Andrew Coyne: Where the hell have you been?

So Andrew Coyne wrote an open letter to British Columbians in Maclean’s magazine that gives a very persuasive argument about the problems with first past the post and how it leads to so many problems with politics, in general, that have disenfranchised voters. I say: A) Well said and I completely agree, and B) What the F%$# took you long? Do you have any idea how difficult it’s been to campaign out here and to get anybody of any stature to say anything positive about BC-STV on a medium that has any reach? Why the hell did you have to wait until the 11th hour to speak up? Sheesh.

A vote that really counts

Politics is broken in Canada, writes Andrew Coyne. But B.C. could help fix it next week.

Dear British Columbia:

I know you’re kind of busy right now, and maybe it’s not my place, being from another province and all, but could I just ask you, on behalf of the rest of the country, to please vote Yes in the May 12 electoral reform referendum? I wouldn’t intrude, except it’s terribly important—important not just for B.C., but for all of us.

Because politics is broken in Canada, and electoral reform—changing the way we vote—may just be the key to fixing it.

B.C., you hold that key in your hands. If the referendum passes, it will not only transform the politics of your province, it will put electoral reform squarely on the map for the country as a whole. Whereas if it fails in B.C.—after the failure of reform efforts in Ontario, Quebec and P.E.I.—it may be the last we’ll see of it for some time.

By now you’re probably familiar with the broad outlines of the debate. Under the old system, in use federally and in all 10 provinces, you mark an X beside the name of the candidate of your choice, and whomever gets the most votes in each riding wins. Hence its popular name: “first past the post.” If you don’t mind, I’ll shorten that to FPTP.

Under the proposed new system—recommended after months of study and debate four years ago by the B.C. Citizens Assembly, a group of randomly selected men and women from across the province—you’ll instead rank your favourite candidates in order of preference: 1,2,3, and so on. And in place of today’s single-member ridings, each riding will elect several members. (Of course, that means there’ll have to be fewer, larger ridings, to keep the legislature from exploding.)

Who gets in? You start by counting up the first choices. Then, as candidates are either eliminated from contention or assured of election, voters’ second choices are redistributed among the remaining contenders. And then their third choices, and so on. (It’s a little complicated, but that’s the returning officers’ problem, not yours. All you need to know is 1, 2, 3 . . .) That’s why it’s called the single transferable vote, or STV.

Why does this matter? Here’s why: under the current system, the candidate with the most votes wins, no matter how few he gets. In a typical six- or seven-person race, candidates often win with as little as 30 per cent of the vote. But that candidate and his followers then get 100 per cent of the power to represent that riding.

What’s true for a single riding is even more true in the aggregate. Under FPTP, governments routinely win “majorities” with 35 or 40 per cent of the vote. Sometimes they even win a majority of the seats with fewer votes than their rivals: that’s how Glen Clark won B.C.’s 1996 election over Gordon Campbell. And sometimes a party will take nearly all of the seats with little more than half of the vote: that’s how Campbell was able to rule all but unopposed after 2001.

Under STV, by contrast, the power to represent a riding is shared. Say it’s a five-member riding: if a party gets 20 per cent of the vote, it gets 20 per cent of the representation, or one member; a party that gets 40 per cent of the vote would get two members. Again, the same is true in the aggregate: a party’s representation in the legislature will tend to be proportional to its share of the vote. STV is a form of “proportional representation”—PR for short. (I promise that’s the last acronym.)

Well, so what? So the parties’ share of the seats don’t always precisely mirror their share of the vote. It may be a little unfair, but whoever said life was fair? It works, doesn’t it?

No. We’ve only just begun to describe the problems with the present system. So if your view of this tends to the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” end of things, let me try to convince you: it is broke.

Let’s just revisit that fairness question, for starters. The issue isn’t fairness for parties. It’s fairness between voters. Take the last federal election (just to broaden this out from B.C. a little). The NDP, with 2.5 million votes, won 37 seats, meaning it took roughly 68,000 NDP votes to win one seat. Meanwhile the Bloc Québécois, with 1.4 million votes, took 49 seats: about 35,000 votes per seat won. So, quite literally, one BQ vote was worth two NDP votes.

