it is, then, people ask me, why was it dropped?
In short it was partisan greed for power. First Past The Post promised more seats to both the Manitoba government of the time (1950s) and to the government of the usually idolized Alberta Premier Ernest Manning, the man of God himself. It turns out that the man usually regarded as a protector of democracy and freedom was not above getting his own by taking away the right and freedom of opposition voters to elect representatives.
Manitoba dropped STV first. It had already switched from a city-wide multi-member district to a scheme of three multi-member districts dividing the city, before the final discontinuation of STV in 1955. (Winnipeg city continued to use STV in city governments until 1971.)
And then Manning and others of his Alberta government said their government stood out as the only provincial government in Canada using pro-rep/the only one using ranked ballots.
(The use of multi-member districts elsewhere (where Block Voting was in use) means that it was possibly wrong for the government to say it was the only one not using FPTP, but this nuance was and is mostly overlooked.)
So that made Alberta's continued use of STV/AV more difficult to defend. (And retention of multi-member districts (electing MLAs through Block Voting as had been done in 1921) was apparently never considered.)
it is said that in Manitoba the only ones who objected to the change were in the Communist party, and in Alberta the only ones in favour of the change was the Alberta Social Credit government.
In Manitoba, resistance was seen to be futile so CCF and other opposition MLAs gave in to what was going to happen anyway.
In Alberta resistance was not seen to be futile - but it was, anyway!
And Manning's government did not suffer for its attack on democracy.
I guess times were good, and people, then or always, mostly vote with their wallets. So they re-elected the SC government. In fact they gave the government more votes - and, due to this and due to the new unfair system brought in, the government got even more seats than before. So the government was good for another decade of power. (by 1971, the dam could not be held and voters went in great numbers to Lougheed's Progressive Conservatives, in what many saw a long-overdue trouncing of the Social Credit government.)
The Alternative Voting used in the rural areas had been mostly electing SC MLAs (although there was a rising number of opposition MLAs being elected there). So the change from AV to FPTP in the rural districts did not mean much to the rural areas.
In the cities, SC support had deteriorated to the point where the SC were receiving less than half the seats in Edmonton. There, objections to the change away from STV were strongest but ineffectual. The move from city-wide multi-member districts to single-member districts meant there was great leeway for gerrymandering and the result in the next election showed the effectiveness of gerrymandering.
In 1959, the SC government took every Edmonton seat despite receiving only a minority (but plurality) of the city vote.
How can you fight a machine like that?, people must have thought.
As well, people seem to just accept the lie that a plurality is a majority. Even the word majority is often used to mean a plurality.
So that is how Manitoba and Alberta reverted to using First Past The Post. That system has been used in British elections since at least the 1700s. It made at least some sense then when there were only two parties. But not now.
Thanks for reading.
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