News Flash: the NDP don’t really care about electoral reform

While researching an article on limiting the Prime Minister’s power to prorogue Parliament for the Feb. 25 issue of The Uniter, it was clear that the anti-prorogation movement that was so influential in January was growing fragmented just a month after it was formed.

Although the local chapter of Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament (CAPP) still regularly meet and discuss, the group is dwindling. Different people had originally gotten involved in the movement for different reasons: some were simply life-long Liberals that were taking advantage of what was seen as an abuse of prime ministerial power, while some were aiming at more systemic reforms of our House of Commons or Canada’s First Past the Post electoral system.

“The proposals [to limit prorogation] from the opposition parties limit a legitimate Parliamentary procedure,” said Colin Carmichael, who created Noprorogue.ca.

He believes that the abuse of prorogation, both this year and in 2008 (when the PM prorogued to avoid a confidence vote) were caused by larger systemic problems in the Canadian political system. He maintains that a Bill making it tougher to prorogue Parliament will do nothing if it is not accompanied by larger parliamentary reforms and more engagement by the public in the political system.

“The root cause of the problem is that Canadians haven’t been engaged in their political process in quite a while and that’s of far more concern than how or why the Prime minister prorogues Parliament,” he said.

As the week progressed, I started to realize that many in the anti-prorogation movement were vastly in favour of electoral reform as the solution to these kinds of prime ministerial abuses of power.

Larry Gordon is the executive director of Fair Vote Canada, a multi-partisan organization founded in 2001 to lobby and advocate for proportional representation (PR) as the preferred voting system in Canada. Gordon is their only paid and full-time employee/spokesperson but the group has a chapter in nearly all of Canada’s 10 provinces.

Proportional representation is an electoral system employed by many European countries and is vastly different from our own British First Past the Post system. The implementation of PR varies but the crux of the system involves representation proportional to the percentage of the popular vote: if Parliament (hypothetically) has 100 seats and the Liberal Party wins 10 per cent of the popular vote, the Liberal Party will we have 10 seats in Parliament.

This is incredibly different from the current Canadian electoral system where the Bloc Quebecois won 49 (out 308) seats in the House of Commons with just 9 per cent of the popular vote in 2008, while the Green Party, with nearly 7 per cent of the popular vote, won no seats. A political party in Canada can form government (even a majority government) without the majority of the popular vote.

“The electoral system of a country is the foundation of democracy, and the fact that Canada does not have a modern voting system is appalling,” said Gordon.

I am sympathetic to organizations like Fair Vote Canada, and others that advocate for systemic reforms of the Canadian political system. I found the anti-prorogation movement to be reactionary and found some of its members oblivious to the systemic problems that have given Harper the power to prorogue the House twice within 12 months. I also don’t think that proportional representation is the solution to these problems. In my view, PR completely dilutes authority and forces Parliament to form loose coalitions for the purposes of governing. It is unsuited to a country already regionally fragmented.

Think of the chaos and hyper-partisanship of the last four years of minority governments in this country. You can argue that adversarial politics is the preferred method of political debate because Grits and Tories are still obsessed with winning a majority government. You could argue that PR would make a majority impossible and thus force opposition and government to cooperate and work together but this simply leaves Canada open to becoming a two-party system or a working coalition of parties that could be hijacked by dysfunction.

Despite disagreeing with Gordon on principle, I was very interested in his answer to a question I raised over the NDP’s commitment to proportional representation. The federal NDP have maintained (mostly because it benefits them) that proportional representation is the best route for Canadian democracy.

“I think the NDP has not been assertive enough on this issue,” he said.

He added that Jack Layton made a commitment when elected leader in 2003 that he would only support (at that time a hypothetical) minority government on the condition of a national referendum on proportional representation. Since 2003, Layton has propped up both Prime minister Paul Martin and Stephen Harper through several confidence votes. Neither of them are committed to electoral reform.

“One thing that is holding back the NDP federally is that when they form government provincially they abandon proportional representation,” he added.

Could it be that the NDP only support initiatives that benefit the party? PR would never benefit a governing party. The Manitoba NDP have no interest in proposing or instituting electoral reform. Instead they elect their leader’s (and our Premier) based on a flawed delegate-selection system last year.

Gordon is confident that PR will be a reality in Canada. He believes that we must start provincially before the federal government will step up.

The provincial NDP is perfectly positioned to rise up to that challenge.