i've been trying to post something all week but blogger has been a pain in the ass lately.
now i have nothing to post.
Here is my essay on why Canada needs proportional representation. It's a shitty essay but it does get the point across in my opinion. So if you are wondering why the government is so fucked, this has alot to do with it.
Restoring Faith in the System –
The Need for Proportional Representation in Canada
By James Martin Windsor
“If liberty and equality, as is thought by some are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.”
Aristotle
While many in Canada mock the Americans’ Electoral College, our system suffers from the same problem -- winner takes all, first past the post. There is much discontent in our current electoral system. Voter turnout in Canada is declining, most voters feel that their votes are irrelevant, women are still underrepresented in parliament, people can no longer associate policy with parties, parties are becoming increasingly regional, government is becoming less accountable and less responsible, and rarely (if ever) do parties keep election promises. These problems are caused by an outdated, unresponsive electoral system, that hasn’t been changed in over one hundred years. The solution is electoral reform under the principles of proportional representation. This paper will detail how proportional representation works; explaining how our current system routinely distorts results, wastes millions of votes, produces parliaments that are not reflective of the electorate, and exacerbates regional differences, how proportional representation fixes these problems, and how it should be applied to Canada and disproving the traditional arguments made against it.
THE GROWING DISCONTENT
A study completed after the 1997 federal election found that voters not only expressed strong negative feeling for the party leaders, but “in record numbers” refused to identify with parties, and failed to link issues to parties. With the First Person to the Poll (FPTP) system in place, the system becomes a zero-sum game – you lose; I win. Distorting the opponent’s position (through appeals to emotion, negative advertising and the like), while keeping one’s own policies vague, pays off.
Only 60% of the eligible voting public cast a ballot in the last federal election in Canada. This is down from about 70% in the 1993 Federal Election . Right now, Canada ranks 109th among 163 nations in voter turnout, slightly behind Lebanon, in a dead heat with Benin, and just ahead of Fiji. Many Canadians feel disenfranchised with our current electoral system, as though it doesn’t matter whether or not they vote. In the past, ‘majority’ governments in Canada in actuality should have never been majority governments in the first place. In 1980, the Liberals won 44.3% of the popular vote and 52.1% of the seats, resulting in a phony majority. Bryan Mulroney and his Tories created one of the largest majority governments this country has ever known by winning 50% of the popular vote, and winning 74.8% of the seats. In 1988, the Tories formed another majority government with 43% of the votes and 57.3% of the seats. However, the biggest phony majority government was in 1997 when Jean Chrétien and the Liberals won 51.5% of the seats in Parliament, with a mere 38.5% of the popular vote.
An additional issue has been increasing regionalism within the party system; rather then having a party representing the predominate views of that nation as a whole. Canada has been broken into a Conservative West, a separatist Quebec, and a Liberal, left leaning centre, where NDP and Liberal support is the strongest.
It is very difficult to look at a map of Canada and not see the growing regionalism and discontent towards our political system. With the exception of the 2003 Liberal victory, a government committed to the political sovereignty of the province of Quebec has been in power for the majority of the past twenty years. On the federal level, many people within the province of Quebec feel as though their vote counts only in regards to the issue of separatism. They vote in favour of separatism and choose the Bloc Québécois, or not and vote Liberal. Many vote Liberal out of fear of separatism, rather then a true desire to support the party. Despite increasing discontent towards the Liberal party due to the sponsorship scandal, recent cuts in education, and generally poor government; the party’s support still remains very high. People still vote Liberal as the only other party with enough to support to provide a true opposition to the separatist Bloc party. This results in a stagnant political environment that is decided by a single issue and leads to a less responsible government, where the polls don’t hold parties as accountable as they should.
The only party to make any progress in Quebec (provincially and federally) is the Action Democratique, a party whose priorities are economic, and whose leader, Mario Dumont, had called for a 10-year moratorium on referenda in Quebec. His party managed to win 14 percent of the vote but only won a single seat in the 1998 provincial election. This improved in the 2003 election when the party won 18 percent of the popular vote and picked up 3 more seats. One is left to wonder if support may have been even higher in the 2003 election, had they been granted the proper amount of seats in the ’98 elections. The last party to hold a seat federally, other then the Bloc and the Liberals, was when the Progressive Conservatives won 5 in the 1997 election. Since then, support for all other parties has diminished into nothing on the Federal level.
