A Conversation Starter On Electoral Reform

A Plea For An Honest Conversation

With the likely election of Doug Ford with a vote share that starts with a 3 and Francois Legault cruising to around 80% of the seats on maybe 40% of the vote this fall, it’s highly likely we’re about to get a national conversation on electoral reform, and so, let’s start it now. (Edit: Ford ended up with 41%. The rest of this column still stands.)

This piece is not about what I want, or what I think will happen (given that the likely answer is nothing, because inertia is always the best bet), it’s about having a frank conversation about an issue where there is so little unbiased writing. Everyone – from the staunchest supporters of the status quo to the ranked ballot nuts to the STV stans to the MMP diehards – always comes at this from their own biases, and ends up arguing in bad faith for their proposed solution. So, this is an attempt to write in good faith about a topic that could end up defining a decent amount of Canada’s next few years of political life, by looking at leading arguments from all sides.

First Past The Post Stops Extremists

This is a classic of the bad faith genre, because there’s a version of this statement that is true, but the actual statement itself is so broad as to be bullshit.

Madison Cawthorn, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and the other 210 House Republicans elected at the start of the current Congress were all elected under First Past The Post, and they are, by any reasonable definition, extremists. The same could be said about the Squad, even if there’s no equivalency between election trutherism and forced birth and universal healthcare. The idea that First Past The Post keeps the centre strong against the extremes isn’t true anymore – because what ends up happening is the extremes just work within the existing structure of the main parties.

Like, this argument in Canada basically is “do we want a dozen PPC MPs?”, which is a horrible way of justifying your voting system. If the people want PPC MPs, they should get them. Democracy isn’t just about “good” choices winning – it’s about people being represented by their choice. Yes, there aren’t ~10 PPC MPs, as some form of provincial MMP would have delivered, but the Tory Party is now having to chase the votes of those sorts of people, so the idea that it keeps us from dangerous views being expressed on the floor of the Commons is absurd. Remember when a Conservative MP called Justin Trudeau a dictator? How’d First Past The Post do at keeping this “extremist” out of Parliament?

What ends up having with PR systems that elect lots of micro parties is they end up just fucking off  into their own world and you get government of the centre. The last five German governments have been: Right-Left, Right-Centre, Right-Left, Right-Left, Left-Green-Centre. Yes, they have the weird anti-NATO tankies and the Nazis in the AfD, but the centre has held because of PR.

Ranked Ballots Will Elect The Liberals Forever

This is another lie I enjoy, because it premises that the voting system will be the exact same and yet nobody will act any differently.

Does anyone seriously believe that the NDP would get under 20% of the vote federally if there was no risk of left-wing vote splitting and no campaign from the Liberals that a vote for the NDP is a vote for the Tories? Does anyone think that the PPC vote would stay at 5%? Does anyone think the Greens wouldn’t rise if Green-friendly voters didn’t worry about wasting their votes? Of course not.

Analyses of election results under ranked ballots that assume no behavioural changes are about as useful as the 2015 NDP platform promising an overnight 2% increase in corporate taxes and they assumed that corporate Canada would make exactly 0 changes to their investment decisions and corporate structures – that, in effect, they’d swallow an extra $4B in charges and do exactly fuck all in response. Of course, we know that such static estimates are dogshit, because of course people will behave differently given a different set of incentives.

Yes, Ranked Ballots would help the Liberals in much of the 905 and in traditional Liberal-Conservative battlegrounds, but it could potentially hurt them in Liberal-NDP battles, if the Conservative Party recommended the NDP over the Liberals in inner city seats. From Australia, we know that about 40% of Liberal voters follow the party’s choice in these sorts of Labor-Green battles, and Liberal preferences were enough to get Adam Bandt elected in 2010 in Melbourne. In some places, the Liberals would be excluded – seats like Essex, Kenora, Oshawa, and Timmins – where Liberal preferences could potentially flip seats currently held by the Tories or help hold onto seats where the Tories are coming up the middle.

The Tories aren’t currently advantaged by Ranked Ballots anywhere in English Canaa, but if the PPC keeps growing – and takes some more old working class NDPers – then they could be advantaged in certain seats too. Quebec could see a Tory boost in seats with ranked ballots, though – Jonquiere and both Beauports would probably see CPC MPs with ranked ballots as federalists vote an anti-Bloc ticket, and it would enable the Tories to not get squeezed on their right wing nationalist flank by the Bloc and their federalist flank by the Liberals.

Oh, and ranked ballots would enable the Tories to split into two parties, which would enable the more culturally conservative, economically redistributive party to eat the NDP in places like Vancouver Island while the socially liberal, tax cuts and love the gays party eats the Liberals lunch in the 905, so it’s not even terrible for the Tories.

PR Would Enhance Rural Liberal Representation And Urban Conservative Representation

This is one that might be true, depending on the specific system and voter support levels.

Like, MMP doesn’t guarantee me a Liberal MP for Lethbridge or a Tory MP for Rosedale, because it would be done at a provincial level and the party gets to pick the people on the list. It’s entirely possible that the Liberals or NDP would select all their winnable MMP list seats in the Prairies from the cities, just as the Ontario CPC list might be all rural and regional candidates (or, at least, in all the winnable slots).

