Well, so what? So the parties’ share of the seats don’t always precisely mirror their share of the vote. It may be a little unfair, but whoever said life was fair? It works, doesn’t it?
No. We’ve only just begun to describe the problems with the present system. So if your view of this tends to the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” end of things, let me try to convince you: it is broke.
Let’s just revisit that fairness question, for starters. The issue isn’t fairness for parties. It’s fairness between voters. Take the last federal election (just to broaden this out from B.C. a little). The NDP, with 2.5 million votes, won 37 seats, meaning it took roughly 68,000 NDP votes to win one seat. Meanwhile the Bloc Québécois, with 1.4 million votes, took 49 seats: about 35,000 votes per seat won. So, quite literally, one BQ vote was worth two NDP votes.
This is pretty fundamental. If there is a bedrock principle of our democracy, it is supposed to be one person, one vote. Every vote is equal, and every vote counts. Yet that is simply not the case in Canada today. Indeed, if you’re a Green voter, your votes might as well not have been counted at all: 938,000 Green votes were worth exactly zero seats.
Well, the Greens. What’d they get: seven per cent of the vote? Except it isn’t just Green voters who are disenfranchised in this way. The same is true of any voter in any riding who supports any other candidate but the winner. In most ridings, that’s most of the voters. Strange but true: in a typical Canadian election, over half the votes . . . don’t count.
And of course, even if you do happen to vote for the winning party, that doesn’t necessarily guarantee effective representation—if you live in a “safe” seat, or indeed a safe region, such as FPTP tends to produce. Since only the leading candidate in each riding gets in, a party that can bunch its votes geographically, like the Bloc, will do relatively better than a party whose vote is spread more evenly, like the Greens. Parties that take a narrow, regional view are thus rewarded at the expense of parties with a broader, national perspective. Politics divides along regional lines, rather than along ideological differences. In place of debates, we get grievances. Sound familiar?
The result is a highly distorted picture of the country. To look at Parliament, you would think there were no Liberals in Alberta, no Conservatives in Toronto—and that federalists were the minority in Quebec. Add to this the phenomenon of vote-splitting, which further limits voter choices: rather than simply vote for the party they like, they are forever being told they must vote against the party they dislike. Anyone who might think of starting a new party, out of dissatisfaction with the choices on offer, is likewise told not to bother: after all, they will only “split the vote.”
By now you may be suspecting this is about much more than the way we count the votes, and of course you’re right. The case for electoral reform isn’t only about what happens on election day—it’s about what happens every day in between. And this is really how we should think about FPTP: not just in terms of the distortions and anomalies it produces, but the incentives these present the political players—the rewards and penalties that accrue, depending on what strategies they choose. In essence, FPTP is a highly leveraged system: a two per cent swing in the popular vote can result in a much larger change in relative seat counts. In that tiny sliver of the vote can hang the difference between a majority government for one party, or a majority for the other.
Much of what we deplore in our politics can be seen in this light. Faced with such massive down-side risk, politicians are inclined to play it safe—very safe. Hence the parties tend to hug as close to each other as they possibly can, minimizing their policy differences while attacking each other in stridently partisan terms. Only at election time do they take off the wraps; in the concentrated time frames that our campaigns allow, that typically means the sorts of wedge-issue gimmicks that can be reliably expected to yield small gains in the short term. Because a small gain is all they need.
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