First past the post sets Canada up for secession threats

Canada is often described as a divided country, and of course it is. No country as large and diverse as ours, built on two official languages, 10 provinces, several dozen Crown-indigenous treaties and countless ethnicities, could fail to be.

But lots of other countries have similar divisions, without arriving at the fix we are now in, with not one but two provinces pondering whether to secede from the union. What factors make Canada so peculiarly fissiparous?

One is our failure to develop a coherent theory of nationhood, a vision of what we have in common as Canadians compelling enough to overcome the temptations of particularism.

A second related factor: Canada, all but uniquely among the democracies, has provided for its own dissolution, in its political debates and constitutional jurisprudence. Most other countries’ constitutions forbid it, explicitly or implicitly.

Third, and perhaps most immediately relevant: We have an electoral system that seems almost purpose-built to divide us.

That system is commonly known as “first past the post.” The academic term is “single-member plurality,” but the more accurate term is “winner take all.” Whoever comes first in a riding, with however small a share of the vote, is awarded all of its representation in Parliament.

This is the fundamental distortion, the one which, compounded across ridings, gives rise to all the others: the false majorities; the vast inequities in the effective weight of a vote; the pressure to vote “strategically,” to avoid “splitting the vote”; the wild swings in party seat counts, in response to minor changes in party support; the consignment of most ridings, indeed whole regions, to the “safe” category; and so on.

But the worst effect, in a country such as ours, is on national unity. The recent election in Quebec is only the most flagrant example: the Parti Québécois, a party dedicated to the breakup of the country, will form a government – narrowly missing a majority – with just 28 per cent of the vote. But this is hardly the first time we have done this to ourselves.

The separatists have never once, in 16 provincial elections and 11 federal elections, won a majority of the vote in Quebec. Provincially, they have averaged just less than a third of the vote. Yet they have governed the province six times since 1976, twice using their “majorities” to put the province, and the country, through the agonies of a referendum.

The damage is as profound, though more subtle, in Alberta. Some of Albertans’ complaints with the way the province has been treated by the federal government are legitimate, some less so, but what is consistent, and true, is that they have not been listened to.

Well of course they haven’t. The Liberals have won 16 of 25 elections since the Second World War. In all that time, they have won an average of 1.3 seats in Alberta.

A cynical Liberal might put it: Why should we pay any attention to Alberta? We can’t win any seats there.

But a really cynical Liberal would put it differently: We don’t need to win any seats there. In all but one of those victories the Liberals had sewn up a plurality, if not an outright majority, before the polls had even closed in the West.

In the most extreme case, in 1980, the Liberals won 74 out of 75 seats in Quebec – and just two west of Ontario. It is not hard to see where the National Energy Program came from.

But both sides of that dilemma – the seeming vacuum of support for the Liberals in Alberta, and the seeming ease with which they have racked up seats in the East – are illusions, artifacts of first past the post.

In the last election, for example, the Liberals won 28 per cent of the vote in Alberta, their best showing since 1968. Yet they still won just two of the province’s 37 seats. Whereas the Liberals have been able to win a majority of the seats in Quebec or Ontario with as little as 36 per cent and 39 per cent of the vote respectively.

Suppose, instead, we had a system in which a party’s share of the seats more closely resembled its share of the popular vote. Then not only would every party be able to win seats across the country – every party would have to do so, to have any hope of governing.

We would at last have a truly national politics. No longer would it be possible to play one region off against another. Parties would have to appeal to the whole country at the same time.

Some Albertans ask: I don’t want to secede – but how can we ensure we never suffer another raid on our resources? This is how.