That's a turnout: Election Night, June 8, 1908, on Bay Street, Toronto.

From the Second World War until the end of the 20th century, roughly 75 percent of eligible voters consistently cast ballots in federal elections. During the Jean Chrétien era, however, that number began to drop and has been declining ever since.

There are many theories as to why this is the case: the increased frequency of elections, less civic obligation, increased skepticism about government’s efficiency, proliferation of negative campaign advertisements, decline in socialization, and administrative changes, like the move from voter enumeration to a permanent electors list. Each exhibits empirical validity, but none entirely explains the downward trend.

It’s not just Canada—voter turnout has declined around the world, and it has been declining steadily by generation. This is particularly troubling because we know that voting is a life skill which needs to be learned early. Disengaged youth today become disenchanted taxpayers tomorrow.

Changing voting rules to allow multiple ballots, transferable ballots, or proportional representation are frequently advanced as improvements Canada should consider. Each has merits and each would improve voter turnout, but only modestly.

It’s time to consider a more drastic move: making voting mandatory.

During the 2000 election, when turnout dipped to 61.2 percent, the chief electoral officer was asked if he would consider proposing to Parliament that voting be made compulsory, as it is in several jurisdictions around the world. He said at the time that he did not support the idea, but if voting dropped below 60 percent he would reconsider his position. In the last federal election the turnout was 58.8 percent. It’s time for a public debate on the idea.

Voting is compulsory in a number of countries, including Australia, which shares our basic political system, constitutional framework, and colonial history. We already make a large number of civic duties obligatory, such as jury duty. So why not voting? There is no reasonable argument that a few minutes out of a citizen’s day every four years or so to make them visit a local polling station is an unfair burden for living in a democracy.

It needs to be clear that what is compulsory is not voting; only spending a few minutes at a polling station. Voters are free to destroy their ballot. In fact, in most countries with compulsory voting, there is a box one can check to state “none of the above”.

With the introduction of compulsory voting in Australia, the turnout went from less than 60 percent to over 91 percent overnight.

Public opinion polls suggest Canadians do not currently support the idea of making voting compulsory (though there is evidence that resistance to the idea is lessening), but the majority of Australians also said they were opposed prior to its introduction. Now, a majority of Australians say they strongly support the law.

Nevertheless, Canadian politicians may be reluctant to lead public opinion. That is why, in 2002, I suggested an alternative: offering a tax credit for voting. Use a carrot instead of the stick.

This is a very Canadian approach, as we have a long history of using taxation to encourage behaviour, including the funding of political parties. A tax credit would provide an incentive to vote. More importantly, it would offset some of the costs associated with voting that disproportionately affect lower-income Canadians. It could be means-tested, and thus paid only to those whose income level is likely to be a barrier to civic participation.

Working people used to be paid to vote by their employers, who were obligated by law to give time off work on election day, but this obligation has been lessened due to the staggering of hours for polling stations. Even when it was provided, paid time off to vote never helped people whose employment was piecemeal, shift work, temporary, or casual—the least affluent members of our society.

There are tangible costs associated with voting, such as transportation, hiring a babysitter, and time spent collecting information and following the issues. These costs affect people differently based on their socio-economic circumstances. In the U.S. mid-term elections in November, for example, it was found that the economic situation had deterred a large number of low-income African-Americans from voting simply because of the administrative costs associated with registration.

To date, the Liberal party of Alberta is the only political party to adopt my idea of a voter tax credit, and no political party in Canada has endorsed compulsory voting.

It is probably a safe bet that the Conservative party of Canada will not introduce compulsory voting on its own, given its fear of all things compulsory (like the long-gun registry and the long-form census), or support a voter tax credit because it will be afraid it might benefit another political party. But there is no evidence that compulsory voting benefits either side of the ideological spectrum.

A higher turnout lends the elected political leaders legitimacy. Low turnout leads to divisive elections and a dissatisfied populace.

