Blown Into Proportion

They say you never forget your first time, but they usually don’t say why. For mine, not long ago, I had to climb a steep hill in the rain. I was a nervous eighteen-year-old university student living in Montreal. I entered the polling station, looked down, and felt nothing.

On my federal ballot was a list of names and political parties, all irrelevant. The Liberals owned this riding by such a crushing margin that the opposition was purely symbolic. (The local ndp candidate, like me, lived in a university residence.)

As with every ballot filled out that day, what mattered most was where it was cast: depending on where you lived, you had one, two, or, in a few rare cases, three meaningful choices. Like about half of Canada’s voters, I wasted my vote, casting it for a losing candidate who wouldn’t represent me in Parliament. Countless others voted against what they feared, not for what they supported.

This system, which we inherited from the Brits and have never modified, produces massive distortions — disenfranchising voters, rewarding regional strongholds, and killing fresh ideas. In 2006, the Green Party won over half a million votes nationwide, a little more than the Liberals won in the four Atlantic provinces. The Atlantic Liberals got twenty seats, the entire Green Party none. Parliament has four men for every woman and vast regions are represented by a single party. Only twice since World War II have majority governments been elected by more than 50 percent of voters.

But all this could change. This October, Ontarians have a chance to pick a new, proportional system, in which the parties’ share of seats would actually match their share of the popular vote. If Ontario’s voters opt for change, Canada could follow. Imagine Ottawa’s metamorphosis: a small but strong Green Party; the Bloc Québécois cut almost in half; Liberals and New Democrats from Alberta, Tories from the big cities; a new party or two; many more female and minority members; a bump in voter turnout; the pmo reined in by Parliament; stable coalition governments. For much of the old guard, this would be a nightmare.

Back when I was still trembling from my first, traumatic experience, though, I never dreamed we could do things differently. I saw electoral politics as a thin wafer, while I hungered for a massive whole-grain loaf.

I looked at bread differently after spending a year studying in Paris. It was across the ocean, nostalgically reading online news from the homeland, that I was jolted by an article about the world’s first citizens’ assembly on electoral reform. British Columbia’s Liberal government had asked 160 randomly selected people to determine whether BC needed a new electoral system, and if so to design one. After eleven months of deliberation, they proposed something called bc-stv, a fairly proportional system that would have put an end to false majorities. Premier Gordon Campbell set the threshold for referendum passage at an unprecedented 60 percent and spent little on public education.

On May 17, 2005, the day of the provincial elections, 58 percent of voters said yes to the new system, not enough to pass. Campbell’s Liberals got 46 percent of the vote and 58 percent of the seats — more representative than most elections, but still a false majority. Thanks to public pressure, the government will hold another referendum on bc-stv in 2009.

Since BC’s false start, government-appointed commissions in New Brunswick and Quebec have recommended similar alternatives, but politicians have declined to implement them. In November 2005, a proposed proportional system lost a referendum in pei.

Hope for change now rests with Ontario, where another citizens’ assembly, mandated by Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty and modelled on BC’s example, has proposed Mixed Member Proportional (mmp), a system used around the world. New Zealand switched to mmp in 1993, and on provincial election day, October 10, Ontario’s voters could do the same. But they’ll need a supermajority to do so — McGuinty, like Campbell, set a 60-percent threshold.