For many years the NDP has supported changing from our current system of electing federal governments by Plurality Voting (PV), often misnamed First Past the Post, where the winning candidate in each constituency is the one polling the most votes, to one of Proportional Representation (PR) where a party’s share of seats is equal to its share of the popular vote.
Many NDP supporters advocate PR as a matter of principle. They start from the premise that votes are “wasted” unless they directly contribute to the election of a member. Under that premise, the only way to ensure that “every vote counts” is to apportion seats directly according to the share of the popular vote. Moreover, majority governments formed by parties that have captured less than half the popular vote are “artificial,” since the parties forming such governments were not the first choice of more than half the voters.
Others have more pragmatic reasons for supporting PR. The NDP has never formed a federal government and only after the 2011 election has it been even the second largest party in the House of Commons. This fact has led these pragmatists to conclude that the NDP is unlikely to win a federal election under PV. Looking for other ways to empower their party, these PR supporters have also noticed that in most federal elections the NDP has had the third-highest national popular vote. For them, PR is a way to maximize situations where the NDP will hold the balance of power between the two larger parties. In such situations, their party could obtain policy concessions in return for their support, and their elected members might even hold cabinet positions in a coalition government.
Both these arguments for replacing PV with PR raise troubling questions. Pre and post-election polling data reveal that in most federal elections parties forming a majority government with less than half the popular vote were, in fact, the party most acceptable to the majority of the voters. Their majorities are close approximations of what would have happened had those elections been held under a system of ranked ballots where voters rank the candidates in order of preference and the candidate with a majority of first and second preference votes wins. Moreover, while promising to “make every vote count,” the practical effect of PR is to maximize minority government situations where, by giving the third party the balance of power, the votes for the third most popular party end up counting more than those cast for either of the two more popular parties. This result is likely to strike most voters as undemocratic, rather than more accurately reflecting voter intentions.
This tendency of PR to privilege votes for third parties over those for the most popular parties may explain why none of the twenty majority NDP governments elected at the provincial level since 1970 in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Saskatchewan has ever attempted to legislate PR in their provinces or even submit a PR proposal to a referendum. Only two of those twenty governments — Saskatchewan in 1971 and 1991– would have had majorities under PR.
At the federal level, the assumption that the NDP will always be the third party seems both too pessimistic and too optimistic. It is too pessimistic because the results of the last two election campaigns have shown that in the right circumstances the NDP could well form a minority or even a majority federal government under PV. The party formed the official opposition in 2011 largely because it won 77% of the seats in Quebec with 42% of the popular vote in that province. Had the NDP shown in the 2015 election that it could maintain that support, it is at least plausible to argue that enough voters elsewhere in Canada would have voted NDP rather than Liberal to replace the Harper Conservatives.
On the other hand, the assumption is too optimistic because the introduction of PR would encourage the growth and formation of parties appealing to specific issues and distinct slices of the ideological spectrum. Some, like the Greens, would compete with the NDP for centre-left votes. Others on the right might surpass the NDP in popular support by taking a hard line against immigration and abortion. There is no guarantee that the balance of power position would always or even usually be held by the NDP or even by a party of the centre-left under PR.
The promise by both the NDP and the Liberals to replace the current system of Plurality Voting arose from the particular circumstances of the 2011 federal election. This election was the exception to the rule cited earlier that parties forming majority governments with a minority of the popular vote are normally the most acceptable choice for the majority of voters. The Conservatives were able to form a majority government with less than 40% of the popular vote in 2011 with little second choice support from NDP or Liberal voters. This happened because the two Opposition parties almost evenly split the non-Conservative vote in Ontario and many constituencies in Atlantic Canada.
But, a system of ranked voting as well as PR would have prevented that result without necessarily giving a third party the balance of power. Moreover, as the result of the 2015 election demonstrated, higher turnout by non-Conservative voters and a more efficient distribution of the Liberal/NDP vote in many constituencies won by the Conservatives with a minority of the vote in 2011 were able to remedy the situation without changing the electoral system.
Given these considerations, NDP supporters might want to re-examine their party’s support for PR, both on grounds of principle and of long-term party advantage. True, the current system does not precisely reflect first preference popular voting, but it does produce governments which, because they usually have a majority, can be held fully accountable by voters for their record in office. That would not be the case for the individual parties in the coalition governments which would become the norm under PR. Accountability to voters is a benefit not to be discarded lightly.
The NDP’s success in electing majority governments in six provinces and the results of the 2011 election demonstrate that the party can form a federal government under the current system. The assumptions that they would always or even usually hold the balance of power under PR, and that such a system would never promote the interests of a party on the extreme right are questionable. Whether from idealism or self-interest, NDP supporters of PR might do well to heed the old warning, “Be careful what you wish for.”