The turnout in U.S. mid-term elections is usually around 40 percent, one of the lowest for an industrialized democracy. The disproportionate impact of the right-wing Tea Party movement is only possible because of this low turnout.

In ancient Athens, voting was compulsory and people were financially compensated for taking time off to participate. This became the largest item in the government’s budget, but it was a new experiment in government in which they believed strongly—clearly more strongly than we do 2,000 years later.

Over the years, governments have tinkered with the parliamentary rules set by the Charlottetown conference, pictured here.

The Harper government has placed a bill before Parliament that would alter the formula for how seats are redistributed following the census. It would give Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia more seats in the House of Commons; naturally, Quebec and the Atlantic Canadian provinces are upset with this change as it diminishes their relative influence in Parliament.

Originally, Ontario was upset with the plan because it wanted the Commons to be even closer to representation by population. So vocal was Premier Dalton McGuinty in his opposition that the Harper government was forced to increase its offer to 18 new seats for Ontario after the next census, instead of the four additional seats as planned. Alberta will now get five instead of one, and B.C. seven instead of two. The increase and redistribution of parliamentary seats will provide some necessary repairs—greater representation for large, currently underserved, immigrant populations in the suburbs around Toronto, for instance—but it opens the door to bigger problems in the future.

Federalism is adopted by countries where there are strong regional identities or linguistic differences, in order to protect these minorities from the tyranny of the majority. A bicameral legislature—literally, “two chambers,” the house and the senate—then allows for two different approaches to representation: the lower chamber represents the majority of the population, while the upper chamber provides minority and regional counterbalance.

The Fathers of Confederation adopted this model in 1867, and established a House of Commons that would be largely “rep-by-pop”—on the condition that the French Canadian partners would receive equal representation in the Senate, and the creation of their own province in which French Canadians would be the majority.

Canada’s first Parliament in 1867 had 181 seats in the Commons: 82 for Ontario, 65 for Quebec, 19 for Nova Scotia, and 15 for New Brunswick. The Senate had 75 seats, divided equally between Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes. But it soon became clear that the Senate had no capacity to represent regional, sectional and provincial interests as was intended. This is, in part, because senators are appointed by the prime minister and so are federally oriented; it’s also because over time unelected representatives have lost the credibility they need to participate in the legislative process.

The result is that the Senate has withered in its authority and importance, mostly rubber-stamping the laws that the House of Commons writes. This has forced the distribution of seats in the Commons—and thus the distribution of political power—to move away from representation by population in order to ensure regional and provincial demands can also be met. A 1974 constitutional provision passed by Parliament dictated that a province can never lose seats—which means the only way to balance things out is to add more.

So why tinker with the formula now? The obvious answer is there are votes to be won in these new seats, and these are voters the Conservatives have long been courting: suburban voters around Toronto and in the big western Canadian cities.

The other answer is that the Harper government has a democratic reform agenda. This agenda involves making the Senate elected on eight year terms and holding Commons elections every four years, with ridings distributed equally by population. Part of the Senate would be standing for election with the Commoners every four years. Sound familiar? This model is not from Westminster—it’s from Washington, D.C.

Most observers won’t know that, because each of these changes is contained in a separate piece of legislation. This is so the Supreme Court does not strike it down— which they surely would, given how radically it would alter the contract found in the constitution.

The problem with a piecemeal approach is that not everything will pass, and half-measures could mean trouble. It is quite possible that the only plank of the new system that will get adopted is the transition closer to representation by population for the House of Commons: more seats for B.C., Alberta and Ontario—at the expense of everyone else.

All of the eastern Canadian provinces would be diminished, but the prospects are most serious for Quebec. Without a reformed Senate, the protection Quebec was guaranteed at Confederation will be severely diminished. Undoubtedly there will be separatists in Quebec who will point out their weakened standing in the House of Commons, a trend that will continue to get worse based on current population projections. In such a scenario, separatists could argue the only political body that can be trusted to represent Quebec’s interest is the National Assembly—and it might be best to go it alone.

