Electoral Reform In Canada

Another Advantage to SMP is that it allows for accountability, every four year or so voters have a hand in choosing their government, they are able to reward a party by keeping them in power or punishing them by electing a new government. It is relatively easy for constituents to give credit or to blame the party when they don’t follow through with the promises they made when they do not have to weigh the competing claims of a number of parties making up a governing coalition. With proportional representation the governments overall accountability is compromised because a proportional voting system rarely results in a majority government, they lead to coalition or minority governments which lack transparency.

Since the turn of the twenty first century, in Canada voter turnout has made a significant and consecutive decline. In the last five federal elections on average only sixty-one per cent of eligible voters voted. If each eligible citizen voted in an election the government would be on par with the primary interests of the people. The easiest way to achieve this objective is by implementing a compulsory voting system. Mandatory voting systems are appealing because all citizens are affected by decisions made by the government, so it makes sense to have all those affected apart of the election process. As a result, the voting results would be more representative of the country and that would lead to an increase of stability and legitimacy.

Canada’s friendly neighbor to the South, the US, has an electoral system that is composed of 3 separate elections, one of them deciding the head of state. The president elected by the people and he or she is the determining person of the country’s political system. In the US runs like a majority system” In Canada, however, elections are held slightly differently. Citizens vote for a Member of Parliament in a 308-seat house and candidates win not by a majority, unlike in the US, but by a plurality. This means that a candidate can actually win by simply having more votes than the other candidates. This method of representative democracy, in general, does not cause too much controversy in a global scope but has

Basically, voters select one candidate from their riding, just like in an SMP system, but they also place a vote for which party they would like to form the government. This second vote determines the amount of seats that each party gains proportional to the amount of votes they collected in the countries. The representatives from each party are then made up of the elected representatives from each riding (if that party was able to elect any) and other members selected by the leader1. An STV system, which is what the Citizen’s Assembly recommended to the people of BC, can be found in Ireland, Malta, and in some levels of government in Australia. Voters rank candidates according to their priorities, choosing as many as they wish. For example, a certain voter could select a Conservative as his or her first choice, a Liberal as the second, a New Democrat as third, and then cast no votes for the Green Party. When each a candidate reaches a certain quota of first place votes, they are elected, and the extra first place votes that they did not need are distributed to the other parties according to their overall ranking. If a second candidate is then elected, his or her extra votes are then distributed to the remaining parties, and so on . This system is rather complicated, especially when compared to our current system, but computerized voting systems have generally alleviated any problems.

Canadian electoral system is largely based on the single member plurality (SMP) system which was inherited from its former British colonial masters. The system dates back to several years before the formation of the Canadian confederation. Some of the common features of the Canadian electoral system include election candidates to represent designated geographical areas popularly known as” ridings”, counting and tallying of the votes casted on the basis of the districts as opposed to the parties of the candidates (Dyck, 622). Finally, a candidate only needs a simple majority over the other candidates in order to be considered a winner, even if the winner has a small percentage of votes. This system has however been heavily criticized for its winner takes all way of judging victory. Critics argue that if the winner takes over the whole system, it may result into unfair representation of the various social groups, but it may also bring into power unstable minority participation in government. For example, a candidate can win even with barely 25% of all the votes casted, while the small parties may end up with no seats in the parliament.

Another important reason that Canada should select a different election system is that the FPTP system has a large impact on smaller parties. According to Political Scientist Maurice Duverger’s Law, given enough time FPTP systems will eventually become a

FPTP is the second most used electoral system worldwide, and in the UK it is used primarily in general elections to reach a fully representative, democratic electoral system. In assessing whether we should scrap FPTP, we must first establish what an electoral system ought to provide. The purpose of an electoral system in the UK is to fairly elect representatives for the population to make up an effective government, as we operate with a system of representative democracy. For an ideal democracy to function, an electoral system that delivers a strong constituency link, genuine voter choice, an effective government is fundamental. It is also important for a system to operate simply and with transparency for the population. As Tom Stoppard once wrote, “It’s not the voting that’s democracy; it’s the counting.”