This is pretty fundamental. If there is a bedrock principle of our democracy, it is supposed to be one person, one vote. Every vote is equal, and every vote counts. Yet that is simply not the case in Canada today. Indeed, if you’re a Green voter, your votes might as well not have been counted at all: 938,000 Green votes were worth exactly zero seats.

Well, the Greens. What’d they get: seven per cent of the vote? Except it isn’t just Green voters who are disenfranchised in this way. The same is true of any voter in any riding who supports any other candidate but the winner. In most ridings, that’s most of the voters. Strange but true: in a typical Canadian election, over half the votes . . . don’t count.

And of course, even if you do happen to vote for the winning party, that doesn’t necessarily guarantee effective representation—if you live in a “safe” seat, or indeed a safe region, such as FPTP tends to produce. Since only the leading candidate in each riding gets in, a party that can bunch its votes geographically, like the Bloc, will do relatively better than a party whose vote is spread more evenly, like the Greens. Parties that take a narrow, regional view are thus rewarded at the expense of parties with a broader, national perspective. Politics divides along regional lines, rather than along ideological differences. In place of debates, we get grievances. Sound familiar?

The result is a highly distorted picture of the country. To look at Parliament, you would think there were no Liberals in Alberta, no Conservatives in Toronto—and that federalists were the minority in Quebec. Add to this the phenomenon of vote-splitting, which further limits voter choices: rather than simply vote for the party they like, they are forever being told they must vote against the party they dislike. Anyone who might think of starting a new party, out of dissatisfaction with the choices on offer, is likewise told not to bother: after all, they will only “split the vote.”

By now you may be suspecting this is about much more than the way we count the votes, and of course you’re right. The case for electoral reform isn’t only about what happens on election day—it’s about what happens every day in between. And this is really how we should think about FPTP: not just in terms of the distortions and anomalies it produces, but the incentives these present the political players—the rewards and penalties that accrue, depending on what strategies they choose. In essence, FPTP is a highly leveraged system: a two per cent swing in the popular vote can result in a much larger change in relative seat counts. In that tiny sliver of the vote can hang the difference between a majority government for one party, or a majority for the other.

Much of what we deplore in our politics can be seen in this light. Faced with such massive down-side risk, politicians are inclined to play it safe—very safe. Hence the parties tend to hug as close to each other as they possibly can, minimizing their policy differences while attacking each other in stridently partisan terms. Only at election time do they take off the wraps; in the concentrated time frames that our campaigns allow, that typically means the sorts of wedge-issue gimmicks that can be reliably expected to yield small gains in the short term. Because a small gain is all they need.

How would PR—STV, in particular—change all this? In every conceivable way. Under STV you’d have a much better chance of actually electing someone in your riding who represented your point of view: not only supporters of the leading candidate would get representation, but also second and third parties. In fact, because second and third choices, even for last-place candidates, are redistributed, everybody’s vote would count. There would be less reward to vicious partisanship: candidates would hesitate to offend each other’s supporters, for fear they might need them on later ballots.

If everybody’s vote counted, there would be fewer safe seats, or regional ghettoes: since every riding would offer a potential gain or loss of at least a member or two, every riding would be contested—and not only among the established parties. New and small parties would now stand a fighting chance. No longer could the fear of splitting the vote be used to terrorize voters into line: a vote for a new party need no longer be considered wasted.

Among proportional representation systems, STV is noteworthy for the way in which it preserves the local representation that is the most cherished feature of our existing system. Indeed, with multiple members in each riding, voters will benefit from competition to represent their concerns, even between elections.

Moreover, given the chance to rank their choices rather than mark a single X, voters will no longer face the Hobson’s choice that so often bedevils them at present: between the candidate they like, running for a party they despise, and the candidate they loathe, running for the party they support. They can vote the party line with most of their choices, but also give a nod to a particularly ?ne independent or rival party candidate. And that means greater autonomy for candidates from the parties—with enough second and third choices, a candidate can get elected even without the bosses’ blessing.

It’s true, as opponents point out, that PR would make majority governments unlikely, given how rarely a party wins more than 50 per cent of the vote. But would it really? It would certainly make one-party majorities less likely. But nothing would prevent the formation of stable multi-party majorities—real majorities, that is, not the phoney ones we have today—as is the norm in the dozens of countries around the world that use some form of PR. In this sense, reform would not mean the end of majority government, but the beginning of it.

