Considering What Just happened in the US, It should Be Painfully Obvious Why Canada Should Change Its Voting System

It's hard to believe but it's true.  Donald Trump is the President-elect of the United States of America.  A man who has never held a public office in his life now is Commander and Chief of the most potent and lethal military force in history.  Put another way, the fate of planet rests in the apparently small hands of a man many consider to be a narcissistic sociopath. 

Yes, this man now has access to the nuclear codes.  I sincerely hope and pray he doesn't decide to nuke anyone.

So, how did this happen?  Much has been written in the aftermath of Trump's victory.  Most of the analysis concentrates on socio-economic variables centered on gender, class, and race.  But the fact of the matter is that Trump did not win the Presidential election.  He lost the popular vote.  Indeed, Hillary Clinton received approximately 2.5 million more votes than Trump.  What occurred is that the Electoral College awards its votes on a state-by-state basis.  Whoever gets the most votes in the state (with the exception of Maine) gets all of the state's electoral college votes.  Add them up and the President-elect is the one who gets the majority of electoral college votes.  In other words, it is the distribution of votes in the winner-take-all electoral districts that determine the winner of the electoral contest.

Was this election democratic? No! Clearly, the democratic result of the popular vote was overturned by the mechanics of the voting system.  The name of the game in a Presidential election is to win as many states possible that produce the greater number of electoral college votes.  The margin of victory in any given state does not matter.  For example, the fact that Trump did poorly in the most populous states of New York and California did not matter since he won a greater number of smaller states that in the end produced 20% more electoral college votes than what Hillary won.

This is not the first time the candidate who loses the popular vote has gone on to become the American President.  The last time it happened was in the 2000 election when Bush defeated Gore despite not having the support of the majority of American electors.  Electoral results carry consequences like the war in Iraq, which was clearly the result of the lie that claimed that the Iraqis possessed arms of mass destruction that required a US military invasion.  What now lies in store for America and the world at large has given rise to great concern for the safety of the global community.

Certainly, the question that needs to be raised is how can the most powerful nation in the world use such a dubious electoral system to decide who will lead the nation?  Simply put, the problem is that the Americans have never gotten around to modernizing their electoral system, which is, for the most part, a relic of its colonial past as an English settler state.  Winner-take-all electoral districts are still in use in England, the USA, Canada, and Australia.  The rest of the world, however, has moved on to adopt electoral systems that do not produce such aberrant electoral results.

It just so happens that Canada is now in the process of deciding whether to change its voting method.  During the last federal election in Canada, the soon-to-be-elected Prime Minister Trudeau promised that the 2015 election would be the last using the winner-take-all, plurality system called first-past-the-post.  Ironically, Trudeau became Prime Minister as a result of the distortion brought on by the voting system: his Liberal Party only received 39% of the popular vote; but in one region, the Maritimes, he won 61 out of 61 electoral districts with only 56% of the popular vote, thereby giving him a "majority" government, meaning that the electoral system had created a majority when in reality his party only had the support of the minority of the population.

Fabricating majority rule and the reversal of popular vote are only two of the major problems of first-past-the-post.  It also systemically under-represents or denies altogether representation to smaller political parties.  Essentially, the supporters of such parties are effectively disenfranchised.  In the 2004 federal election, for example, the Green Party of Canada received almost one million votes but was denied any representation in Parliament thanks to the electoral system.

Canadians have been aware of these problems for almost one hundred years.  In fact, in the provinces other voting methods have been used, but for many reasons we have never taken these problems serious enough to make a qualitative change to the voting system at the federal level.  Looking at what just happened in the US, we should realize that a hostile take over of one of Canada's traditional governing political parties by a demagogue is wholly possible.  In fact, Germany adopted proportional representation largely to prevent this possibility from ever happening again given the tragic turn of events leading to carnage of the Second World War.

Let's not be smug Canada.  It could happen here.  Do the right thing.  Adopt proportional representation and make Canada Trump proof.




























