Campaign signs line a residential street in the Toronto-St Paul's federal riding on June 21.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
It is a big year for elections, with about a billion voters in India and the European Union having already exercised their democratic franchise, and with Americans set to vote in a presidential election that has the entire world on tenterhooks.
By Monday, parliamentary elections in Britain and France will have radically altered the makeup of each country’s legislature, with the centre-left Labour Party winning a majority of Westminster seats, and the far-right National Rally expected to win a plurality of National Assembly seats.
If you ask voters in any of these places how they feel about their country’s electoral system, it is unlikely they will have much good to say about it. Most voters take the electoral system as a given and act in consequence.
The truth is, there is no such thing as the perfect electoral system. Democracy may be based on the principle of one person, one vote. But designing an electoral system to suit any individual country’s unique characteristics involves trade-offs. It is debatable whether one electoral system does a better job reflecting the will of voters than another. Capturing the electoral zeitgeist is both art and science.
Some people think they know better. The folks behind the Longest Ballot Committee took it upon themselves to complicate the voting process in the June 24 St. Paul’s by-election by getting 77 candidates to run in the Toronto riding, in a bid to draw attention to Canada’s “broken” electoral system.
The group’s stunt resulted in a nearly metre-long paper ballot with 84 names on it. That delayed the result by hours, and caused the premature death of an undetermined number of healthy trees. All to make a point that was likely lost on most of the 37,000 voters who turned out to cast a ballot in St. Paul’s, anyway.
Undeterred, the same group is threatening to mount an even more spectacular ballot stunt when voters in the Montreal riding of Lasalle-Émard-Verdun go to the polls in a by-election that must be held by Sept. 17.
“Next time it won’t be 84 candidates, it will be 184 candidates,” Glen MacDonald, a representative of the Longest Ballot Committee and unsuccessful candidate in the St. Paul’s by-election, told CBC News after winning a mere 42 votes on June 24.
“It’s about getting Canadians to think about the voting system,” Mr. MacDonald said. “So when they go to vote, they need to ask themselves: ‘Does my vote actually count, and will it actually be represented properly and accurately in Parliament?’”
Mr. MacDonald said the first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system led to not only “distorted” results in recent federal elections, but “wrong” results. His evidence? The Conservatives won about 190,000 more votes than the Liberals in 2021, but ended up with 41 fewer seats than the Liberals, who were held to a minority government.
You could just as easily argue that FPTP yielded not a wrong result, but the most correct one given the choices voters faced in 2021. The Conservative vote was overly concentrated in Western Canada, while the Liberals won seats in every province and territory except Saskatchewan and Nunavut. That is not a minor detail in a country as vast as Canada, where regional representation in government is paramount.
Proponents of proportional representation (PR), which the Longest Ballot Committee appears to favour, seem to think that system is superior to all others because it comes closest to fulfilling the one-vote-one-person principle by allotting seats based strictly on the number of votes a party garners. But it also leads to voter fragmentation and the creation of more fringe and single-issue parties.
Voters in the Netherlands, which has a PR-based electoral system, went to the polls last November. But it took until this week for the country to get a new government, as the 15 parties that won seats in the 150-seat legislature jostled for power. And it is unclear whether a coalition government made up of the far-right, centre-right, centrist and populist parties can last for very long, so great are its internal divisions. PR often leads to unstable governments and legislative paralysis.
Canadian voters have repeatedly rejected electoral reform proposals that were put to them in provincial referendums. And those who do favour change can express their desire for it by voting for the federal New Democratic Party or the Green Party, both of which advocate for proportional representation.
The Longest Ballot Committee’s tactics are insulting to voters and an abuse of the electoral process. Luckily, there is an easy fix for this: Elections Canada should reinstate the refundable $1,000 registration fee for all candidates in federal elections. The fee was struck down by an Alberta court in 2017 and Ottawa declined to appeal. The St. Paul’s by-election laid bare the ruling’s unintended consequences.