Elections

Moves toward Electoral Reform

Throughout democratic countries, electoral reform has been under some considerable discussion in recent years. The only other major Western democracies using the Canadian version of winner-take-all (first-past-the-post) for national elections are the United States and Britain. When the new democracies in Eastern Europe chose their voting systems, not one adopted the first-past-the-post voting system used by Canada. In contrast to winner-take-all systems, 75 democracies have chosen proportional representation systems - including most long-term democracies, most European countries and most of the major nations of the Americas.

In Canada, the debate over electoral reform is only recently gaining momentum, mostly at the provincial, rather than federal level. What is behind the growing interest in electoral reform is primarily the distortions built into the "winner-take-all" voting system used in Canada both federally and provincially.

For example, in the 1993 federal general election, Canadians clearly wanted to show the ruling Progressive Conservatives that they had lost confidence in them, and the party won only 16% of the popular vote. However, the workings of the voting system turned a show of non-confidence into a massacre. Rather than electing 46 of 295 members that a proportional system would have provided, the PCs were decimated, electing only two MPs. By contrast, two regionally-based parties, the Bloc Québécois and Reform, with 13% and 19% of the popular vote respectively, elected 54 and 52 Members. The voting system also turned the victorious Liberals' 41% of the vote into a very solid majority of 177 seats.

Equally disproportionate results have been achieved in various provincial elections. For example, in the 1987 provincial election in New Brunswick, the Liberal party won every single seat in the legislature with 60% of the popular vote. The 1993 provincial election in Prince Edward Island saw the Progressive Conservative party win only 1 seat despite receiving almost 40% of the vote. Similarly, in the 2000 election, the Liberals won only 1 seat with 34% of the vote. The Ontario general election of 2007 resulted in the Liberal party winning 71 of 107 seats with 42% of the vote. In the 1998 Quebec general election, the Parti Québécois formed a majority government winning 76 of the 125 seats in the Assembly, despite actually receiving fewer votes than the 2nd place Liberals. Many other examples of disproportionate election results can be found in other provinces.

There is growing concern in the country over the issue of declining voter turnout, yet few are willing to link this phenomenon to the first-past-the-post voting system used and the often unrepresentative results that it produces.

To date, three provinces have held referendums on changing their electoral system. They are British Columbia (2005), Prince Edward Island (2005), and Ontario (2007). Only in British Columbia did the measure come close to succeeding; in fact, given the near-success of the measure, the provincial government has scheduled a new vote for 2009. One more referendum is tentatively scheduled, but not yet officially called, and that would be in New Brunswick.

As well, the Liberal government of Quebec proposed electoral reform in 2004, which was scheduled to be passed in the fall of 2006 without a referendum. The project was postponed due to divergent views on how to improve it. The province's Chief Electoral Officer was asked on December 21, 2006, to analyze eight characteristics of a possible compensatory mixed member voting system and to submit his opinion to the government, in order to determine the effects of the possible changes that would result from such a system. He submitted his 410 page report exactly one year later, December 21, 2007.

Federally, the New Democratic Party and the Green Party both include electoral reform as part of their party platform.

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Related Links

• Fair Vote Canada
• Voting Counts: Electoral Reform for Canada (PDF)