How people elect parliaments
A debate in the Canadian Parliament today confirmed that the governing Liberal Party has reneged on an election commitment for electoral reform.
The Canadian Liberal Party and its leader, Justin Trudeau, campaigned during the 2015 election with reform of the electoral system as a key promise.
Now the nation’s Prime Minister, throughout 2015 Trudeau repeatedly hammered a commitment that the 2015 election would be the last Canadian to use the first-past-the-post system.
The Liberal policy, adopted officially by its members in late 2014, included a commitment to select from one of several possible replacements systems after holding a public enquiry.
The promised all-party parliamentary enquiry was duly held during 2016.
Public engagement with the enquiry was remarkably high for a technical subject such as electoral system design.
731 witnesses appeared before the Committee’s dozens of public meetings across Canada, and over 500 detailed written submission were received from electoral experts, non-governmenr organisatiosn and individual citizens. Many MPs held additional public consultation of their own in their local communities.
Over 85% of members of the public, and 90% of technical experts, advocated to the enquiry that some form of proportional representation be chosen as the new electoral system.
The 338 members of Canada’s House of Commons are still elected
by first-past-the-post voting
The enquiry Committee’s landmark Strengthening Democracy report was finally released last November.
The report did not, however, recommend one specific election method, due to the fact that Canada’s incumbent political parties each take a different direction on the question. No majority of the committee members could be found to back a single proposal.
Leaders and party officials of the governing Liberal Party, including Trudeau, are widely thought to prefer a move to preferential voting in the existing single-member ridings.
The New Democratic Party, Greens and Bloc Québécois broadly supported the proportional methods that the overwhelming majority of the public had called for.
The opposition Conservative Party’s preference is to block change altogether and retain the existing plurality voting system. The Conservatives’ main demand was therefore for a public referendum between the current system and a single alternative. Conservative enquiry MPs also tactically declined to support any specific replacement.
The report instead called on the Government to take on the lead in the debate by selecting a preferred alternative system and moving forward.
But in responding to the report, the Prime Minister astonished observers by replacing the minister responsible for electoral reform and informing the Parliament that no further action on reform would occur.
Trudeau sought to justify reneging on his party’s election commitment by claiming that “no consensus” had occurred on a single alternative to first-past-the-post voting.
But reaching consensus among the political parties, or even among the dozen individual MPs who had conducted the enquiry, had never been part of the election commitment itself.
It is widely believed that, having won a parliamentary majority with just 39% of the vote in 2015 in a single-member division system, the Liberal leadership has turned against any proportional option, and would only accept keeping single-member divisions while adopting preferential voting.
Analysts have calculated that the Liberals would win an even more disproportional share of House seats under the single-member preferential voting voting method, generally known as the alternative vote system in Canada.
Single-member preferential voting is used in Australian elections. But unlike Australia, Canada has not two but three major national political parties, as well as a fourth major party – the Bloc Québécois – in its second largest province Quebec.
The reform enquiry report was finally debated in the House of Commons on Wednesday. The Liberal Party, with a majority of the current MPs, voted to reject the report, with two embarrassed backbench members crossing the floor.
In the lead-up to the parliamentary debate a formal public petition to Parliament, backing the electoral reform report, had garnered over 132,000 online signatures – said to be the largest ever response to a petition call.
Reform lobby group FairVote Canada had also organised polling of over 15,000 residents of Liberal-held electoral divisions. The results showed that 74% of respondents wanted a system where every possible vote counted, and 68% agreed that proportional representation was the way to achieve that.
70% of those polled felt that the Liberal Government should honour its electoral commitment to bring about change in the voting system.
Both the enquiry proceedings and the petition of recent weeks having set record levels of public engagement.
Government MP Andy Fillmore, a parliamentary secretary to the minister responsible for electoral reform, tried to defend the Government’s backflip. But he found himself arguing both sides of the question of whether the public were adequately engaged with the reform issue.
“We undertook one of the most robust public engagement processes the country has seen,” Fillmore told the House, before contradicting himself by adding that “unfortunately, we had low participation from Canadians.”
Bloc Québécois MP Gabriel Ste-Marie summed by the situation neatly in his comments in the debate:
“I am not surprised at what the government did, but I am disappointed”, Ste-Marie said. “When the Liberal Party was the second opposition party, it promised electoral reform and seemed to be strongly in favour of a proportional voting system to close the gap between the percentage of votes cast and the percentage of members elected.
Once in power, the Liberal Party reneged on that promise because it came to power under the current system.
I can only conclude that the Liberal Party wants a system that favours the Liberal Party. When it is the second opposition party, it wants a proportional voting system, but when it is in power, that no longer seems like such a good idea.”
The House of Commons final vote was 159 to 146 against “concurring in the Report of the all-party Electoral Reform Committee”. No actual legislation was being considered.
The two Liberal Party backbenchers who crossed the floor were Nathaniel Erskine-Smith from Toronto – who has published a striking apology to his constituents – and Sean Casey from Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.