 

Democraphobia Runs Rampant in North America

The fear of democracy has a long history.  Plato was mistrustful of the demos, believing it would be subject to bullies and to tyrants. In England, the storming of the Bastille in France by the sans-culottes during the French Revolution was dismissed as a regrettable manifestation of "mobocracy". According to Thomas Jefferson, one of the most influential framers of the American constitution: "A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where the fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine." Really? I guess as a slave-owner, he had cause for concern if ever the "mob" had taken over and moved to take away his "right" to own slaves.

This denigration of the demos into the unruly mob is a tendency that we have not shaken through out the Anglo-American countries of the Northern Hemisphere.  Somehow down under, the Aussies and the Kiwis have been able to overcome the fear of the rule by the many and have adopted more modern democratic institutions, namely electoral systems in which the electoral results reflect the will and the desire of the masses in the representation found in their elected assemblies.

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This has not yet happened in Canada, the UK and the USA, which still cling to their outdated electoral systems that regularly distort electoral outcomes, where the results are often far from what the people intended.  In North America, this is particularly the case.

Here in Canada, the last two federal elections have produced "majority" governments in which a single party has found itself with a majority of seats in Parliament despite the fact that each of the two political parties that won the subsequent elections actually received less than 40% of the popular vote.  In effect, Canada is ruled by a minority that systemically receives the benefit of an electoral distortion in its favor and rules as if it had the support of the majority.

To the south of us, the Americans just staged a Presidential election in which according to the popular vote, the loser, Donald Trump, has become the President-elect despite the fact that his opponent Hillary Clinton received approximately two million more votes.  In this case, the election was decided by the infamous Electoral College which uses an antiquated method to decide the election: the winner of the popular vote in each state gets all of that state's electoral votes, and the winning candidate that goes on to become the President is the candidate who garners the majority of the College's electoral votes, not the overall popular vote.  At last count, Trump was awarded 20% more electoral college votes despite having received less votes overall than his opponent.

What's up with that?

Obviously, both Canada and the US pay only lip service to democratic principles.  For instance, the most fundamental feature of democracy is that it is the rule of the majority.  Yet, in both countries, electoral procedures are allowed to deviate from the democratic norm, which lead to the formation of governments that although created as a result of a popular election, do not reflect this most fundamental feature of democracy, the rule of the majority.  As is often the case, the Devil is in the details and in both countries the Devil manifests itself in each country's use of single member, winner-take-all, plurality electoral districts.  To the winner go the spoils of victory.  To the other candidates nothing.  Hence all the ballots for the other candidates, which often constitute the majority of the votes cast in the electoral district, do not bring about any effective representation for the electors who cast them.

Put another way, we do not hold democratic elections in North America.  What we do is stage electoral popularity contests guided by slightly different rules than in democratic elections. The winner of the popular election appears to have the legitimacy of a democratic result, but in reality the winning candidate or political party has won according to the rules governing the popular elections in each country, not by the rules governing democratic elections of which the most important is that each vote counts and counts equally.

This masquerade has been going on for quite some time.  At the heart of the problem is the fear of what the "many" might want and what the "many" might do.  Fear of an unruly mob taking over is far-fetched since the rule of law, backed by a substantial police and military presence, is well-entrenched in both countries.  However, the well-off few have reason to fear that the many, if given the reigns of power, would move to better redistribute the nation's wealth and to pass environmental and social legislation that would make the accumulation of great wealth of the few more difficult.  Heaven forbid! 

In reality, elections in North America are for the most part and with few exceptions little more than popularity contests conducted by the ruling elite that allows the population at large to participate in a public spectacle in which the public chooses between the two options provided to them by an electoral process designed and maintained by the wealthy.  For example, although there are considerable differences between Trump and Clinton at the level of outward appearance, neither represent a significant departure of the way wealth is acquired and maintained in the US.  Similarly, in Canada, with regard to social issues there are considerable differences between the Conservatives and the Liberals; however, both parties are the flip sides of the same coin when it comes to financial and economic matters.

Presently, in Canada there has been a Parliamentary Committee created to examine how to change the voting system as a result of the promise made by our new Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, during the last federal election.  This is the fourth time such a committee has been struck in about one hundred years.  Will this time be any different? 

