Trudeau’s electoral reform chatter has a century of history behind it

Canada’s long history of electoral reform suggests party interest dictates change, political scientists say.

Thestar.com
Dec. 30, 2016
By Alex Ballingall

If you think Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will keep his repeated promise to change the voting system before the next election, consider this: Ottawa has flirted with reform for almost a century. At least eight reports on the way we vote federally have been produced since 1921, each recommending some form of change.

And yet, plus c’est la meme chose.

But some Canadian jurisdictions have managed to toss out the voting system we inherited from Britain, where the person who receives the most votes in each riding gets elected. Aside from a smattering of municipalities that have experimented over the years, Manitoba and Alberta had alternatives to this first-past-the-post (FPTP) system from the 1920s to the 1950s. So did British Columbia for elections in 1952 and 1953.

It’s a little-known history that political scientists and advocates for reform say is worth dredging, given the current brouhaha over electoral change in the capital.
“I think it’s a fascinating story, very instructive,” said Dennis Pilon, a York University professor who studies the history and politics of electoral reform. His big take-away: “It’s not about principle; it’s not about values - it’s about power.”

The first wave of change came at a unique historical moment. New political forces were emerging as the First World War came to a close, particularly in the Prairies, where populist movements included groups of farmers who were tired of partisan politics and yearned for a more decentralized and direct form of democracy. There was also a push to extend voting rights to women, the strengthening labour cause and the fragmentation of the two-party system - Grits versus Tories - that had endured since Confederation.

Pilon argues that the political establishment of the time feared these trends. In 1919, roughly 30,000 people joined the Winnipeg General Strike, a mass show of dissatisfaction that fanned the sense of postwar unease among the dominant political and business players of the day, Pilon said. His view is that Manitoba’s Liberal government quickly moved to change the electoral system in 1920 to prevent the labour movement from taking power.

Harold Jansen, a University of Lethbridge political scientist, believes the Liberal government wasn’t being so nakedly self-interested, yet recognized they were “trying to placate” the United Farmers of Manitoba, a nascent political movement with chapters in other provinces that was pushing for electoral reform (they actually won the Manitoba election in 1922).

At any rate, Manitoba eventually adopted a hybrid system, starting in the 1926 election, where the rules for voting in rural ridings were different from how ballots were counted in Winnipeg, the province’s major urban centre. Outside the city, elections were held using the alternative vote (AV). Rather than marking an X beside a single candidate, voters would rank them according to their preferences. Bottom-ranked candidates would be dropped after the first count, and ballots in their name would be redistributed to their voters’ second choices. This process would continue until one candidate got at least 50 per cent of the vote. As both Jansen and Pilon explained, this system went on to benefit the United Farmers, who already had strong support in rural ridings and were the second choice of many Liberal and Conservative voters.

Winnipeg got a different system, which began six years earlier in 1920: single transferable vote (STV). This variation of proportional representation is different from first past the post, in that the seats awarded to each party is closer to their share of the popular vote. Under FPTP in the 2015 federal election, for example, the Liberals were awarded a majority government (more than 50 per cent of seats) even though just 39.5 per cent of the electorate voted for them. That probably wouldn’t have happened with a proportional system like STV.

Jansen explained that under Winnipeg’s STV system, voters ranked candidates and the entire city elected 10 candidates based on these rankings; victorious candidates had to receive a certain number of votes to get in, and once a candidate reached that threshold, surplus ballots with them as the first choice were redistributed according to voters’ preferences until 10 representatives had enough support. This was complicated and often resulted in several rounds of counting. In 1922, for example, it took 37 counts before 10 candidates were declared elected.

As University of Manitoba political scientist Christopher Adams argued, this system was meant to dilute support for left-wing candidates in Winnipeg, where the socialist and labour causes had recently demonstrated their strength with the General Strike. Their support was concentrated in the urban ridings, meaning they could have won several seats under the FPTP system with just 30 to 40 per cent of the vote in each riding. Under STV, the parties receiving the rest of the votes in those ridings would likely get some representation from the city, preventing a left-wing sweep of Winnipeg seats. And it worked - labour, socialist and social democratic politicians were routinely elected there, but so were Conservatives and Liberals.
“They wanted to prevent a group being elected they didn’t like: labour,” Adams said.

Alberta adopted the same hybrid system in 1926: AV for rural ridings and STV for the urban centres, Edmonton and Calgary. Jansen said the logic was the same: The party in power - in this case, the United Farmers of Alberta - wanted a system to weaken the electoral prospects of their opponents. “They divide their opposition in the cities and in the rural areas they devise a system that allows them to pretty much win every seat,” he said.

Then there was B.C. in 1952. The provincial government at the time was a Liberal-Conservative coalition, fearful of the possibility of a victorious Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), which later became the NDP.

As Jansen explained, the B.C. coalition government decided to change the electoral system to prevent the CCF from taking power. In 1952, a bill was passed to scrap FPTP and bring in AV ranked ballot provincewide. There was even a rule that Liberal and Conservative candidates would be listed first and second, Jansen said, the assumption being that slack-jawed voters would have a tendency to rank these first and second. Jansen called it “a very direct attempt to try and game the system.”

Turns out, another upstart party was the second choice of many CCF, Liberal and Conservative voters: Social Credit. They swooped to power in 1952, won a majority under the new system in 1953, and then introduced legislation to return to FPTP. Aside from a brief period in the early 1970s, Social Credit held power in B.C. until 1991.

Alberta and Manitoba eventually returned to the FPTP fold too, in 1955 and 1953, respectively. Jansen said Winnipeggers felt overlooked because the system ensured elections were won and lost in the rural ridings, while Alberta dropped their system because there were too many spoiled ballots. The relevant question now is: what does this history tell us?

Kelly Carmichael, executive director of Fair Vote Canada, an organization that has been pushing electoral reform for more than a decade, said history’s lesson is obvious: Party politics is a major factor.

“It’s about winning, this whole campaign and changing the electoral system,” Carmichael said. “It’s partisan interest against democracy, and it’s unfortunate.”

Jansen said that’s true, but believes more is at play. In order for electoral systems to change, there is always a “complex set of motives working together,” he said - a combination of party interest and public pressure.

He added that, while many people foresee different parties gaining from different electoral systems - for instance, many observers agree that the Green Party would gain seats under proportional representation, because their disparate low level in each riding adds up to a lot of votes nationally, but rarely translates to the plurality needed to win in a single riding - it’s difficult to predict how the public would vote under a new regime. Just look at the B.C. coalition government’s expectation that a new system would preserve their hold on power in 1952.

“They paid a big price for it,” Jansen said, pointing out that the Conservatives have never again held power in the province, while the Liberals didn’t win an election for 49 years.

For Pilon, if electoral change is ever going to happen federally, the party in power needs to perceive “an existential threat” to their ability to win. If that’s the case, change can occur easily and quickly. Each province that reformed its electoral system did so by simply passing legislation - no referendum, no drawn out consultations, he said.

But now that Trudeau’s Liberals have a majority, Pilon said his best guess is that party operatives no longer feel the way they did after the 2011 election, when the party was relegated to third place for the first time in its history.

“Suddenly they were talking about a change to the voting system,” Pilon said. “Accident? Coincidence?”

History, at least according to Pilon, would suggest it was not.