Electoral
reform, a buzz-phrase from the NDP leadership contest that’s trickling down to
conversations between growing numbers of Canadians. While all candidates
support electoral reform and the implementation of a proportional representation
(PR), it’s important to be critical of any public decision.
Proportional
representation is an electoral system that uses party ballots; citizens vote
for a party, not a candidate. Prior to the election, parties create a ranked
list of prospective MPs and elect the percentage of MPs equal to their vote-share.
PR
defines itself in opposition to our current first-past-the-post system in that
it privileges ideology rather than geography. Under PR Canadian votes would
represent ideas behind parties rather than the region they vote in.
I argue that Canada
may just be too big and too diverse for PR to work. The success of the Bloc Québécois is that it fully exploited the geographic nature of our current
electoral system. National PR elections would largely dilute regional concerns,
including sovereignty, on the national stage.
Further,
if MPs were elected by lists, partisan elites would populate the House of
Commons. A national PR model would reinforce a class barrier to the
participation in electoral politics. The switch would also require that the
government find new and meaningful ways to interface with the pubic; Canadians
would be losing their long standing institution of a constituency representative.
In an
attempt to incorporate geographic representation into a PR electoral model,
Mixed-member-proportionality (MMP) has been proposed. Therein, Canadians would
be given 2 votes for both a local MP and the party of their choosing. Two types
of MP would be elected, constituency representatives, and a predetermined
number of list MPs in addition.
While MMP
would mean our parliaments would more closely reflect parties’ vote-share, it
would create a dichotomy of elected officials. To whom are the list MPs
accountable if not a constituency? And are the duties of the list MPs less or
less valuable, than those of representing Canada’s diverse regions?
Two
models stand out as more palatable to Canadians. The first is Alternative Vote (AV) or Instant Run-off Voting (IRV), an electoral system is used by every major
Canadian political party for their leadership contests. Therein, voters rank
candidates, making the electoral process a more comprehensive reflection of
public opinion. Effectively, it would benefit non-Conservative parties in the
many races that centre-left vote splitting saw Conservative candidates elected
with well under 50% of the vote. AV/IRV also maintains the mechanism of
geographic representation, which has underscored most of Canadian political
culture.
The
second option is a regionalized PR election; wherein, citizens would vote for a
party that fields candidates in their region, and a given number of MPs
representing that area would be elected from regional party lists. By holding
separate regional run-offs, Canadians can elect a group of multi-partisan MPs
that understand the needs of their constituents. Canadians then have multiple
MPs to contact regarding local issues, and the election results would better
reflect the real vote-share.
Incorporating
regionalism into PR also inhibits partisan elites from dominating public
discussion and reduces the impact frivolous
single issue parties can have PR election outcomes. The regional dimension would allow a
geographically based party, such as the Bloc Québécois, to be represented on
the Parliament Hill.
Canada
needs electoral reform, but it can’t be a decision made in haste; Canadians should
demand a system that balances ideological and geographic representation.