Indeed, a promise made during an electoral campaign is often much different than the promise kept once the government is in power.  In this instance, it is the fear of the unknown that prevents the newly elected government from changing the electoral system because by changing the rules by which governments are formed, notwithstanding the possibility of making the government more democratic, there lies a very real possibility that the ruling party might lose its lock on political power that the present system has conferred upon it.  Better the devil we know than to risk an uncertain future.

In my mind, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."  In Canada, we spend billions to educate the public.  Consequently, we are not any less intelligent collectively than the people who govern us, although we are probably less concerned with the accumulation of wealth of the few than the well-being of the many.  To me, democracy is not such a scary proposition.

Get on with it!       

In Opening Up the Pandora's Box of Electoral Reform, Canada Should Look Down Under

Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable -- the art of the next best.  (Otto von Bismarck)

I never thought that I would see this day come.  We have a newly elected Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, who stated publically that this election would be last using the first-past-the-post voting system, which is quite something considering he now governs Canada with a majority government although the Liberal Party only garnered 39% of the vote.

Scrapping the present voting system and putting another one in place, especially since it hasn't been decided what that new system will be for the next election, is a monumental task.  It would involve public consultations, adopting legislation, and retooling Elections Canada within the constitutional requirements of section 3 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms  which protects the voting rights of Canadians.

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We also need to keep in mind that in our system of governance Parliament is bicameral, comprised of the lower, elected House of Commons and the upper, unelected Senate.  For any law to be enacted, it needs the assent of both chambers.  As a result, it would be unwise to radically reform the lower chamber with a proportional voting system of which there is great debate with regard to which to choose from and to leave the upper chamber untouched.  Imagine having an unelected Senate ruling over the House of Commons that can no longer effectively control how Senators vote.  Not a good idea!

Fortunately, the Senate as it is now functions is in disrepute and the idea of having an elected Senate has been discussed extensively but never enacted.  So, it would not be a great leap for Canada to change the voting system in the lower house and to introduce one into the upper chamber.

What we must realize is the scale of the institutional change Canadians are now thinking of making.  We simply cannot abandon our present system of governance under the rule of law and start over from scratch.  We would be much better off to take an incremental approach and to look to another member of the Commonwealth, Australia, a nation that has already evolved a political system much more democratic than its predecessor, the Westminster system that we both inherited from Great Britain.

In short, both the upper and lower houses are elected in Australia.  The lower house is elected using a preferential voting system in which electors rank the candidates, and the first candidate that receives fifty percent of the vote after the lower finishing candidates have their ballots redistributed on the basis of their electors other preferences.  The upper house is elected using a single district proportional voting method in which the percentage of the vote obtained by each political party in each state and territory determines who gets elected.

Importantly, this system is transferrable to Canada. 

For the next election in 2019, it would be feasible to transfer in a preferential voting system.  We could use the existing electoral map.  Moreover, this system has the advantage of requiring that each elected representative have the support of at least the majority of the electors that vote in his or her riding.  What it doesn't do is to correct for the distortion of the representation on the basis of the first choice, which, after all, is the most important choice a voter can make on this type of ballot.

Herein lies the brilliance of the Australian voting method.  It is in casting the second vote for the Senate where each vote counts and has equal weight.  The method is proportional, which allows for smaller political parties like the Greens to gain representation, and reflects, in the distribution of seats, how the electors actually voted.  Essentially, the Aussies made their political system more democratic without throwing out the existing system altogether, something I think the vast majority of Canadians would agree to be an important principle to follow.

Presently, Canadians are thwarted in making qualitative change to their dysfunctional Senate because of the Constitutional requirement to have unanimous consent of the provinces.  However, simply changing how Senators are chosen, moving to election instead of appointment, without changing the number of seats each province receives is entirely within the prerogative of Parliament.  Most assuredly, this would be challenged in the courts, which is why the present government must seek the opinion of the Supreme Court on the matter, preferably within the first year of its mandate.  Thereafter, Elections Canada, with the new minted proportional voting method in hand, could then go about educating Canadians on how to vote in the subsequent election in 2023.

There you have it, turning the world upside down by transferring the Australian electoral system into Canada.