We think of minority governments as unstable because, in our present winner-take-all system, they are: the payoff from that two per cent swing is such that every party has its finger poised over the election button, ready to press it the minute they get a pop in the polls. But take away the leverage—let a two per cent swing in the popular vote mean a two per cent change in seats—and everyone is forced to calm down. Politics becomes more incremental, a matter of long-term persuasion, rather than short-term gambles.

Indeed, many of the most common criticisms of PR could better be applied to FPTP. Instability? That would well describe the changes of government Ontario endured in recent elections, from Bob Rae to Mike Harris to Dalton McGuinty. Or if the concern is that fringe parties, representing a tiny fraction of the population, might wield disproportionate influence—well, what do you call the parties’ obsession, under the existing system, with that sliver of the electorate known as “swing voters,” on whose every whim their fortunes depend?

So you see, B.C., it all comes down to you. If there’s anywhere electoral reform is most desperately needed, it’s probably in federal politics: the damage FPTP has done, particularly in terms of regional ghettoization, is most acute there. But reform is most likely to occur at the provincial level first. And that means you. You came so close in 2005, when you voted 58 per cent in favour of reform—just shy of the required 60 per cent margin. If it’s ever going to happen, B.C. is the place. And now is the time.

So come on B.C. Pluck up your courage. Show us the way. Light a candle for electoral reformers everywhere. We’re depending on you.

Your friend,
Andrew
cc The Rest of Canada

Another Andrew Coyne blog post on proportional representation

I better be careful about posting too many Andrew Coyne articles. People will start thinking that I’m in love with him or something. Either that or he decides to sue me for copyright infringement. But he is a strong supporter of electoral reform, proportional representation more specifically. And almost all of his thoughts on electoral reform make sense and mirror a lot of mine.

This time, Mr. Coyne is writing about how the current fiasco that we’re seeing in parliament is not indicative of what politics would be like under proportional representation (and BC-STV by extension). Politics would be more inclusive, civil and conciliatory compared to the childish mud-slinging that is actually encouraged under our first-past-the-post system which I talked a bit about in my "Why change to BC-STV?" post.

Different electoral system, different coalition

Andrew Coyne - Wed, Dec 10 2008

Against the notion, often found in the comments here, that the the last two weeks is just a preview of life under proportional representation, the folks at Fair Vote Canada offer a timely rebuttal. Recalculating the party standings as they would obtain under PR, they suggest a very different coalition would have emerged:

Most likely, the three people sitting at the front of the room at the recent coalition press conference would have been the Liberal leader representing an 81-member Liberal caucus, the NDP leader representing a 57-member NDP caucus and the Green Party leader representing a 23-member caucus. Assuming a proportionate assignment of portfolios, the resulting coalition cabinet might have been 13 Liberals, 8 NDP and 4 Greens.

The regional composition of the coalition would have been dramatically different. The coalition would have boasted about 43 MPs in the west, rather than just 21, and in Quebec 30 MPs rather than 14.

What about Mr. Duceppe? He would have been sitting on the opposition benches with just 28 Bloc MPs, rather than the 49 he has today that give him the power to pull the plug on a federal government.

Of course, even this is misleading, since elections held under PR would not just spit out the same parties with different seat-counts, but more and different parties, with different electoral bases — less regional, more ideological — and different incentives. For example, Green voters today go to the polls in the certain knowledge that they will elect no one. How many more people would vote Green if they knew their votes would actually count?

In other words, the present instability and division is not a reflection of what would obtain under PR, but is rather a direct consequence of the anomalies of first past the post:

A fair voting system would also have provided a more stable and effective government. The expiry date on the proposed coalition is three years at best and more likely less than two years. Because first-past-the-post voting allows a relatively small shift in support to produce a windfall of seats for one party or another, the current system subverts stable and effective government.

“Today the parties’ spin-meisters are working hard to divide voters into warring camps and pit entire regions against one another,” said Larry Gordon, Executive Director of Fair Vote Canada. “When careers in Ottawa are on the line, country be damned. Will Canadians turn on one another rather than the real culprits? Or are we finally fed up with this madness and the old-guard party leaders who defend an electoral system that serves their own interests but not those of the voters?”

