When three
of the remaining British colonies in North American federated in 1867 - the
same year Britain
extended its suffrage to 10 percent of the electorate - the new Dominion of
Canada naturally adopted British institutions of electoral democracy. Canada's
founding fathers, in contrast with their Australian counterparts two
generations later, failed to ask if the British First Past the Post (FPTP)
system was suited to a federal country dispersed over far-flung regions. Though
some local and provincial experimentation with different systems of election
took place after the Western provinces entered confederation earlier this
century, it proved short-lived. Today, not only are the 308 Members of
Parliament elected through FPTP, but so are all members of the ten provincial
legislatures and three territories. Indeed, over the years, the federal
electoral system moved even more closely to the pure FPTP plurality model as
the few two-member districts that existed were gradually eliminated.
That FPTP
is appropriate for Canada
has largely been taken for granted in part because Canadians' familiarity with
electoral experiences outside its borders generally extends only to the US and UK. Yet, this does not fully
explain how a country so much concerned with constitutional reform has not
proven open to altering its electoral institutions - especially, as we shall
see, given the anomalies they have produced. This is not to say that reform to
a more proportional system has never been proposed; only that it has not made
it to the political agenda. The Task Force on Canadian Unity (Pepin-Robarts
Commission) in its 1979 Report included a recommendation for just over 20
percent of the seats in the House of Commons to be accorded to the parties
proportional to their support and from those provinces in which there was
underrepresentation. A slightly different proposal was submitted by the
left-leaning New Democratic Party, the party most underrepresented under FPTP.
Yet when the Trudeau government rejected the Pepin-Robarts report, electoral
reform of the House of Commons was also shelved.
The fact
that the issue was off the political agenda became clear ten years later when
Pierre Lortie, Chairman of the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party
Financing set up by the Mulroney government in 1990, made it clear that
changing the electoral system as such was outside the Commission's mandate.
Discussion of electoral reform of federal legislative institutions concentrated
on a proposal supported by the Western provinces to turn the appointed upper
chamber, the Senate, into an elected one. But when Senate reform died with the
rejection of a Constitutional amendment proposal in a 1992 referendum, this
possible avenue to electoral regimes other than FPTP was closed.
Ironically,
the distorting effects of the FPTP electoral system on representation in the
House of Commons - combined with Canadians' tendency to identify politically
along regional lines - have probably never been greater than in the two federal
elections that took place in the 1990s. In 1993, the voters repudiated the
ruling Progressive Conservatives, but the electoral system almost decimated Canada's
oldest party. Rather than electing the 46 members of 295 that a proportional
system would have given them, the Tories managed to elect only two. In
contrast, the two regionally-based parties, the Bloc Québécois and Reform, with
13.5 and 19 percent of the popular vote respectively, elected 54 and 52 MPs.
In 1997, of
the 301 seats in Parliament, the Liberals won 155, Reform 60, the Bloc
Québécois 44, the NDP 21 and the Tories 20. Had the seats been distributed
according to the parties' popular support, the Conservatives would have placed
third with 58 seats, just behind Reform's 59, with the NDP up and the Bloc
Québecois down to 33 each, leaving the Liberals with 118. Two thirds of the
Liberals' seats came from Ontario, while
Reform dominated the Western provinces, and the Bloc Québécois Québec -
"quartering Canada"
- as The Economist put it, producing what Canadian pundits called a
"Rainbow Parliament." Had the seat been distributed according to the
popular support for the parties, Liberals, Conservatives, and NDPers would have
won seats in all provinces or regions; Reformers in all but Québec. And this,
of course, is to leave out the fact that under PR the parties would have had an
incentive to expend their efforts and resources beyond the regions where they
do well: the Conservatives would have put far more effort into the West; the
NDP and Reform would have worked much harder for support in Québec. Indeed,
there is good reason to assume that the low turnout of just over two-thirds of
registered voters is linked to the fact that in most ridings only one or two of
the parties were real contenders, with supporters of the others effectively
disenfranchised.
Electoral
reform toward a more proportional system was proposed by a number of columnists
and editorialists in the wake of the two elections, and raised by the leaders
of the Progressive Conservative Party, but only wistfully. And in November
1997, a private member's bill was submitted by a leading member of the NDP
proposing Parliament endorse PR and appoint an all-party committee to conduct
public consultation on the question and report back with a concrete proposal
which would then be put to Canadians for their approval a national referendum.
Yet, like other private members' bills, this one will die on the order paper.
By and large, politicians view electoral reform as a non-starter in which they
are unwilling to invest precious political capital.
While this
is understandable it is also regrettable. While the FPTP system has produced
some majority governments, the tendency of the system to polarize rather than
promote compromise has not necessarily served Canada well. As a thought
experiment, one can imagine the outcome if the one serious recent effort to
bring electoral reform to a provincial political agenda had succeeded. This was
in Québec in the early 1980s when an investigatory commission advocated
adoption of a regional-list system of PR, a recommendation endorsed by the
Québec cabinet but one that due to lack of support from the opposition, and
even in the governing party caucus - was never presented to the legislature.
Had it been adopted, the balance of power today would be held by parties
representing the twenty-five percent of Québeckers who want change but prefer a
compromise short of the sovereignty favoured by the Parti Québécois.
The only electoral
reform efforts that made it to the political agenda were provisions adopted in
certain Western provinces allowing for the recall of legislators. As far as
electoral-system reform is concerned, the only real prospect might be for Canada to once again follow Britain's example. If Britain proves prepared seriously to consider
changing the electoral system it bestowed upon Canada, Canadians might follow
suit.
