CKNW Editorial
for June 25, 2001

Ed Broadbent made quite a point here on Friday when he said we had to go to some form of proportional representation in Canada in order to preserve the national union. He used the example of the Alliance getting nearly ¼ the votes in Ontario yet only one MP. But it goes further than that. The Liberal Party gets far too many seats in Central Canada and not enough from the western provinces. This is because the "first past to post" system creates such distortions. To see these distortions clearly one need only look at the results of our last two provincial elections. In 1996 the Liberals got 3% more of the popular vote than did the NDP yet the NDP won. In the recent election the NDP got about one in five votes yet got 2 out of 75 seats. And on it goes.

There are innumerable voting schemes devised to correct this situation but the most common is called Proportional Representation or PR. Under this system political parties present a list of candidates to the voter and have the number of them elected as their percentage of the popular vote would warrant – usually requiring a base of 5% to qualify.

This has some drawbacks to it. For one thing, it shuts out the independent. Now, independents don’t get elected very often but do we want to eliminate the influence that independent candidates have on a race ands decide that we are committed to political parties, period? Another problem is this – who selects the list? Is it just the party bosses? If so, one would hardly expect too many independent spirits to be on that list. And, on the national scene,for a national election, the lists would have to be provincial but what would stop the party bosses in Central Canada from making sure that these selections were satisfactory to them? But the most serious problem is that it eliminates constituencies. In a country this large, that doesn’t seem desirable.

Other countries distinguished by regions have solved that problem by having a mixed system where half the parliament is elected from the party list and the other half by constituencies. This system prevails in Germany, which is regional in nature, and New Zealand which by and large is not. In Germany it seems to work – in New Zealand it is hugely unpopular and the country is considering reverting to first past the post. But perhaps that tells us that it depends on the psyche of the country involved and what it was trying to accomplish. Apart from the North Island/South Island situation in New Zealand, which has never had any sort of bitter regional overtones, what the Kiwis wanted was to break the jolting back and forth between the left as represented by Labour and the right as represented by the National Party. In this they were only partly successful as instead of minority governments emerging – as they had hoped - what developed were coalitions either formal as under the National Party and now informal under Labour. They also found that there were now two sorts of MPS – those responsible to the constituency and directly elected and those responsible to the party. With the larger parties it seems that the party lists tended to reward the party faithful rather than seek out committed parliamentarians.

I think we must reform the system, nationally and provincially. In doing so, we require a national debate with options being presented. I agree with Ed Broadbent that national unity is seriously threatened by the current system. How long can we go on where the two main opposition parties are regional in nature, one because it wants to be, the other because under the "first past the post" system it cannot elect members east of the Lakehead?

But we won’t do it. And we won’t do it because the Liberal Party arrogantly believes, as part of their party psyche, that they and they alone can save the country. Although they only get elected from two provinces and only really make an effort to get votes there, their conviction is that they and they alone understand the country and its divisions and thus are supremely competent to rule us forever. They know that any form of PR would jeopardize their position as the natural governing party and it’s not in the nature of those with power to do anything that might lose it. When they see the Alliance Party in western Canada the Liberals assume that sooner or later the wisdom of their rule, based entirely on the never ending Upper Canada/Lower Canada debate, will sink in and those dimwitted hayseeds from the west will get the message.

I believe and have for a long time believed that if regions of the country no longer see the federal government as relevant they will drift away. Canadians are not revolutionaries – not only do we not take to the streets we throw those who do in jail after brutal arrests. No, it is a slow, steady process culminating in utter boredom. British Columbians will wake up one morning and find that all they have in common with other Canadians is bare citizenship – and that will no longer be enough.

I would argue that if the political system were such that all regions participated in the governing of the country, national unity would stand a decent chance.

But, as I say … it isn’t going to happen … certainly it won’t happen when the minority government with a majority, the Liberals, knows that a fair system would see them having to please the entire country in order to retain power, not just please Ontario and Quebec.