Proportional representation comes in, well, not quite 31 flavours, but it’s a lot. There’s more than one way to elect an MP!

Party List System

In list systems, parties put forward a list of candidates, and voters cast a ballot for one party and its slate of individuals. Seats are allocated to parties based on percentage of the popular vote. However many seats the party gets, it fills them with candidates starting at the top of the list and working down. in “closed list” systems, parties supply the lists; in “open list” systems, voters can influence the party lists.

YAY: Simple to understand.

BOO: Voters may not have an MP directly answerable to them; entrenches powerful senior party officials.

IN USE BY: Austria, Denmark, Israel, Norway, Sweden.

Mixed Member Proportional

In MMP, each voter gets two votes: one for their local representative and one for a party. Parliamentary seats are allocated based on the proportional party votes, but are filled by local reps. Parties that get more of the popular vote than individual candidates elected are “topped up” from their own internal list of candidates.

YAY: MMP promotes proportionality in party representation, but voters are also ensured a local MP.

BOO: Party lists can mean reps who aren’t directly elected by the public.

IN USE BY: Germany, New Zealand.

Single Transferable Vote

In STV, each voter ranks the running candidates in order of preference. an equation based on the number of votes and number of seats determines a “quota” number of votes that candidates must receive to be elected. if they meet the quota, the candidate is elected, and voters’ second-choice candidates receive the remainder of the votes. Votes trickle down until the seats are filled.

YAY: individual voters’ ballots aren’t “wasted” if their first-choice candidate loses; their second choice still influences the result.

BOO: Complex behind-the-scenes counting systems can confuse.

IN USE BY: Australia, Ireland

Previously in our special week on electoral reform: Parliament needs women and proportional representation is the solution (to which this article was a sidebar); and our interview with Judy Rebick.

Electoral reform is on the agenda in the U.K. following the May election that saw the creation of the first British coalition government in more than 60 years. As his price for joining David Cameron’s Conservatives, Liberal Democrat party leader nick Clegg has demanded a referendum on voting practices.

The published coalition agreement between Conservatives and Lib-dems reads: “The parties will bring forward a referendum bill on electoral reform, which includes provision for the introduction of the alternative vote in the event of a positive result in the referendum, as well as for the creation of fewer and more equal sized constituencies.”

Clegg has assumed personal responsibility for the push for electoral reform, and early signs are promising. There will certainly be compromises—probably more so than Clegg would like—but the Lib-dems now find themselves off the sidelines and in a position to make good on their rhetorical claims to the greatest British reform movement since 1832.

Illustration by Antony Hare

The recent U.K. election has raised the issue of electoral reform there, as the Liberal Democratic party made it a condition for propping up the Conservative government. This spoke to social activist Judy Rebick, who is a member of Fair Vote Canada, about her group’s campaign to bring some form of proportional representation to Canada.

This: What’s wrong with our current system?

Judy Rebick: Canada has one of the least democratic systems of election and governance in the democratic world. A party can win, and almost always does, a majority of seats with a minority of votes. Which means that a majority of our votes don’t count. Because it’s a winner-take-all system, if you vote for a person who comes in second, even if there are only 20 votes between them, your vote doesn’t matter. For example, we have a very radical right-wing government that only about 33 percent of the people voted for.

This: How would PR work?

Judy Rebick: There are several different forms of it, so it depends on which one you’re talking about.

This: Ontario had a referendum in 2007 that was defeated. It was on mixed member proportional reform (MMP). What’s that?

Judy Rebick: It can be confusing and there can be variations on how it works. To keep it simple let’s say you get two votes: one for your riding MP and one for the party you support. For argument’s sake let’s also say 50 percent would still be elected by first-past-the-post and 50 percent would be elected by PR.

This: How would the PR members be chosen?

Judy Rebick: You’d likely have to have fewer ridings, maybe double the size right now. And they’d be bigger. And the parties would choose who they appoint to the PR seats they have allotted to them.

