Election Numbers

I read the Bricks and Bouquets in the Reporter a while back. The Bouquet praised the US style of government. I cringed just a little.

When I was young and never questioned what I was told, I also praised our electoral systems with patriotic zeal. I was 60 years old before I realized that there are better ways.

When our system was enacted, it served the role of encouraging the expansion of our economy. Under either party the goal was and still is the same -- growth, above all else. The force that controls this is entrepreneurial fervour, and capital money -- the goal is profit. It served us well in this regard, providing we ignore the fact that we are squandering our capital, when we should be living on the interest.

As time passed, many people began to realize that their views were not being represented. They formed Socialist, Labour, Regional, Social Credit, Christian, Natural Law, and even Communist parties. The latest are the Green Parties. They are gaining strength around the world as people see the foolishness of our ways. Since new views and new parties have to compete with a variety of other interests it has always been a tough battle -- particularly tough when entrepreneurial interests financially support the two or so established parties, while private individuals and bake sales support the others.

I will never be a political scholar, but I do understand some statistics -- as my daughter says, "Without statistics, you are just another person with an opinion."

I ventured into the Elections Canada web site to see how fair our system is. Using my $2.00 calculator and a little common sense, the inadequacies show up remarkably well.

In the last election, there were 12,985,874 voters.

Each elected Liberal required an average of 31,819 votes to gain a seat as an MP.

Each elected Reform required an average of 41,501 votes.

Each NDP required an average of 67,733 votes.

Each Conservative required an average of 121,287 votes.

The reason for this is simple, but not just. The winner in any given constituency may have much less than one-half of the vote and still win. That is to say, if 5 candidates run and one gets 24% and the other four each get 19%, the former wins -- even though 76% of the voters never voted for him -- 76% have representation that they didn't want.

Hold on, it has been worse. Lets look at the 1993 Federal election. In this election the PCs got a total of 2,186,422 votes and elected only two members. This amounts to over 1,000,000 votes for each PC MP elected. (Two seats is hardly representative of the strong electoral support.)

The Liberals got 5,647,893 votes and elected 177 members. This amounts to 31,909 votes per MP elected.

How many people see this as just and fair play? I certainly do not, and wonder why we haven't trashed the system years ago.

If we look at the Quebec Provincial election we see that the PQ got 76 seats with 42.9% of the popular vote - the Liberals got 48 seats with 43.6%.

To quote Mr. Bill Hulet of Guelph, "Don't forget that the problem is even worse than these figures would suggest. A lot of voters cast a ballot for parties they don't really agree with, simply because the parties they really would like to support aren't likely to be elected and they don't want to waste their vote."

I wrote to Mr. Preston Manning about a year and a half ago asking his opinion on this subject. He responded. "I appreciate your interest in electoral reform to make the House of Commons more truly representative of Canadians."

"With respect to your specific question about our position on proportional representation, our official policy is as follows: The Reform Party supports the use of a referendum to determine if the present First Past The Post system of selecting Members of Parliament should be replaced with a more representative form of representation. A decision in the affirmative would be followed by a second referendum, at a later date, to choose amongst several alternative systems."

This was a good political answer - how sincere I can only guess.

"Proportional Representation" is an electoral system that is designed to ensure that the number of seats a party receives in Parliament really reflects the percentage of votes that they received in the election. There are various ways of doing this, but ultimately they all involve placing a greater emphasis on the political party than the individual candidate. In this system you, in effect, vote for a party and for every so many votes it receives, it gets a chance to select one member from within its ranks to represent you in the legislature. In this system, if 24% of the votes are cast for one party, that's the percentage of people they elect to the house of commons---no more, no less.

Whenever someone mentions PR government, opponents always laugh and say look at Israel. I say look at Germany, Norway, Sweden, Australia, Japan and New Zealand.

Have a nice day.