Don’t send flowers yet
Despite its recent defeat in Ontario, electoral reform is alive and kicking
BY Scott Piatkowski
Photography by Reuters: Chris Wattie
Defenders of this country’s current unfair electoral system would like us to think that the defeat of a series of proposals to fix that system corresponds to the death of the Canadian electoral reform movement. They shouldn’t plan the funeral just yet.
With Canadians boycotting elections in increasing numbers, it’s surprising that there is not more clamour for reforming our archaic and ineffective electoral system. After all, electoral reform promises to address the principal arguments for not voting—the feeling that voting won’t make a difference and that governments get elected every four or five years and then behave like petty dictators.
But politicians rarely give up power willingly, no matter how ill-gotten their electoral gains may be. They appear to quite like the fact that they can get as little as 35 percent of the vote and still form a “majority” government. Politicians of all stripes have resisted reform once in power, either ignoring the case for change or setting the bar so high that it’s virtually impossible for that change to occur.
The P.E.I. Liberal and Conservative parties were successful in crushing electoral reform in a 2005 referendum, and New Brunswick’s new premier recently cancelled a planned referendum there. Official recommendations for change in Quebec have sat on the shelf for two years, while the Saskatchewan NDP government finally (after 16 years in office) promised to address electoral reform—but only when it was clearly on its way out the door.
British Columbia represents the high-water mark in support for electoral reform, falling just short of the artificial 60 percent majority imposed for the 2005 referendum. B.C. voters will likely have another chance to vote on a slightly modified reform proposal in the forthcoming election.
While advocates for a fairer system had high hopes for change in Ontario, the electoral reform process there did exactly what it was set up to do—it failed in spectacular fashion. Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty had promised during the 2003 election to create a process to study reform, but he waited until nearly the end of his term to set it up.
Rather than properly funding “yes” and “no” campaigns, the Liberals gave the responsibility of educating voters to Elections Ontario, but required that they wait until the writ was issued (just one month in advance of the vote) and that they provide only the most innocuous information possible. The entire televised advertising campaign urged voters to “make sure [they] understand the question,” but it neither told them what the question was nor did anything to explain it.
The news media happily played along, first by ignoring the issue and then by distorting it. Not surprisingly, most Ontario voters didn’t even know the referendum was happening, much less understand the issue being decided. This allowed opponents to fill the void with misinformation, including implications that members of provincial parliament elected proportionally would be “appointed party hacks” (which not only wasn’t true, but also obscured the fact that the Liberals had actually appointed a number of candidates running during the very same campaign).
In the end, the proposal to adopt mixed member proportional representation (MMP) for future elections didn’t even come close to a simple majority, let alone the 60 percent “supermajority.” Ironically, the election results (which handed McGuinty two-thirds of the seats with less than half of the votes) further proved the case for the electoral reform that’s not going to happen.
On the surface, those who suggest that the cause of electoral reform is dead (while, of course, ignoring their own role in its execution) may have a point. Given that efforts at electoral reform have now been squelched in six of 10 provinces, we may well be stuck with the electoral system that we have for the foreseeable future. But there’s no reason that the reform movement’s injuries have to be fatal.
The problem is that electoral reform is popular among academics and activists, but not well understood by the average voter (again, largely due to the efforts of its opponents). But abolition of the death penalty, same-sex marriage rights and even women’s suffrage were once long-shot proposals as well. The current electoral system is so unfair, and has so many negative side effects, that it’s only a matter of time and continued public education before people come around. Abandoning the cause now would be unconscionable.
