Tomb

Rather than turkey-induced post-Thanksgiving bloat, it is perhaps a deficit of real democratic choice that kept Canadians voters at home during the federal election.

Canada’s electoral system has been criticized loudly by experts and voters alike for many years, most notably by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s old Reform and Canadian Alliance parties. The argument is that the current mechanism breeds regionalism, disenfranchises supporters of smaller parties and puts power in the hands of unaccountable men and women elected by the minority of voters, rather than the majority.

Of these accusations, the first is perhaps the easiest to prove, given last Tuesday’s results: With nearly twice the popular vote given by Canadians to the Bloc Quebecois, Jack Layton’s NDP nonetheless managed to gain fewer seats in the House than the separatist party — a peculiarity that results from the fact that Gilles Duceppe’s Bloc enjoy all of their support in only one region of the country, while the NDP’s arguably stronger support is spread thin over a whole country’s worth of ridings.

Regionalist parties like the Bloc, and, in the past, the Reform Party, thrive on a system that gives them the ability to base their platforms on “us-and-them” politics, drumming up support in one area of the country or another by stoking a sense of alienation among their constituents. In a minority government situation, this is especially dangerous because it gives a regional, separatist party like the Bloc a leg up over a truly national party and makes them a disproportionately strong power broker in the House. In the next year, Harper’s government will likely have to rely on the Bloc’s support to pass many bills into law. And so, with only 10 per cent of the popular vote to Layton’s 18 per cent, a party that wants to break the country up will hold the balance of power in Parliament.

By a similar oddity, the Green Party, despite having almost five per cent of the vote, compared to the Bloc’s 10 per cent, was once more shut out of the House of Commons entirely. The only MP the party has ever had was Blair Wilson, who was not elected as a Green Party candidate, but as a Liberal, and never got to exercise voting rights as a Green representative. Of the many small parties in Canada, the Greens are by far the strongest, but even as part of a greater global movement whose policies are increasingly becoming doctrine for other parties, the Greens are fighting an uphill battle to get a member elected to parliament, thanks to the current electoral setup. Their broad, national policies fail to give them the kind of regional traction of populist parties, meaning that they can’t get enough support in any single riding to elect an MP.

Perhaps the greatest indictment of the current system is the continuing slide into voter apathy. Harper capturing 36 per cent of the vote may seem like a strong mandate in a first-past-the-post system, which gives a parliamentary seat to the party with the highest percentage of votes in each riding, even if the support is below 50 per cent. However, the fact that only 64 per cent of eligible voters actually turned up at the polls means that Harper’s government was elected by only 23 per cent of Canadian citizens over 18. That means that the party in charge of our government is without the support of the other 77 per cent of Canada’s electorate.

Harper used to be in charge of policy development for the rabidly pro-democracy Reform Party. He’s now remarkably silent on the various reforms that he once helped to trumpet. These include MP recall and proportional representation as well as mixed-member systems, in which parliamentarians who do not represent their constituents faithfully can be forced to resign by these same voters. It can also strip power from regionalist parties and give small national parties a fighting chance.

Harper’s law establishing fixed election dates is one step in the right direction, supposedly stripping the leading party’s power to exploit the constitution and call an election when it feels that it is most likely to win. However, he broke that same law to call this last election. Many consider this action to be a grossly irresponsible and unnecessary waste of $300 million amidst massive global economic upheaval. One has to wonder just how committed to democratic reform Harper really is.