Musing on “Electoral Reform”

As happened a number of times over the last several years the topic of “electoral reform” has made it into the headlines. Personally I do not see a need and am puzzled as to why it has gained as much traction as it has unless very few have thought about the reasons and the ramifications.

The primary reason I accept the current system (First Past the Post or FPTP) is that it makes logical sense. Those of us in a particular riding must choose one person from a slate of typically 3 to 4 to represent our collective interests in the legislature, whether provincial or Federal. It is no different than a multiple choice test whereby there can be only one correct answer. The winner is the fraction based on the total divided by the number of choices plus 1.

Like so many words in the English language, “majority” can be interpreted in different ways. In the case of multiple choice, such as the current electoral system in Canada, a “majority” is the choice that has more votes than any other choice just as illustrated above, and not the sum of the others. But the problem is that far too many people say that a true majority, having 50% plus at least 1, is required irregardless. To show that FPTP is fair take for example the last Federal election whereby the Liberals got 39.5% of the vote, the Conservatives 31.9%, the NDP 19.7%, the BQ 4.7% and the Green Party 3.5%. Keep only the top two and discard the others (remember, we are only choosing 1 representative and to evaluate who has the 50% plus 1 majority we need to reduce our list down to two), and rescale so that the percentages sum to 100, then the Liberals would have had 55.3% and the Conservatives 44.7%. I would say that justified the Liberals ending up with 54.4% of the seats in the House of Commons. So what is so wrong with that?

The funny thing is that the ones who promote the 50% plus 1 majority before rescaling are typically those on the losing side and thus wish to call into question the legitimacy of the winner rather than facing up to their own inadequacies. Should such attitudes be tolerated? Absolutely not as that kind of self-serving distortion of the facts is at the core of bi-partisanship which in turn makes cooperation and compromise next to impossible.

So these losers have tried promoting alternative systems with one of the more popular ones being “proportional representation” whereby a party gets a number of seats in the legislature proportional to the total vote that they received. The real scary problem with this is that the selection of the representatives is no longer in the control of the electorate but instead in the hands of the party itself as they choose who will sit in the legislature representing their party. In essence it is truly undemocratic as “democracy” is supposed to be “government by the people”.

We, the people, have seen enough erosion of our trust through the loss of democracy within our political parties; once elected by party members as “leader” they are in effect dictators who are then difficult to remove. No wonder Justin Trudeau is so enamoured with the leadership of China and Cuba. You don’t need to be smart to be a dictator. Just ruthless and power hungry.