Fair Vote Canada is calling on Liberal, Conservative, NDP and Green voters to stand together – call it a people’s coalition – to demand equal and effective votes for all and legitimate majority rule for Canada.

Pie in the sky? An Angus Reid poll released today suggests not:

Following two weeks of political turmoil in Ottawa, Canadians are taking a second look at their existing electoral regulations, and almost half of them believe the implementation of a proportional representation system would be good for the country, a new Angus Reid Strategies poll has found.

In the online survey of a representative national sample, 33 per cent of respondents believe the current first-past-the-post system, where candidates win seats by getting more votes than any other rival in a specific constituency, is the best one for Canada. However, 47 per cent of Canadians would be open to trying different guidelines.

Almost three-in-ten (28%) would switch to a proportional representation system, where parties win seats in accordance with their share of the national vote, and one-in-five (19%) prefer a mixed- member proportional voting system, which would allocate some seats on a constituency basis, and others by proportional representation.

More thoughts on proportional representation from Andrew Coyne

This was a blog post from Andrew Coyne’s own blog on Maclean’s Magazine’s website. The article was mainly written to discuss whether the coalition that was proposed by the Liberals/NDP/Bloc Quebecois would actually be a good idea; but at the end (I highlighted it in red) he also provides a good synopsis of how minority governments would be much different, much more stable, and much, much, more conciliatory under proportional representation (ie single transferable vote) than under our current first-past-the-post system. That would certainly be a big improvement over the brouhaha that's going on in Ottawa right now.

Notes on a crisis: the coalition is not illegitimate, just ill-advised

ANDREW COYNE | December 3, 2008 |

To be clear: there is nothing unconstitutional or illegitimate in the notion of a coalition government, per se. Nor would the Governor General be committing any sin against democracy were she to disregard the prime minister’s advice, following his defeat in a confidence vote, and call upon the coalition to form a government, rather than dissolve Parliament and call new elections. Constitutional scholars are virtually unanimous that she has that option, and only slightly less so that she should in fact exercise it.

But it is not a slam dunk. She must take into consideration whether the coalition is likely to last, or whether its in-built volatility is such as to condemn Canada to a prolonged period of instability and uncertainty. But even if she does hand them the keys — and that is much the more probable result: whatever misgivings she might have, she would doubtless feel she lacked the legitimacy to exercise such discretion — that doesn’t make it a good idea.

My beef is not with the notion of a coalition, as such. It is with this coalition, at this time. My criticisms are not that it is undemocratic, but that it is unstable; not that it is illegitimate, but that it is misdirected and unjustified. (The opposition is entitled to vote no confidence in the government for any reason it likes — but I am entitled to say that the reasons it offers are humbug.) The policies it pursues are, in my judgement, likely to prove calamitous for the country, and ruinous for the Liberal party. But if that is what the majority of the House decides, that is how our system works.

Up to a point. The public’s views of the result cannot simply be ignored. It may be that the Conservatives are appealing to popular ignorance of parliamentary government, with their demands for an election before any change of government. But it may also be that there is a broader question of legitimacy at play: past a certain point, if a thing is rejected by the public, it becomes illegitimate. This is such a bizarre situation, such an extreme application of the traditional Parliamentary prerogative to choose a government — defeating a government so soon after an election, and propping up such a rickety contraption in its place, even leaving aside the question of the Bloc’s involvement — that the public’s response may well be, like the child in the New Yorker cartoon, “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.”

MOREOVER: A number of people have written to ask how I could have a problem with the coalition, given my support for proportional representation, with its tendency to produce coalition governments. But the two are entirely separable questions. First, as I say above, I have particular problems with this coalition, as opposed to coalitions in general. But second, and more fundamentally: the present situation is not a template for what would obtain under PR.

A minority government is a very different thing under first-past-the-post than under PR, and so would be the coalitions that arise. There would be different parties, with different bases — less geographical, more ideological — and different incentives: whereas FPTP, with its highly leveraged outcomes — a 2 per cent swing in the popular vote leading to a 60 seat swing in Parliamentary representation — encourages parties to push the button on an election the minute they think they have the upper hand, under PR there is no such payoff — a 2% swing means 2% more seats — and no such incentive. As a result, modern PR systems tend to be more stable, not less, than FPTP. And the coalitions are typically formed before elections, not after: the National Party and the Liberals in Australia run as a ticket, as do the Christian Democrats and the Christian Social Union (and, more often than not, the Free Democrats) in Germany.

