(From 2022)

Every citizen of Canada has the right to vote in an election of the House of Commons … (Section 3, CRF)

In late 2021, The Economist magazine featured a story on the Canadian federal election that had been held earlier that year. The magazine predicted that Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would likely conduct a more moderate governing style. At the same time, the author questioned the impact of Liberal policies promised during the campaign. Would some provinces resist their implementation? Would federal finances restrict others?

One of the policy proposals the party had made in the previous, 2015, election was to replace the first-past-the-post voting system with a proportional voting system. As a result, commentators focused attention on the election results. The Liberals won 157 seats in Parliament and the Conservatives won 121, with the bulk of the remainder split between the NDP (24) and the Bloc Quebecois (32). These numbers mask what could be an existential problem for the federal parliamentary system.

In the 2019 election, Liberals had won 46.4% of the seats with 32.2% of votes cast and the Conservatives 35.8% of the seats with 33.9% of the votes. The Conservatives received approximately 240,000 more votes than the Liberals. Voter turnout was 65.95%. The effect was that the Liberals formed a government having been the choice of only one out of five eligible voters. Had the Liberals carried out their commitment in the 2015 election to introduce proportional voting, they would not have formed the government in 2019.

Rules is rules

Some might argue that this doesn’t matter. Canadians are aware (perhaps only vaguely) of the rules of the game. As long as those rules aren’t broken, they can accept the results as a legitimate democratic outcome. But Canada is widely diverse culturally and geographically; we should be concerned that politics might systematically marginalize the interests of significant sections of the population.

For example, in 2019, the NDP held 7% of the seats in the House of Commons, despite receiving almost 16% of the votes. Similarly, the Green party occupied 3 seats in the Commons, having received 1.2 million votes – 6.5% of those cast. Perhaps the starkest example of the unfairness the system generates is the result for the People’s Party. It received 292,703 votes – that’s more than the combined populations of Nunavut, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Prince Edward Island. The party had no seats in the subsequent Parliament. While we would be rightly concerned if the three territories and PEI were excluded from Parliament, shouldn’t we also be concerned that the supporters of the People’s Party (1.6% of votes cast) had no representation?