by Steve Gabell
Imagine you are a high school student sitting a civics exam. You open the exam paper and see the following questions:
1a) Five parties running in a national election receive the following share of the vote: 34%, 24%,12%,14% and 7%. How many seats does each party get in the House of Commons?
1b) The party that won 34% in the most recent election increased their share of the vote by 1.7% from the previous election. How much did their share of the seats increase by?
Under a fair, representative, and proportional electoral system, a party winning a third of the vote would win about a third of the seats in Parliament, a party winning 15% of the vote would win about 15% of the seats, and a party seeing a small increase in their share of the vote would see a small increase in the number of seats won. Unfortunately, the UK and Canada do not have such a system and the number of seats won depends on how votes are distributed across the country, so the questions above are impossible to answer.
Thanks to First Past The Post (FPTP), a party can win an enormous majority while having the support of less than one in three voters. In the recent UK general election, Labour won 63% of the seats on 34% of the vote (and an increase from 31% of seats on 32% of the vote in 2019). The Liberal Democrats were close to achieving a proportional result, with 11% of the seats from 12% of the vote, while Reform and the Greens both won 6% of seats but won 14% and 7% of the vote respectively. While I disagree with Reform’s policies, it is clearly absurd that a party can win twice as many votes as another party yet both win the same number of seats.
FPTP is a throwback to a bygone age where few people had the right to vote, MPs were known personally by many of the small electorate, MPs had some degree of independence, and communication was slow and limited. None of this applies now (with the exception of Greens at federal and provincial levels who do not whip their MPs/MPPs). FPTP is not fit for purpose in the 21st Century and needs to be replaced by a more proportional system; one where the number of seats won reflects the share of the vote won.
While I may be delighted to see a Labour government elected again in the UK after 14 years of Conservative rule, it is inherently undemocratic for a party to be able to wield unchecked power thanks to the votes of one in three people who actually voted (and the support of only one in five of the electorate as a whole). Such a disproportionate result could happen here at both federal and provincial levels and would be just as undemocratic.
Canada needs a fair electoral system. One where every vote counts, where everyone is properly represented. One where a government needs the support of at least half the electorate to implement their policies. We need a proportional system, and we need it now.