This: So in the last federal election, for example, the Green party, which received 940,000 votes and didn’t get any seats, would have some members in Parliament.

Judy Rebick: That’s right.

This: And the Conservatives, who got a quarter million votes in Toronto but no seats would also get some there.

Judy Rebick: Likely. The Tories would have put their own list up and whether they had people in Toronto on the list would have been up to them.

This: Why was the referendum defeated?

Judy Rebick: The government in power is against change.

This: But the Liberals set up the Ontario Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform.

Judy Rebick: And then they sabotaged it. There’s no other way to describe it. It was an excellent assembly. But when the assembly decided to go for MMP they completely cut off its resources. They refused any government financing for the campaign, either for or against. And many of the policy wonks, who supported other purer forms of PR, fought against it because their system wasn’t on the ballot. They said, I’m for PR but against MMP because it gives too much power to the parties, so we should go with STV (single transferable vote), which it was in B.C. But in B.C. they said STV takes away too much power from the party.

This: There are a lot of acronyms. How does STV work?

Judy Rebick: Basically, voters rank candidates in their order of preference by numbering the candidates on the ballot. The candidates with the highest preferences are elected. The idea is to eliminate any wasted votes. It’s used in Australia, for example.

This: But it was defeated in B.C.

Judy Rebick: Barely. It received 57 percent of the vote but the government said it had to get 60 percent. It was insane to ask for 60 percent. Who does that? That was stupid and undemocratic.

This: What do you support?

Judy Rebick: I like MMP. I think our culture and traditions are such that we need to have an MP that we have elected. But what I really think should happen is that we have a referendum on PR and then work out the details after.

This: How do you assess the media’s coverage of this issue?

Judy Rebick: The media is notoriously against having any discussion of democracy. It’s really quite extraordinary. That I don’t understand. It does very little explaining of the different systems and what’s involved in each.

This: Do you think there will be electoral reform in the U.K.?

Judy Rebick: I hope so, but I wouldn’t hold my breath because it’s so hard to make these changes.

This: Will what’s happening in the U.K. help the electoral reform movement in Canada?

Judy Rebick: It’s been discouraging. The proponents of PR in Canada, with the exception of in B.C., have not done a good job of explaining it to the public. I first started supporting PR in 1992 and was one of the first people on a public level to argue for it. Certainly there’s a lot more awareness and support of it now. But it’s just not turned into a grassroots movement. I hope it will soon but I’m just not sure.

One Thursday last spring, an Angolan MP named Faustina Fernandes Inglês de Almeida Alves addressed an assembly at United Nations Headquarters in New York City. Those present—members of the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the UN Division for the Advancement of Women, professors, commissioners, Parliamentarians, and observers from more than 40 countries— had gathered to discuss the role of Parliaments in the advancement of women’s rights. It had been 15 years since the Beijing Declaration, adopted during the Fourth World Conference on Women, promised to achieve greater equality for women. It was time to take stock of how the world was progressing.

While the five women representing Canada sat nearby, Alves spoke of her government’s push to increase the number of women in the National Assembly. “This action allowed, from 1992 [the year of Angola’s first general election], the number of Parliamentarian women to rise [from] 26 to 86, in 2008” she announced. By 2008, women accounted for 38 percent of Angola’s main legislative body. This means that Angola—a country where securing basic human rights for women remains a major concern—elects far more women than we do.

Canada ranks 50th on the IPU’s annual list of women’s representation in world Parliaments. Iraq—a place not renowned for its achievements in gender equity—ranks higher. This isn’t because the women’s rights movement in Iraq is particularly advanced; it’s because of the Iraqi electoral system. The first-past-the-post system—used in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and virtually nowhere else— does not help women get into power. In fact, it impedes their chances. Doris Anderson, always ahead of her time, knew this 50 years ago. As editor-in-chief of Chatelaine from 1957 to 1977, she introduced a generation of Canadians to women’s rights issues many hadn’t known existed: abortion, pay equity, female sexuality. But one of her greatest passions was equality in government. Anderson believed that women lawmakers made women-friendly laws. You need only look to Denmark, Germany, Sweden or Spain, each one a top-20 country on the IPU’s list, to know that this still holds today.