Quebec is not the only province that suffers from a single party over representing an entire region. The province of Alberta has suffered from the distorted view that the Conservative and Reform parties hold political dominance. In 1980, the Tories won all twenty-one seats with sixty-five percent of the vote. The Tories won all of the seats again in 1988, while only receiving fifty-two percent of the votes. In 1997, the Reform party won ninety-two percent of the seats with fifty-five percent of the vote. In 2000 the renamed Alliance party won eighty-eight percent of the seats while winning fifty-nine percent of the votes.
We see a similar pattern in Ontario. In 1993, the Liberals won 98 of the 99 seats while only winning fifty-three percent of the votes. Again, in 1997, the Liberals won 101 of 103 seats while receiving even fewer votes at fifty percent. The Liberals won 100 of 103 seats in 2000, while winning fifty-two percent of the vote. The current electoral system does not help unite the nation under a government that actively works together for all its parts. The over representation of a single party in a specific region only pours more fuel on the growing fire of regionalism; it inaccurately increases the nations divisions, as well as the provinces’ discontent towards one another.
Other problems within the current system are the lack of female and minority representation in our government. Despite several decades’ attention to the low percentage of woman in Parliament, the 2000 election produced a house with 79% male Members of Parliament (“MPs”). Canada now ranks 36th amongst nations in percentage of woman MPs, well behind most Western European countries.
In the last six federal elections in Canada, just over 49% of the votes were wasted. Voters cast more than 6.2 million votes in each of these elections, but not a single person was elected. In 1993, this was never more evident then when Kim Campbell almost destroyed one of Canada’s oldest political parties by receiving two million votes for her Progressive Conservative party, but only won two seats, insufficient for official party status; in comparison to her competitors, the Liberal Party, with one seat for every 32,000 votes.
In comparison to countries with proportional voting systems which are designed to make every vote count, Canada blows the others out of the water. In the 2002 New Zealand election, roughly 5% of the votes were wasted; in Scotland’s 2003 election, 6% of the vote was wasted; and in Germany’s 2002 election, 7% of the vote went to waste. For Germans, New Zealanders and Scots, more than nine out of ten voters were able to help elect an MP. This compares to only five out of ten Canadian voters. What is exactly proportional representation, and which system would be best for Canada?
WHAT IS PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION?
Today, seventy-five countries, including most major democracies, use what are generally called proportional representation systems. That label, however, can be confusing because it describes election outcomes rather than the core principle. The principle behind this voting system is to make it as close as possible; to make every citizen’s vote count. The goal is to maximize the number of citizens who can help elect the representatives they desire. The more votes that count, the more likely the results will be proportional. Parties will then gain a portion of seats relatively equal to the portion of votes they receive. In other words, proportionality is the outcome when all voters are treated equally.
The system was first used by the Weimar Republic of Germany in 1919, but ultimately failed, with Hitler rising to power in 1933. There are several different types of proportional representation: Party Voting List, Mixed-Member Proportional Voting, and Single Transferable Vote.
Party list voting systems are by far the most common form of proportional representation. Over 80% of used worldwide are some form of party list voting. It remains the system used in most European countries. Legislators are elected in large, multi-member districts. Each party puts up a list or slate of candidates equal to the number of seats in the district. Independent candidates may also run, and they are listed separately on the ballot as if they were their own party. On the ballot, voters indicate their preference for a particular party, and the parties then receive seats in proportion to their share of the vote. In a five-member district, if the Liberals won 40% of the vote, they would win two of the five seats. The two winning Liberal candidates would be chosen according to their position on the list.
Party Voting List
There are two broad types of list systems: closed list and open list. In a closed list system, the party fixes the order in which the candidates are listed and elected, and the voter simply casts a vote for the party as a whole. Voters are not able to indicate their preference for any candidates on the list, but must accept the list in the order presented by the party. Winning candidates are selected in the exact order they appear on the original list. Most European democracies now use the open list form of party list voting. This approach allows voters to express a preference for particular candidates, not just parties. It is designed to give voters some say over the order of the list and thus which candidates get elected. Voters cannot vote for a party directly, but must cast a vote for an individual candidate. This vote counts for the specific candidate as well as for the party. The order of the final list completely depends on the number of votes won by each candidate on the list. The most popular candidates rise to the top of the list and have a better chance of being elected.
