Prime minister-designate Justin Trudeau has promised a lot of things — no doubt, many of them popular — but one of those campaign promises may be tricky to pull off and in fact may strike some people as anti-democratic.
While it’s easy to fulfill big spending promises (like that multi-billion-dollar infrastructure spending proposal) it is something else entirely to implement a wholesale public policy change, especially one that goes to the heart of democracy.
I’m referring to his stated vow to change the way we elected federal members of Parliament. It’s all part of his 32-point plan to “restore democracy to Canada” that was first announced last summer.
Some parts of that democracy plan sound plausible and relatively simple to implement: a weekly question period devoted to grilling the prime minister, new spending limits for political parties and a 50-50 gender split in cabinet membership, among other things.
However, scrapping the way we determine who actually gets to run this country is a far more serious matter than any of those other proposals. It digs directly into the roots of our democracy.
Trudeau has promised to scrap the current system — called first-past-the-post, or FPTP — within 18 months, after a study by an all-party committee. Presumably, the committee would come up with a voting model based on some form of proportional representation.
A large number of Canadians have already said no to scrapping the FPTP system at the provincial level. British Columbians have voted down proposed changes twice in referendums (2005 and 2009) and so have Ontario voters (2007) and Prince Edward Islanders (2005).
Unfortunately, the new prime minister is not offering to let Canadians decide whether or not they want to change how they elect their federal politicians through a national referendum, as those three provinces did.
For anyone to argue that many people voted for Trudeau and his Liberal party in the recent federal election based solely on his vow to scrap our voting method is laughable. The issue was hardly even mentioned during the campaign.
Trudeau is opting to allow politicians (of all people) to come up with a new voting system, a conflict of interest if there ever was one.
For example, the federal NDP took almost 20 per cent of the popular vote in the last election yet won about 13 per cent of the seats. In most elections, the NDP’s seat count percentage runs well behind its popular vote percentage, so the party (and the Greens and, for that matter, the Conservatives) have a vested interest in moving to a form of proportional representation.
To be sure, there are problems with our current system. It does indeed allow a political party to form government with less than 50 per cent of the vote — in fact, that’s almost always the outcome — but so what? Proportional representation usually delivers the same kind of outcome.
There has been a lot of hand-wringing and screaming that the deposed Harper government never had a true “mandate” from the people because it received less than 40 per cent of the votes in the 2011 federal election.
However, Trudeau received roughly the same percentage support from the voters this time around (39.5 per cent) and I don’t hear the same criticism attached to his win.
Political scientists can put together long lists of both advantages and disadvantages for various forms of proportional representation. They can do the same for our current FPTP system.
How we vote is a complex issue, and an emotional one for many. Allowing politicians to make arbitrary decisions on how we exercise this most basic democratic right is destined to fail.
Instead, a nationwide vote may be the only way to legitimize any switch to a new system.
Keith Baldrey is chief political reporter for Global BC. He can be reached via email at [email protected].
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