Why I Prefer Canada's Current Electoral System

Who Cares?

Although the subject of electoral systems would usually make for a terrible blog post and the act of bringing this subject up should get you "un-invited" from dinner parties, the fact that Canada's newest Prime Minister wants to change Canada's system makes it worth talking about. It's also worth writing about because it seems that our new Prime Minister is not considering my favourite system (status quo) as an option.

How Does Our System Work Today?

Today, Canada uses the "First-Past-the-Post" system (hereinafter referred to as FPTP) where the individual with the most votes (regardless of how many or what percent) in each riding is elected. Based on the countries that use this system (UK, US, Canada, India, etc.) I'm guessing the modern version of this system originated in the UK and was passed to commonwealth countries but I can't seem to find a solid reference for this theory...regardless of where it came from the idea for FPTP flows pretty logically from the concept of representative democracy which goes a little something like this:

In a democracy "the people" form government and make their own rules (in lieu of a monarch, dictator, etc.). However, it is not practical to have every single person in a country vote on every issue or bill so the country is divided into small geographic areas (in Canadian federal politics this typically means ridings containing ~100,000 people) and the people in those areas choose someone to represent them in government. Because these people are there to "represent" others this form of democracy is referred to as "representative democracy".

The reason I say that FPTP flows naturally from this idea is because if a group of people are picking a representative it only makes sense that the person receiving the most votes would be that representative. One of the alternative systems that is often proposed, Proportional Representation (PR), is not as intuitive when you look at it from the lens of a representative democracy (for example to enact PR you need to create multi-member districts...). That said, a Ranked Balloting (RB) system would have the same benefits as FPTP.

What's Wrong With FPTP?

The main criticism of the FPTP system seems to be that it "distorts" the election results by giving the parties that received the most votes a disproportionally large share of the seats. To see this in action you only need to look at the last Canadian federal election where the Liberal Party received 39.5% of the popular vote and 54% of the seats. Now I don't imagine the people who voted for the Liberal Party are too upset about the distortion in the last election but for every party that benefits others must see a negative impact. In the case of Alberta's last provincial election you can see that the Progressive Conservative Party only gained 10.3% of the seats despite getting 27.8% of the popular vote. I suspect their supporters are less than thrilled with the current system right now (although they did benefit from it for over 40 years)...

Obviously, comparing the popular vote to the share of seats gained can make the FPTP system feel "unfair" although I never really felt that way personally. I've always looked at it through the lens of a geographic representative democracy and it made sense to me. That said, some people make the case that if you vote for any candidate that does not win that vote is "wasted". Furthermore, if your favourite political party constantly receives less seats than their popular vote (I'm looking at you NDP supporters!) I can see how that constant frustration could make you feel that way.

What Are the Options?

I want to start this section by suggesting that none of Canada's main political parties are approaching electoral reform in an honest way. The reason I say that is that all three of them (the Conservative Party, Liberal Party and New Democratic Party) just happen to support the electoral system that gives them the greatest chance of forming government. In the case of the Conservative Party they prefer FPTP (although they won't say it publicly yet so instead they are advocating for a referendum on the subject), the New Democratic Party has publicly stated that they prefer PR and I believe that the Liberal Party will eventually conclude that the best system for Canada is Ranked Balloting. Fortunately, for me I don't even have to do the math to prove this because Eric Grenier of the CBC already did it (see below).

Because I didn't make my own chart though the headings are probably a little confusing. To make it perfectly clear the results under "Election" show how the parties did under FPTP, "Proportional" of course means PR and "Preferential" refers to a Ranked Balloting system. So what you can clearly see is that the NDP has the most to gain from PR and the Liberals would be virtually guaranteed to form government every election under RB. The Conservative Party is a little trickier because they actually would have done better in the current election with PR but I mentioned above that they prefer FPTP.

The reason I suggest that the Conservative Party prefers FPTP is because this party and its predecessor (the Progressive Conservative Party) only received more than 50% of the popular vote 3 times in the last 100 years (1917, 1958 and 1984) whereas these parties formed majority governments 6 times in the last 100 years (1917, 1930, 1958, 1984, 1988 and 2011) under a FPTP system. Given that their contemporaries show a clear bias toward the system that benefits them the most I don't expect the Conservative Party to want to switch to a system that would cut their odds of governing in half...

Ranked Ballots

If Canada were to adopt some form of a RB system it would very likely be of the Instant-Runoff variety. What this means is that every voter ranks the candidates in order of preference instead of voting for a single candidate. If a candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, that candidate wins. Otherwise, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Ballots assigned to the eliminated candidate are recounted and added to the totals of the remaining candidates based on who is ranked next on each ballot. This process continues until one candidate wins by obtaining more than 50% of the votes.

Although this system can be a little bit cumbersome to explain it is a pretty good system. I like it in that it stays true to the idea of representative democracy and it "wastes" less votes as the individuals voting for smaller parties eventually have their votes count towards the larger parties of their preference. Critics of this system will again point to the fact that parties can win more seats than their first choice preferences would suggest (i.e. the Liberals would have won 66% of the seats although only 39.5% of voters had them ranked 1st). So it really doesn't solve the main problem of FPTP. This system is also more computationally challenging so it will cost more to implement (although technology has reduced this a lot). Lastly, although some scholars suggest this system is resistant to strategic voting anyone who followed the Progressive Conservative leadership election in 2006 is aware of how badly the strategic voting can turn out (*cough* Stelmach *cough*)...