Under PR, there would be fewer Bloc seats, and thus less likelihood that it would hold the balance of power. There would be more parties, and thus more possible coalition partners. And there would be much less incentive to partisan rancor: majority governing coalitions would be formed, not by splitting votes, but by combining them.

Interesting Andrew Coyne Article

Here's an interesting article about how our first-past-the-post electoral system is really only adequate to deal with two political parties at a time, that it is being used to handle five political parties, and failing. And because of it's failures to do so, it creates a situation that encourages the type of behaviour, that Canadians profess to find so distasteful, in politicians and political parties in their desperate attempts to manipulate the electorate into inadvertently voting in a majority. Where, instead of building themselves up, they have to resort to tearing each other down.

What if they gave an election and nobody won?

We now know one thing: this electoral system is broken

ANDREW COYNE | October 16, 2008 |
On Friday, Aug. 29, as the Conservatives were putting the finishing touches on election planning, the S&P/TSX composite index closed at 13,771 — down from its record earlier in the summer, but still at historically high levels, and rising. A week later, just before the election call, it was down 955 points. Four days later, another 670.

Still, for all the turmoil on the markets, the gathering crisis in global finance remained for many Canadians a distant thunder — troubling, but not yet occasion for a cold-sweat panic. For all the stock market's gyrations over the first weeks of the campaign, the trend was unclear, and Conservative support held relatively firm. Through the end of the campaign's third week, the Tories maintained a healthy 10-point lead over the second-place Liberals.

And then everything went to hell.

The economy was not just the most important issue of this election. It was the only issue. It wasn't even an issue, as such: nobody really had much to offer in the way of significant policy differences. It was more like a natural disaster. It was like holding an election in the middle of a hurricane. Nobody much wants to know what your policy is on force nine gales. They just want to know how well you'll stand up in it. They just want to know if you can get them in to port.

All elections are about leadership, to a greater or lesser extent. This one became, as few elections are, a test of leadership under fire, played out in real time. Surprisingly, that did not automatically redound to Stephen Harper's benefit.

In the early part of the campaign, the Conservatives had some reason to hope that a diffuse unease over the economy would work to their advantage: that steady-as-she-goes would be an appealing message, that Harper's image as a "strong leader" would attract undecided voters to his side. But when the storm clouds turned into a deluge, it became clear that the "strong leader" image was built on sand. Harper had had great sport beating up on Stéphane Dion, he'd shown a tactical mastery of the House of Commons, he'd bullied and bruised virtually anyone he'd come into contact with. Politics engages the primitive part of our brain, and Harper's appeal was that of the lead wolf, "red in tooth and claw." But what did it amount to in the end? All those broken promises, all those abandoned convictions, all those jaw-dropping about-faces — they'd won him the element of tactical surprise over his opponents, but at the cost of any relationship of trust with the broader public.

It turns out that matters. Way back at the start of the campaign, it was commonly framed as a contest between strength (Harper's preferred "ballot question") and trust (Dion's presumed comparative advantage). Apparently strength depends on trust. When the crisis broke, Harper was at first unable to call upon those reservoirs of trust a leader needs if he is to, well, lead. A leader whose appeal was based on always being in control was peculiarly vulnerable when it became clear he wasn't in control — not of the markets, not of the televised debates, timed with cruel precision for the very week of maximum turmoil, where a blinking Harper was subjected to a non-stop, four-party barrage of abuse: you don't care (not true), you're not aware (surely not), you have no platform (you got that right).

It must have been bewildering to Harper. In policy terms, he was absolutely right: the Canadian economy was hardly in as bad repair as the American, nor were the sorts of remedies being contemplated there in order here. We were bound to be affected by the crisis in American finance and there were sure to be hard times ahead, but in the short term there was little that any Canadian government could do about it, and even less that any party leader was actually proposing. Yet for a week or 10 days after the markets collapsed, no one was listening. Or not enough people were listening. Or not the right people: the undecided, the swing voters, the voters in parts of the country Harper needed to reach if he was to achieve the majority he sought.