Anderson was a fierce proponent of proportional representation, the electoral system used by nearly every Western country and emerging democracy. Under PR, if one party receives 60 percent of the public’s support and another receives 40 percent, those two parties get 60 and 40 percent of the legislative seats, a close approximation of voter sentiment. In addition to being a more accurate reflection of the electorate’s will, PR has also proven to open up legislative bodies to women and minorities. In other words, it produces governments that look more like the populations they serve.

Ten years ago, Larry Gordon, a political activist who had lately become concerned about the future of democracy, approached Doris Anderson and asked if she would join Fair Vote Canada, his new campaign for electoral reform. “At the time she was, like, 80 years old,” Gordon remembers. “She was amazing. She was writing in the mid-50s on things that were considered controversial in the U.S. women’s movement in the mid-60s, and getting death threats.” Anderson quickly agreed to become a founding director of Fair Vote Canada, the final endorsement Gordon had been seeking.

His citizens’ campaign has since become the strongest voice advocating for electoral reform in Canada. It operates 21 chapters in eight provinces, has thousands of members across the country, and its advisory board includes such luminaries as Maude Barlow, Ed Broadbent, and David Suzuki. In May, the group held its 10th annual conference at the University of Ottawa. The lecture hall was packed with people: old, young, veterans of 60s activism, and fans of Bill Maher’s page on Facebook. Most of them had paid $35 to be there, thrilled at the chance to spend nine hours pondering a favourite subject, one usually shunted to the spidery back corners of political debate.

The speakers program progressed from Judy Rebick (“Grassroots Mobilization”) to Walter Robinson (“Reaching Conservatives on Electoral Reform”), and on to Mercédez Roberge after lunch (“Electoral Reform Developments in Quebec”). One by one, they were greeted by applause and rapt attention—the left-wing journalist, the Conservative tax consultant, the Québecoise activist—though it was unclear what, at the end of the day, the crowd would be putting its energy into, aside from remaining optimistic. In the past ten years, Fair Vote Canada has seen the failure of three provincial referendums on voting reform, and there’s nothing on the horizon to indicate another shot. A decade in, the group is no closer to its goal.

Gordon insists that “things are happening,” but his unabated zeal for the project has an air of the religious—he believes so strongly in the mission that its actual feasibility is unimportant. Because it is right, its success is assured, the team cheer seems to go. Someday, we shall overcome.

Larry Gordon has no hair to speak of and wears thin wire-frame glasses that nearly disappear into his ruddy face. He is the kind of person you wish could always come to family dinner— a fantastic storyteller, with the permanent grin and the quick, unfaltering speech of a seasoned professor (or salesman). At 60 years old, he has worked in the nonprofit sector his entire adult life, beginning his career at the Grindstone Island peace and justice centre, a nowdefunct co-operative in the Rideau Lakes. (“It was fabulous,” he says. “A 12-acre island overrun by hippies.”) It was the 1970s, and Gordon had shed the vestiges of his conservative, pro-Reagan Cincinnati upbringing with great success. He worked at Grindstone every summer before moving to Toronto permanently.

Around 1999, he says, after peddling the idea of economic democracy (e.g., worker-controlled production) for 20 years, it occurred to him that he’d never read a single book on democracy and wasn’t really sure what it meant. He picked up On Democracy, by Yale political scientist Robert Dahl. “I had gone into reading that book thinking, well, we’ve got democracy in the Western world, we’ve done that.” But Dahl turned out to be more concerned about reforming democracy in the U.S., Britain, and Canada than exporting it elsewhere, and believed proportional representation was critical to democracy’s survival in the 21st century. “All of a sudden it was like a big light bulb going off,” Gordon says. Canada’s population was not properly represented in Parliament. Democracy in this country was manifestly sick. (Everyone I spoke with from Fair Vote used the same light bulb analogy. Scrutinizing our electoral system, it seems, is good for producing epiphanies.)