Proportional Representation

The theory behind PR systems is relatively simple in that they try to give political parties a share of seats that roughly match their share of the popular vote. Unfortunately, the practicality of doing this is not really that simple. For example, there are usually rules about the minimum votes you need in order to get a seat, the election threshold, and in order to have enough seats to redistribute based on the popular vote, PR systems need to create the multi-member districts I mentioned earlier on. That said, if the districts are created properly these systems can still do an okay job of being a representative democracy although they are a little more convoluted to understand.

The main advantage of a PR system is that it feels more "fair". The reason it feels this way is because if you believe most voters are not voting for candidates and instead vote for parties then this system will result in the parties receiving a share of seats that matches the share of votes they got. Therefore almost no votes are "wasted" and the resulting government looks more like a random sample of the population than it does in any other system.

The main disadvantages of the PR system is that it very rarely produces a majority government (Sweden has only had two in over 100 years!) and it also creates an incentive for more parties to form (just look at the Netherlands with 11 parties receiving seats in their 2012 elections). My personal issue with this comes down to how these coalitions are formed but I'll get into this in a little more detail in the next section.

How These Systems Might Work in Canada

Ranked Balloting

First, let's take a look at Ranked Balloting. In order to do this I'm going to borrow an image from my previous blog post on Alberta's elections and if you want to understand how I built this you'll have to take a look there. Otherwise we're just going to assume that you can predict how Canadians vote by placing the political parties on a spectrum from left to right and that Canadian preferences for these parties will form a normal distribution with a mean somewhere near the "center".

Now that we have this chart it should be clear that individuals voting for one party are most likely to pick a party adjacent to them as their second choice (i.e. someone voting for the Conservative Party is likely to select the Liberal Party as their second choice and NDP voters would almost certainly not mark the Conservative party as their second choice). What this means is that the current governing party, the Liberal Party, would likely receive a lot of second place votes from the second largest party, the Conservative Party and would also receive a fair amount of second place votes from the third place party, the New Democratic Party. For this reason many observers (myself, Eric Grenier, etc.) believe that using a Ranked Balloting system would really benefit the Liberals.

Some might argue that the Liberal Party does a pretty good job of representing the average Canadian (because they are right in the center) so maybe having them as our government all the time is not such a bad thing. While that is true to some extent I don't believe it's healthy for any democracy to have a perpetual governing party. As the old saying goes, "governments are like diapers they should be changed often, and for the same reason.".

Proportional Representation

I suspect that the Canadian political spectrum would change dramatically if we were to adopt a PR system. I mentioned earlier that these systems rarely yield majority governments and while that has to do with the fact that it's hard for any one party to get 50% of the vote it is also due to the fact that a PR system encourages more political parties. To see this in action let's take another look at Sweden.

Looking at the first Swedish election Wikipedia has results for (1911) we find that there were three political parties (the Social Democrat Party, the Liberal Party and the Moderate Party). Over the last century however the number of parties has grown dramatically and in the last election (2014) eight different parties received a seat and one other just missed out.

Now if you think I'm cherry-picking here by talking about only a couple PR countries with lots of parties (Sweden and the Netherlands) I welcome you to look at the list for yourself but I did check a number of countries and compiled a partial list of how many of their parties received seats in their most recent elections:

• Belgium - 13 (last election 2014)
• Colombia - 10 (last election 2014)
• Denmark - 13 (last election 2015)
• Germany - 5 (last election 2013)
• Israel - 10 (last election 2015)
• Norway - 8 (last election 2013)
• Poland - 6 (last election 2015)
• Sri Lanka - 6 (last election 2015)
• Tunisia - 15 (last election 2014)

After reviewing all of these countries I am convinced that PR systems do in fact result in more political parties (exactly what everyone wants...) because all you need to do is reach the election threshold and you get a seat at the table. In contrast, Canada's current system requires a party to win an entire riding in order to get a seat which means you need at least one riding in the country to give you more votes than all the other parties (for the sake of argument you can probably get away with as little as 30% in a particularly fragmented riding). As it turns out getting at least 30% in one riding tends to be a little harder than meeting election thresholds so there isn't much incentive to creating a fringe party in Canada so we only had 5 parties win a seat in our last election.

At this point some of you might be wondering what is so wrong with having more political parties. My main problem with having this many parties and never having majority governments is all of the horse trading that has to occur in order for coalition governments to function. Basically, the smaller and more extreme parties occasionally become kingmakers and in exchange for their support they demand that the more moderate government enact some of their crazy policies. To me, this is not a recipe for good government and actually increases the politics of politics...and in Canada we saw a glimpse of what this might look like when the Conservative Party won minority governments in both 2006 and 2008.

Between 2006 and 2011 the Conservative Party held the most seats in Canadian parliamentary. However, they never held a majority of the seats and had to rely on other parties to pass their legislation. In particular, the NDP and Bloc Quebecois supported the Conservatives occasionally through this period in exchange for a variety of concessions.

The Systems in Pictures

Putting all this together I believe the following graphs show how the Canadian political spectrum looks today and how it would be impacted by the most likely alternative systems, RB and PR.

So what you can see in these diagrams is that our current system allows for some variety of governments (from slightly left of center to right of center), the Ranked Balloting system would dramatically narrow the range of governments Canadians can expect and the Proportional Representation system would cause a proliferation of parties and would permit a very large range of possible governments depending on how the coalitions are formed.

Last Comment

After going through all of this I still prefer Canada's First-Past-the-Post electoral system. It has its flaws but the governments it is likely to produce are reasonably moderate but diverse enough that we don't devolve into a one-party system. The other systems can seem "fair" in their own ways but the ultimate result of these systems aren't desirable. With respect to Ranked Balloting I suspect this would cause a near perpetual government and Proportional Representation would simply create more parties and occasionally result in governments with extreme policies.

So for me I look at FPTP a lot like Winston Churchill did with democracy, "...the worst form of government, except all those others that have been tried.".