The first past the post system also known as the single - member plurality system is a classification in which the country is divided into districts. This system is quite successful as it allows the winner to obtain a majority in parliament. The candidate gains a parliamentary seat by finishing first in a single district. This reform would not achieve the desired effect of reducing the disintegration of the party landscape. This is because, despite its antiquity and simplicity, the first past the post system is becoming less common as it is possible that the party with the most votes may not win the election. Thus, it focuses enormous power in the hands of one party that might only represent 20% of the electorate. It is mainly used in Britain

The second consequence of electoral systems is referred to as local representation. LP is extremely poor in STV yet is excellent in SMP. This is the case because the current system elects one MLA per riding and has much smaller constituencies, making contact between the voter and their MLA more feasible and likely easier to get in contact with. Once constituencies grow and become large in size, like it has a tendency to do in STV, there becomes a need for multi-member parties required for one riding. Local representation under STV becomes an issue for voters when constituents are too geographically large as contact with representatives become few and far between. Large constituents with multiple members representing them, seem to be the answer to the problem at hand, however there is no guarantee that there will be enough candidate interest to support these constituents under STV. For example, if many of the towns in Northern Manitoba were grouped into one constituent, due to the sheer amount of travel that would be required by candidates, it would be very difficult to find enough candidates willing to sign up, and even more difficult for voters to engage face-to-face

One of the major elements in Canada’s democracy, is that Canada uses voting to decide on important decisions. In every vote all canadian citizens over the age of 18 may vote for whichever choice they think is best. Citizens may vote on some laws, who their Prime Minister will be and they can vote in referendums and plebiscites. This assures that not all of the power goes to only one person.

voting/tactical voting, thus, the mentality of a ‘wasted vote’ is no longer an issue, which plagues the SMP system and is a focal point to why voter turnouts are so low. Essentially, all the disadvantages associated with the SMP system would be fixed by switching to the AV system. Even though the system would seem fixed, in regards to the electorates, here are cons that arise with the alterative voting system. The first disadvantage that arises from the AV system is that it is not a proportional represented system, thus it still fails at fully representing the people’s political thoughts. Secondly, within the Electoral Reform Society’s article they state that “Lower preferences can potentially throw up a “lowest common denominator” winner without much positive support of their own.” There are controversies with both systems, yet the AV system has a higher chance for electorates choices and votes to matter in the long-run, which seems to be the biggest issue for why voters do not vote.

MMP is a proportional representation system used in many countries such as Germany, New Zealand, and Scotland. Under MMP, a voter has two votes on election day. The first vote works just like the current system, so that it goes to electing an MP to represent the riding. The other vote is what makes the difference. One uses the second vote to vote for one’s favourite party, and the total number of votes that party gets is tallied up nationwide, meaning that all votes matter. Then, members of that political party are added to the legislature according to a list made by that party until the number of seats a party has is proportional to the number of votes it got. For example, if the Pirate party only wins 5 seats from the ridings but gets 10% of the overall vote, they would get 29 more seats so that the number of their seats out of 338 corresponds to approximately 10%. A party will need to get at least 3-5% of the overall vote to be given seats.

However, seeing as this party would seeem intitially to be the ideal voting system, there are strong disadvantages which limit its potential. Perhaps the most obvious one is that it fails to provide a majority very often. For example, when used for the London Assembly in 2012, Labour gained 12 seats, the most for a single party, and the Conservatives gained 9, however Labour were still not able to gain a majority of seats as the Green Party and Liberal Democrats won 2 each, showing that if this was used for the general elections, we would end up with another coalition.

Candidate nomination is the party activity that gives the general public the greatest influence over the particular party. However, less than two percent of voters participate in their riding’s nomination for a particular party’s representative and only one third to a half of the party members are estimated to participate. The difficultly that opposes the general population is that an individual needs to sign up to be a member of the particular party and in many rural constituencies, travel from their residence to a chosen location of meeting to participate. The fact that the general electorate participation is so low benefits the party executive because it gives them more control over the elected representative. This strategy is far from democratic but with many citizens feeling less attached to a particular party, with “less than 50 percent of Canadians even identify[ing] with a political party”, the effort and commitment required does not appear to pay off. A second issue with the system of nomination is that the party leader has the ability to veto any constituency’s representative if they do not consider them to be aligned with the party’s ideologies. An example of this is in 1974 when “Robert Stanfield denied the party label to Leonard

Single member plurality (SMP) electoral system is often used to elect members of a legislative