Between 1970 and 1993, Western countries using proportional representation saw the proportion of women MPs rise by 14 percent; in first-past-the-post countries, it increased by 7 percent. Germany uses first-past-the-post to populate half of the Bundestag and proportional representation to populate the other; the latter contributes twice as many women. New Zealand’s parliament used to be 21 percent female; in 1993 they switched to proportional representation, and by 2008 it was 33 female. PR was finally ushering women into legislative roles and improving the representation of other minorities, too.

It’s delightfully simple. So why are governments ignoring it?

The Canadian government would say they’re not. There have been three provincial referendums on voting reform since 2005. None of them passed.

Wendy Bergerud sat on the citizen’s assembly that preceded the first: a group of 160 randomly selected B.C. residents, most of whom had no deep political ties and very little knowledge of voting systems. They had been charged by Premier Gordon Campbell with investigating the current system and possible alternatives. For seven months, they heard experts and laymen speak on different voting systems; they learned what was used in different countries around the world, and the effects that various systems had on political bodies. Then, for one month, they deliberated on the recommendation they would make to the B.C. legislature. In October 2004, they submitted their final report. They had decided, almost unanimously, to propose a change from first-past-the-post to a form of proportional representation called single transferable vote. Bergerud, a recently retired Ministry of Forests employee, had no previous interest in voting systems; she is now a member of Fair Vote’s national council, the president of its Victoria chapter, and a member of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. The experience turned her into an activist.

“I think a lot of people were really surprised that the assembly worked together and came up with such a high consensus on the recommendation,” she tells me over the phone from her home in Victoria. Her voice is gruff, though she laughs easily. She answers my questions without pausing to think. “I’ve come across people who expected us to fight like our political parties. But most of us in the assembly were committed to the common good, the public good. We were very serious about communicating on what would work for most people. It seemed, as we learned more about voting systems, that a PR system was going to give parties a number of seats in the House that closely matched their support and that that would change quite a bit how the parties behaved. Another thing we learned is that an awful lot of countries use PR. Here in North America we live in this little hole that doesn’t know much about the rest of the world. We don’t realize that most countries in Europe use one form or another of PR.

“No new country chooses first-past-thepost,” she continues. “Whenever anyone sits down and says, ‘We’re forming a country here, what should we use?’ They always choose some form of PR.”

After their recommendation, Bergerud and other assembly members grew concerned: the government was going to include a referendum on electoral reform with its provincial election in May, but it didn’t look like they were going to do anything to educate the public about the choices that would be placed before them. If voters didn’t understand their options, surely they’d vote to stick with the status quo. Impassioned by everything they had learned, assembly alumni began a massive educational campaign. Bergerud estimates that between them, they gave 800 presentations leading up to the referendum, and on May 17, 2005, the “Yes” side won almost 58 percent of the vote. But it wasn’t enough—the threshold had been set at 60 percent.

“Fundamentally, we won that one,” Bergerud says. “Something that’s annoyed me for a long time is that the press will say, ‘It was rejected here in B.C.,’ and I go, ‘well, 57.8 percent isn’t rejection.’ New Zealand changed into the new voting system with something like 53 percent and Ireland didn’t change with something like 57 percent [against]—so everyone else in the world used 50 percent.” She wonders why the Liberal government would have initiated the assembly process if it was not going to follow through. I ask her if she thinks it was all for show. “Oh, I think it’s highly likely,” she says.