What happened, in that first flush of public panic, was that everybody returned to their corners. Polling data from Harris/Decima tells the story. Of those who said the economy was the issue that would decide their vote — and there were many more of those midway through the campaign than at the start — a disproportionate share broke Tory, from Manitoba west, while from Ontario east, they tended disproportionately to vote Liberal. The regional and partisan split correlated closely with people's views of the nature of the threat to the economy. Those who saw the threat in more general terms were inclined to look for a steady hand at the tiller, Harper-style — and more of them were to be found in the prosperous West. Those who saw a threat in more personal terms — my job, my future — looked for someone who cared about them. And so was born the brief Dion boomlet, in those parts of the country where people are more inclined to see the government as their protector. He may have been slow to recognize how completely the economy had come to dominate public concerns — at the expense, say, of climate change — but he was quicker than the others.

It didn't last. In the end, Harper was able to pull out a surprisingly strong win — at least compared to where he had been with a week to go — maintaining his party's numbers in Atlantic Canada and Quebec while gaining seats in Ontario and the West. Across the country, the Conservative vote was about four percentage points higher than the polls had predicted. It may have been superior Conservative organization, a more motivated base, a late blast of good news from the markets. But it seemed also that Harper found his feet in the last week.

Oddly, things had to get worse in the financial crisis before they could get better for Harper. Measures that he would have been justified in rejecting earlier in the crisis, such as the $25-billion government airlift of bad mortgages off the bank's books, by the last week of the campaign had become entirely justified, given the alternatives, even to the most doctrinaire free marketeer. Just as the prospect of a global financial implosion galvanized world leaders to action, so it freed Harper to break out of a passivity that, whatever its merits as policy, was political poison. By the last weekend of the campaign, Harper was promising to "protect" the economy with something approaching passion, and something very near conviction.

But let us not lose sight of big picture. The Conservatives entered this campaign with a real shot at a majority — perhaps their best shot, perhaps their last shot. This is not a victory for the Tories, except in the most literal sense. It may not have turned out the catastrophe it looked to be at one point. But the Conservatives can hardly be congratulating themselves. In particular, the utter failure of their Quebec campaign — they finished third, behind the Liberals — must be dismaying to a party that had convinced itself, and a good share of the commentariat, that it was the natural inheritor of the federalist vote in Quebec, that it might even knock off the Bloc.

This is an indictment, not just of the particular tactics of this campaign, but of the whole strategic vision of the party's "pragmatists." They have led the polls since they were elected, yet they have been chasing all the way — chasing the middle, chasing Quebec — only to see their quarries recede ever further from their grasp. All that tacking about, all their attempts to denude themselves of anything resembling an ideology, has not produced a more conservative public: it has never been more liberal. The effect of Tory efforts to woo Quebec nationalists has not been to bring Quebec into the Conservative fold, still less to make them more Canadian: it has only persuaded them to withdraw still further from national life, to consider Canada as little more than a ready source of cash and favours. Think of all that the Conservatives have thrown at Quebec. Billions of dollars in the name of the fictional "fiscal imbalance." The status of nation. A growing role in foreign affairs. And it all falls to pieces over a few paltry cuts in arts funding?

But then, it's hard to see the result as a victory for anyone. The Liberals, at less than 27 per cent, have limped home with the worst popular-vote showing in their history, giving up one-quarter of their seats. If Liberals think this is merely a problem of leadership, a simple matter of giving Dion the old heave-ho and running off with that dreamy Michael Ignatieff — or is it Bob Rae? — they should think again. This is the third election in a row that the Liberals have seen their popular vote drop. Indeed, they have been operating with a narrower and narrower electoral base, not just of late, but for the past five decades. While pundits fretted about friendly dictatorships and "gritlock," the Big Red Machine has been dropping one wheel after another. They lost the West in the Diefenbaker sweep, and have never recovered. (Across the West, the Liberals won just seven seats this election. Seven seats.) They lost Quebec in the Mulroney sweep, and have never recovered. And now they have lost Ontario. They have become, for all intents and purposes, the Montreal-Toronto party, with pockets in Atlantic Canada.

