Political, Institutional, and Psychological Centralization: A Critique of Canada's Electoral System and Parliamentary Representation (Part 3)

Part 3: Consequences on the Party System and Reform

In essence, MPs are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The MP may want to distance themselves from the party in order to lessen their dependence on it but are often unable to do so without significant risk.  As a result, MPs overwhelmingly tend to comply with the party apparatus and are thus accurately dismissed by the public at large as primarily party ambassadors. On its own, even considering the negative effects of centralization this is not an entirely unacceptable arrangement until one turns their focus to the state of the Canadian party system. As hypothesized by Duverger, the Canadian political system has historically been dominated by two major centrist parties, the Liberals and to a lesser extent the Progressive Conservatives/ Conservatives, despite technically being a multi-party system. 

This had led to the Canadian party system being explained by the brokerage theory, where major parties pursue centrist politics to such an extent that the true policy differences between them, and thus policy innovation, has become minimal. These parties are not committed to any one stance or position but instead move to the left or the right along to follow the median voter. These parties do not seek to represent or articulate the interests of any specific societal group but instead seek to make their appeal as broad as possible to maximize cross country votes. As UBC professor of political science R. Carty writes: 

“...two large brokerage parties dominate our politics and the logic of their existence focuses their ambitions on office rather than on policy or program. On occasion, national elections will be fought over seemingly major policy differences, but the alacrity with which parties are prepared to adopt policies they once enthusiastically denounced continues to amaze foreign observers.” 

The major Canadian political parties are highly centralized election-winning machines, which can afford to maintain weak, vague, or shifting policy agendas because of the mechanistic realities of the electoral system. As a result, while people may be voting on partisan grounds, this hardly produces strong policy mandates. The parties that win and form governments in an FPP system do so only with platforms weak enough that they can actually accommodate the vastness of the spectrum of interests inherent to one of the world’s largest and most diverse countries.

This is of course exacerbated by the fact that FPP tends to heavily distort the distribution of seats in parliament relative to the popular vote. For example, in the last election, the Liberals won the most seats despite not achieving the most votes; they finished with 33.1% of the vote and 46% of the seats while the Conservatives won just 36% of the seats with 34.4% of the vote. While this is one of only two instances where a party has lost the popular vote but won the most seats, there are numerous other examples of distortions in the popular vote. In the 2008 election in which the Conservative party won 46% of the parliamentary seats with just 38% of the vote, the Green party received nearly 7% of the popular vote but won no seats. In the 2015 election, the Liberal party similarly won 54% of parliamentary seats with 39.5% of the vote, compared to the NDP who won 13% of the seats with 19.7% of the vote. 

FPP can then be thought of as a system that suffers not necessarily because of its own operation per se, but from the long term consequences it imposes on the party system, mediated by the manner in which voters interact with it. For this reason, I propose the adoption of a new electoral system, Single Transferable Vote (STV).

STV retains the riding system, but allocates multiple candidates per district and determines victory through a ranked multi-choice ballot. Voters would be presented with a list of candidates and their party affiliations and would rank them based on preference, with candidates who pass a threshold determined by the number of available seats per riding winning a seat in parliament. For candidates, this means that they will have to compete not only at the party level but at the intra-party level as well, allowing a much wider field of debate for policy. The idea behind this reform is to force voters away from reliance on the cognitive heuristics that allow parties to remain leader-dominated by mandating they seek out information on the local candidates in order to make an informed vote. Voting by party or by leader would still be possible, but it would also be necessary to devote some level of attention to the personal policies of the relevant individuals running for said party. This would allow for elections to be far more consultative on policy than they currently are, as voters could choose not only which party to support but which candidates within that party. 

Furthermore, because of the mechanistic changes, brokerage parties would no longer enjoy such a large advantage over other parties. This is because ranked voting completely removes the requirement to win pluralities and the concept of wasted votes. If first choice candidates do not acquire enough votes to pass the threshold, their vote will simply transfer to the next highest-ranked candidate on their list. Depending on how many candidates are allocated to each district, as low as 25% of the support in the riding could send a candidate to parliament. This not only means that the diverse policy preferences of a riding could be more accurately represented within government, but that it will be much easier for new or smaller parties to get MPs into parliament and the distribution of parliament would be a much more accurate reflection of the popular vote. 

However, this electoral system is not without its criticism. The complexity of the system has been criticized, with some claiming such an electoral system would lower already unimpressive voter turnout. The assumption for this argument is that many would simply abstain from voting instead of seeking out the information required for an informed vote, which is admittedly higher than under FPP or comparable systems. While prima facie this seems logical, the evidence suggests that that electoral participation is not that heavily dependent on the electoral system. For example, research conducted in New Zealand following the adoption of STV by numerous city councils after having previously used FPP demonstrated that declining voter turnout was not exacerbated, but instead was mitigated by the adoption of the system. 

Under this system, Parliament would not be defined by a series of elite party leaders commanding MPs elected overwhelmingly due to their party affiliation and the profile of the leader. Parliament would not be governed by parties that could kick their MPs out of their caucus the moment that they step out of line, confident that they have no shot at returning to parliament. MPs would have a clear mandate to act on the policies that they ran on, and if those policies run into conflict with how their party leader wants the party to vote, the consequences of the MP unfilling that mandate could be worse than them voting against the legislation. Checks and balances, the division of powers, and the notion of responsible government are all concepts integral to a well-functioning democracy. Parliament is undoubtedly the single most powerful institution in this country. Within it resides massive legislative, spending, and constitutional power. These reforms hope to see the power of parliament once again divided among all its elected members, not just those at the top.