Electoral reform is not a partisan issue: Doris Anderson and Troy Lanigan, the president of the right-wing Canadian Taxpayers Federation, sat next to each other on Fair Vote’s founding board, agreeing on nothing except the need for voting reform. The problem with changing the electoral system is that parties in power—regardless of ideology—never want to do it. Larry Gordon learned this early on in his campaign, and has re-learned it repeatedly over the past decade. “I very naively thought that all left-ofcentre people, all left-of-centre parties would obviously support this, until I discovered that NDP governments, provincially, relate to this just the same way that Conservative governments or Liberal governments do: ‘If first-past-the-post puts us in power, we’re not going to reform anything. If we’ve been really badly screwed by first-past-thepost, we’re all in favour of reform.’ The NDP is 100 percent on board for proportional representation—because everybody should be equal, it’s atrocious that the voting system distorts results, we need democratic equality in this country—except in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, British Columbia or Nova Scotia when they’re in power.” Doesn’t that make him angry? I ask. “Oh, very angry, yeah,” he says, smiling.

In two later referendums, one in B.C. and another in Ontario, the governments in power again dragged their heels and did little to educate voters on the choice they were facing. Consequently, the 2007 referendum in Ontario lost with 36.9 percent of the vote; last year’s in British Columbia lost with 38.2 percent.

June Macdonald, chair of Fair Vote Canada’s Women for Fair Voting committee, echoes Gordon’s anger. “The major parties—the Conservatives and the Liberals—stand to win big under our system. They can parlay a minority popular vote into a majority of seats. They don’t want to give that up.”

Fair Vote’s inaugural conference, on March 30, 2001, took place in Ottawa. There were around a hundred attendees and a single reporter, who, Gordon says, had a single question: “You people don’t think this will ever really happen, do you?”

Ten years and several close calls later, the group remains convinced that it will. Gordon thinks that the current era of minority government, with all of its dramas and public dysfunction, may present Fair Vote with its moment. Proportional representation forces parties to work together; when no one can win an outright majority, the major concern shifts from gaining an edge over the opposition to determining allies and how best to cooperate.

Stephen Harper’s Conservatives would have us believe that coalitions don’t work: the governments of Israel and Italy, which suffer the strains of shifty and ill-advised allegiances and powerful extremist factions, are held up in terrifying example. But you could just as easily blame the dysfunctional politics of Zimbabwe on their firstpast-the-post electoral system, and it would be equally specious. The political culture of a country is not soley a product of the voting system it uses.

In Canada, meanwhile, it’s become very obvious that our parties would rather one-up each other than work together for the public good. The current system compels combative behaviour, a problem that, war-ravaged and corrupt countries aside, proportional representation naturally amends by encouraging cooperation. The prime minister has presented coalitions as undemocratic, says Bergerud, but what many people don’t understand is that “it is quite legitimate and proper for parties to work together to form a government, and that it happens on a regular basis in Europe.”

In April, Environics released the results of a poll on public support for proportional representation, showing that 62 percent of Canadians are in favour of adopting the system for elections. “On the idea of fair voting, Canadians are there, always have been there, will be there,” says Gordon forcefully.

Fine—but getting the issue on the political agenda is another matter. I ask how he sees it happening. He lists several possibilities, but then slowly qualifies each one in turn: the NDP could demand it in exchange for supporting the Liberals in government (but that won’t happen with the current configuration of seats); Britain could reform, thus paving the way for Canada to do the same (but the movement there is very much up in the air); the Supreme Court of Canada could rule first-past-the-post unconstitutional—a Quebec court case to that effect is currently winding its way through the courts (but it’s a long shot).

Gordon pauses. His voice has grown progressively shakier. He knows how it sounds and what he’s up against. In the end, he speaks of serendipity. Large-scale social change, he says, is ultimately effected only when “unexpected events, completely outside of your control, come together at a particular moment in history and allow big change to happen.”

In other words, he’s waiting on a miracle. He acknowledges that it’s a hard thing to mobilize people around.

Whether or not electoral reform ever comes to this country, the fact is that democracy is a people’s concern. The government has proven its lack of interest. Canadians will have to demand it—and Gordon believes that they will, once they understand what they stand to gain. We are living with a system under which 900,000 people can vote for the Green Party and get no representation, but 800,000 Conservatives in Alberta alone can elect 27 Conservative MPs. That’s not a truly representative democracy, and Fair Vote wants to make sure we know that, at the very least.