But why pick on the Liberals? The NDP, for all the impression of momentum it gave off during the campaign, finished it no higher in the popular vote than it was last time, and no closer to its professed goal of knocking off the Liberals as the government-in-waiting. The Bloc held on to most of its seats, but only with a large assist from Conservative mistakes — and its popular-vote share declined. Even the Greens, the one party to significantly increase its vote, fell far short of expectations — and elected no one. Is it possible for everyone to lose an election?

And the biggest losers? Try the public. Five weeks of campaigning and $300 million in public funds later, the parties finished within a percentage point or two of where they were at the start. It's almost as if the election never happened — and might as well not have, for all the public cared. All those polls, all those ads, all that breathless coverage, and the turnout in this election, it appears, will be the lowest ever: just 59 per cent of registered voters. At some point it will occur to someone: we have a democratic crisis on our hands — a crisis of legitimacy, a crisis of efficacy. We are stuck, spinning our wheels, unable to find a sense of direction. The prospect is for more hung Parliaments, more bootless elections, more stall and drift, and less and less public interest.

If this election proves anything, it is that the process by which we elect our governments is broken. We are trying to run five-party politics through a system that was designed for two parties. The Conservatives look at their steady, incremental progress, slowly spreading eastward, election after election, from their Alberta-British Columbia base, through Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and now Ontario, and see a majority in the making. But the other way to look at it is that this is as close as they're likely to get.

It has become almost structurally impossible to form a majority government in this country. If you start each election, as it appears we are condemned to do, with 50 seats off the table — the Bloc's gift to Canadian democracy — then it is not 50 per cent of the seats you need to win a majority, it is 60 per cent: 155 of 258. Add to that the growing, institutionalized fragmentation on the left, and the mathematics become almost insurmountable. Eight years ago, the NDP and the Greens took less than 10 per cent of the vote between them. Today, it is 25 per cent. Throw in the Bloc, and the two parties with any chance of forming a government, the Liberals and Conservatives, are working with just two-thirds of the vote between them.

In a two-party system, majorities can be won with very little margin between first and second: in the theoretical limit, just one vote. A generation ago, when the two main parties were more dominant than today, you could win a majority with a margin of as little as nine points, say 44 to 35. But the more parties there are, and the more the vote is dissipated among them, the more the leading party must rely on the accidents of split votes to engineer a majority — meaning the larger the gap it must open up between itself and the second-place party. This explains some of the Tories' heavy reliance on negative ads. It wasn't enough for them to raise their own vote. They had to suppress the Liberals' vote, to somewhere close to the NDP's, to have any chance of a majority. As it was, they wound up with an 11-point gap, and still fell short.

THERE IS nothing wrong with minority governments, per se. It depends what kind of minority. Do we want the kinds of minority Parliaments we have had in recent years, a clutch of hobbled regional or quasi-regional parties, fingers perpetually on the button, endlessly threatening to pitch us all into another pointless election in the vain hope that, if the swing voters can be distracted in their direction, if the splits go their way, if they can demean and belittle their opponents enough, if they can depress turnout even further than before, they might just fluke their way into a majority? Or will we accept that, whatever the ancient glories of the two-party system, it no longer exists?

If we must have five-party politics, let them at least be parties with real differences, and national appeal. Away with the system that guarantees the Bloc two-thirds of the seats in Quebec on the strength of little more than one-third of the vote. Away with the ghettos of Conservative Alberta, or Liberal Toronto, where it is scarcely worth campaigning, so predictable are the results. Away with "strategic voting," and other attempts to tell people they may not vote for the party they support, but must vote against the party they fear. Away with the disgraceful situation of a party winning almost a million votes, as the Greens did this time out, and getting zero seats.

Indeed, when you think about it, many of the problems identified in this piece have their origins in the perverse incentives of our highly leveraged, winner-take-all electoral system. Why have the Tories degenerated into mush? Because they face no competition on the right, Reform-style uprisings being more or less outlawed for fear of "splitting the vote." Why did the Liberals ignore their growing weakness all these years? Because they could still count on the bizarre distortions of first-past-the-post to reap a bushel of seats from one region or another. Why has the Bloc become an immovable blot on the national scene, long after its original purpose was exhausted? Ditto. Why have majority governments become next to impossible? Why has politics degenerated into such vicious, empty partisanship? Why do so many people no longer bother to vote? Because the system is broken, and if this election won't persuade us to change it, nothing will.