Balancing ballots: until the recent string of minority parliaments, Canada had majority governments that controlled 100 percent of the power while capturing less than half the popular vote in elections.(DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT--ELECTIONS)

Publication: Canada and the World Backgrounder

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COPYRIGHT 2006 Canada & the World

Following the most recent federal election, the voices calling for electoral reform were not as loud as in the past. One reason? More people turned out to vote reversing the downward trend of the previous five national votes. Another reason? The result in seats more closely followed the popular vote (although not in the case of the NDP).

However, 2006 was not without its strange outcomes:

* The NDP got a million more votes than the Bloc Quebecois but won 29 seats versus 51 for the Bloc;

* More than 650,000 people voted for the Green Party and elected no one, while only 475,000 Atlantic Canadians voted Liberal and sent 20 MPs to Ottawa.

There remains a healthy appetite for some type of electoral reform led by the likes of Larry Gordon at Fair Vote Canada. Talking about the 2004 vote, after which many Western Conservatives blamed Ontarians for the Liberal victory, Mr. Gordon said "Did you know that more people voted for the Conservatives in Ontario ... than the combined total for British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan? It's true. But, that translated into only 24 seats in Ontario versus 61 in the Western provinces."

All these oddities are possible because of our first-past-the-post electoral system. The candidate who wins the most votes in a riding wins. With four or more candidates running in most ridings, the winner rarely wins a majority of votes; he or she only has to get one more vote than anybody else. There are ways of dealing with this problem.

There's much talk about Proportional Representation (PR), which some predict will be used in Canada before the end of the decade. Under PR the seats a party has in parliament reflect its popular vote. It's a system used in almost all the world's democracies.

Most countries that have PR require parties to gain at least five percent of the vote to win a seat in the legislature.

According to Fair Vote Canada, a PR system in the January 2006 election would have created a Conservative minority government, hut with 113 seats rather than 124. The Liberal opposition would have dropped from 103 to 93 seats, and the Bloc Quebecois would have...

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