“Fair Vote Canada is going to continue to do what it’s always done,” Gordon says, rallying: “outreach, trying to mobilize as many people as possible from all points on the political spectrum to appreciate how fundamentally important it is for the issues that you’re passionate about, and for your own quality of life, the community, the quality of environmental life, how fundamentally important it is to you to make sure that we have a democratically elected Parliament.”

He pauses, and then twists the knife. “Which you’ve probably never experienced.”

What to choose? Proportional representation

Canada, in deciding to adopt the British system of responsible parliamentary government, instead imported SMP elections. The supposed strength of SMP was that it encouraged two-party contests, which would lead to clear mandates for the elected MP and strong majorities in the parliament so these MPs could enact legislation with the broadest appeal. PR, on the other hand, inevitably leads to multiple parties being elected to a legislature, which in a parliamentary system means a divided legislature and coalition governments.

If we had adopted PR in 1867 when it was the dominant democratic idea, many of Canada’s current political problems would have been eliminated. At the very least, Canadians would see that parliamentary government and coalition governments are actually synonymous — they are predicated on identical democratic principles.

Furthermore, Canada has been — and continues to be — the exception to the SMP rule. Open any textbook on electoral systems and there will likely be a footnote next to Canada explaining how our large land mass and ethno-linguistically diverse population resulted in “third parties” (and, eventually, four-, five- and six-party contests).

The reason for this is that SMP rewards regional parties. Canadian political parties need only focus their policies and resources on local interests and, as is often the case in Canada, can pit one region against another for electoral gain. This is the reason the Bloc Québécois won 49 seats in the current Parliament, running candidates in only one province. The Bloc Québécois received 12 more seats in the Commons than the NDP, which won eight percent more of the popular vote across Canada.

The skewed electoral system is also the reason most people believe that all Albertans oppose the Liberals and why in the last federal election, 27 of Alberta’s 28 seats went to the Conservatives, even though more than a third of the province voted against them (with 11 percent of Albertans actually voting Liberal).

The exaggerated success of regional parties under SMP in Canada fuels regional discontent. PR would alleviate this because it would ensure that those 11 percent of Albertans who voted Liberal, and the 12 percent of Quebecers who voted NDP, received representation in the House. Regional parties would still have some advantages under PR due to the geographic and demographic quirks unique to Canada, but PR would rebalance the electoral system so it did not disenfranchise pan-Canadian political parties.

Yes, PR ensures more ideological and divergent parties get elected, but SMP is already doing that in Canada. However, since it is rare for any party to hold a majority in a PR system, it forces political parties to form coalition governments. These governments are, based on the mounting evidence from other countries, centrist and not ideological in their policies. The same cannot be said for recent Canadian governments.

Canada’s minority governments for the past five years have increasingly used the threat of confi dence votes and early election calls to ram through ideological legislation in the pursuit of a public policy agenda that was not supported by the public or the majority of elected MPs. Proportional representation would change Canada’s electoral dynamics. Parties would be forced to leave the door open to the possibility of coalitions, and the electorate could consider these possibilities when casting their ballots. It would also force politicians to work together once elected, since the illusion of a majority just being around the corner would disappear.

If PR had been in place, Stephen Harper would not have triggered an early election in 2008. Jack Layton and the NDP would not have wasted the last two years, and the last two election campaigns, running against the Liberals instead of focusing on keeping an ideological right-wing Conservative party out of government. And Michael Ignatieff would not have had an excuse to seize the leadership of the Liberal party without a leadership convention and then spend a month considering whether his own electoral future was most advantaged by keeping the Conservative government in power, forcing a new election, trying to form a Liberal government, or forming a coalition with the NDP.

PR would have ensured that following the last election, all political parties worked together to decide how to form a stable government whose policies were supported by the majority of the Commons and thus the Canadian people. This is how responsible parliamentary government is supposed to work — and that, not the wonky electoral system, is what Canadians thought they had imported from Britain in 1867.