STV would come closer to that goal, but depending on how the lines are drawn in Toronto or northern Alberta, there’s no guarantee you’re getting a Liberal member at quota in a “Fort Mac And Other Shit” seat, and there’s no guarantee you’re getting a Conservative quota in a “Rosedale, Spadina, And Tor Cen” seat. Maybe, probably even, but the notion that you can guarantee these sorts of things is absurd.

Oh, and the idea of a mixed voting system – FairVote Canada’s stupid “STV in the cities and suburbs, MMP in the regions” from BC’s last failed attempt at reform – is such an egregious violation of the Canadian Constitution’s equal protection clause as to be laughed out of the room. The idea that some voters get to vote in a different voting system on the basis of geography is so absurdly contrary to Section 15 (1) that I’m not a lawyer and I could get it tossed if that abomination ever passed anywhere.

“Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law” is the exact wording of 15 (1), and if you think two different voting systems isn’t unequal protection and unequal benefit of the law, you’re lying.

A New Voting System Would Create A Kinder, Gentler Politics

The Tories use Ranked Ballots for their leadership races and this is the nastiest Leadership contest of any party since at least Chretien/Martin 1990, so no.

Also, I was gonna say that it might make the Liberals and NDP less combative, but being in confidence and supply isn’t making Jagmeet Singh any less of an ass towards the Liberals, so also no.

The Liberals Unilaterally Picking Ranked Ballots Would Be Undemocratic

This was the argument back when the Liberals had majority government back in the late 2010s, but yes, a government changing the electoral rules because it thinks it is advantaged by said rules is anti-democratic, and we know this because every Canadian Liberal looks at Republican gerrymandering and the electoral college as a blight to be gotten rid of.

Yes, all you “Trump is #NotMyPresident”/”Justin Trudeau won, shut up” people are hypocrites, and the Liberals endorsing the voting system that, at least in their view, would help them most is not ideal. Electoral reform changes made to help the party enacting the reforms – be it ease of voting in the US or electoral system reform in Canada – is bad.

Referendums Are Necessary

Fuck this argument.

This country is not a direct democracy, it is a representative democracy, and we elect Governments to rule us. It is not necessary to get direct voter consent for every policy, and of all policies to be the one subject to this expectation to be electoral reform is absurdist nonsense.

We extended the franchise to women without a referendum, we gave Indigenous Canadians the franchise without a referendum, and we have had radical changes to policy on abortion, gay sex, gay marriage, assisted suicide, drugs policy, and the enactment of the fucking Charter without ever being put to a public vote, but electoral reform is the rubicon?

Ah, but it’s about the way elections are conducted, so it should be the voters choice then, right? Well, no, because by that principle, voters should have to agree by a referendum on the riding lines too – given that a theoretical gerrymander would be more disharmful to the voters than electoral reform – and that notion is both nowhere to be seen and obviously absurd. Those who argue for a referendum are the people who know that the status quo bias is an obvious, real thing that we can measure, and therefore the status quo preserves not on the basis of its actual merits but on the basis of inertia.

If the government passes a voting system the public doesn’t like, they have a mechanism to change that government – it’s called an election. If a left wing government passed a form of PR designed to lock in permanent left wing government and then the people thought that was wrong, they would vote out said government. Remember when the Scottish voting system was designed to stop majority government and lock in Labour minority governments? The SNP won a majority in 2011 and Labour has come third in each of the last two elections. There already is a democratic sanction for passing a voting system the populace don’t like – it’s the same sanction as exists for every other policy area.

…

If you think you know where I stand on this issue after reading this, you’re wrong – I don’t know where I stand, so bite me if you pretend you think you know my mind. Yes, I am not a fan of First Past The Post, but I am suspicious of the alternatives, for a few reasons. STV and MMP are great in theory, but MMP would require either an increase in the number of politicans (for the top up seats) if they keep 338 members, or they have to shrink the number of ridings, making some already way too geographically large seats even bigger, once again eroding the very basic concept of local accountability.

STV runs into the same problem, because if you have multiple members per seat, you have to merge seats together and then have X number of members per district. That’s fine in Toronto or Vancouver, where the mergers would be interesting and mostly not troubling. How they’d work in Northern Alberta or the BC Interior is another problem.

Ranked Ballots are great in theory, but I can’t sit here and pretend I like the idea of Liberal governments picking the voting system that under current conditions helps them most.

Get way out there and you run into a morass of unconstitutional and wacky ideas that won’t accomplish their goals and are so complicated that I don’t understand them entirely – and certainly are unworkable in practice.

That said, a voting system that delivered the McKenna sweep of the Legislature in New Brunswick on 60% of the vote, and one that is about to wipe out large chunks of Legault’s opposition in Quebec with 40% of the vote, is shit too, and just because it has been used for a long time isn’t an argument in its defence.

I know an argument about electoral reform is coming next week if and when Doug Ford wins a majority on 37%  of the vote or whatever, but all I want is an honest one. The current Electoral Reform war is a dishonest and phony fight that pretends that all of the world’s ills are either about to be cured by a new voting system or induced by a new voting system. The answer is neither, and all I want is an honest conversation about this thing that will probably rise again over the next few years.