Mixed-Member Proportional Voting
Mixed-member proportional representation attempts to combine a single-member district system with a proportional voting system. Half of the members are elected in single-member district plurality contests, and the other half are elected by a party list vote and added on to the district members so that each party has an appropriate share of seats in the legislature. People in favour of mixed-member proportional voting claim that it is the best of both worlds: providing the geographical representation and close constituency ties of single-member plurality voting along with the fairness and diversity of representation that comes with proportional representation voting. In Germany there are two electoral thresholds that a party must overcome in order to be allotted seats. A party must either receive five percent of the nationwide party list vote or win at least three district races in order for it to gain any seats in the legislature. This is used in order to limit the amount of small parties growing like weeds.
Single Transferable Vote or Choice Voting
As the name "single transferable vote" implies, this systems involves a process of transferring votes. It is designed to minimise wasted votes in multi-candidate elections, while ensuring that votes are explicitly for candidates, rather than party lists. A list of candidates is created, and the voters then rank their candidates by preference. The top preference votes are tallied; the candidate with the fewest votes is then eliminated, and then those votes (based on the previous established preference) are transferred to the other candidates, and this is done until a single winner is decided.
The single transferable vote should not be categorized under proportional representation, as it does not guarantee proportionality. It simply provides a small degree of preference, but ultimately results in your vote not electing who you want elected. Your vote is still wasted, but you receive a slight preference towards who your vote will be wasted upon. It does nothing to remedy our current electoral problems, and Canada should not adopt this system.
ARGUING AGAINST MORE DEMOCRACY
Despite the obvious fact that the voting population is terribly unrepresented within our government, people argue that this is actually a good thing; that if you demand “too much democracy”, then there is a trade-off, losing the ability to form “good government”. What is meant by “good government’ is anyone’s guess. The argument is that two or more parties will have to negotiate, compromise, and co-operate in order to form government and pass legislation; essentially “when the government works together in order to pass legislation (which would be the most popular amongst the public), that would be a bad thing.” The argument just doesn’t hold water.
If you look at what is considered Canada’s most popular governments of all time, you will find that they are minority governments. The Liberal minority governments of the 1960’s and 70’s, headed by Pearson and Trudeau, cooperated and worked with Tommy Douglas and the NDP to pass some of the most popular legislation this country has ever known. In the recent CBC’s “Greatest Canadian” poll, these three men were all in the top ten; with Douglas taking the number one spot. Canada is a nation that functions best when working together, for the progress of all the people, and in the interest of all the people.
A criticism related to this is that very small parties will somehow blackmail the big parties who need their support to adopt their radical agendas; the idea is that fringe viewpoints will have an extraordinary impact on government policy. This simply isn’t true, any major party or political leader adopting an agenda that isn’t in touch with its own support base would be severely punished at the next election. It is more likely that parties will be forced to work more with one another in order to find the most public pleasing legislation, rather then appealing to extremists, just so that the minority party may remain in power. Generally, two or more like-minded parties who together represent a majority of voters would agree to form a coalition government. Their compromise agenda would focus on areas of policy agreement. If two parties representing a majority of voters have common policy interests, it is often indicative of majority public support for those policies.
Another criticism is that small parties will start multiplying like weeds. In order to dissuade this, one could implement a popular vote threshold, where parties must receive three or five percent of the vote in order to obtain seats in parliament. This measure has been taken by such governments as Sweden, and Germany.
For far too long have Canadians tolerated a primitive and dysfunctional voting system. If Canada wants to end its’ current era of corrupted politicians, scandals, misspent tax dollars, broken campaign promises, and political discontent; it must change its current electoral system, thankfully steps in the right direction are already being made. This May, in B.C. their will be a referendum on the issue, and then the coming November in P.E.I., and the province of Quebec has started its own public consultation on electoral reform. I believe with the implementation of a mixed-model system similar to New Zealand’s, Canada will be able to achieve a government that is highly responsible, responsive, and reactive to the needs and desires of all Canadian people, whether rich or poor, white or native, male or female, socialist or conservative; all people will be represented in government, fairly and equally.
