One person, one vote is basic democratic principle. We should try it some time

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Tobi Lütke is a Canadian business legend, the CEO and co-founder of Shopify, an e-commerce outfit that in two decades has grown to be Canada’s largest non-bank company, with a market capitalization in excess of $200-billion, 6 million business users worldwide and revenues of more than $16-billion annually.

Mr. Lütke himself is among Canada’s richest people, with a net worth in excess of $15-billion.

He is also a first-class fool, when it comes to matters other than making money. Not for nothing has he been called “Canada’s Elon Musk,” with a fraction of the wealth but the same penchant for issuing simplistic, intolerant or otherwise dubious statements about politics and human affairs: Canada “very much veered into socialism under Trudeau”; Donald Trump’s demands in the 2025 fentanyl tariff dispute were “things that every Canadian wants its government to do, too,” etc.

(Working at Shopify sounds fun. Employees must “improve” their performance in line with the company’s growth rate – “20-40% year over year” – to “re-qualify” for their jobs. Those displaying “victimhood thinking” must be seen “for the threat they are.” No new hires are allowed unless managers can demonstrate “why they cannot get what they want done using AI.”)

But he outdid himself this week in a couple of posts on X. What seems to have set him off were some posts from San Francisco showing photos of local residents, mostly elderly, opposed to a housing development, which Mr. Lütke compared to the local opposition that this week led the federal government to shelve the proposed Billy Bishop Airport expansion in Toronto.

To a complaint from an American commentator (“‘Community input’ just means obese old people never letting young people have anything”), Mr. Lütke responded: “Exactly what just happened in Toronto. Retired, Unemployed, Unemployable, and useful idiots are the only people who go to these town hall sessions.”

Oh, but he was just getting warmed up. Responding to another U.S. commenter (“until we deal with these people and the power they have over local government, we’re never fixing our housing crisis,”) Mr. Lütke offered:

“New deal: when you get your pension deal it’s locked in and guaranteed. But now you are a dependent and that means no voting, just like dependents under age … let people with a stake in the future decide.”

That led a retired Canadian banker to suggest an alternative: “What about weighted voting proportional to the level of income tax you pay?” He elaborated: “no income tax paid - 0 vote, $1-100k - 1 vote, $100-200k 2 votes and so on ... cap it at 5 votes for $500k+,” on the principle that we should “build a democracy around those that foot the bill?”

To which Mr. Lütke replied, with Muskian terseness: “Good system.”

In fairness, these ideas – no votes for pensioners, extra votes for rich people – should be viewed in context. The proposal to deprive retirees of the right to vote might be seen as a reflection of a larger social divide between the generations over the cost of housing, while the proposal to allot one vote for every $100,000 in tax you pay might be seen as a reflection of a larger social divide between Mr. Lütke and reality.

Nevertheless, the sight of one of Canada’s richest people musing publicly over how to deny democratic representation to the elderly while quintupling it for the wealthy got a lot of folks fairly riled up. Many took it as a sign of how uniquely clueless today’s generation of billionaires can be – a cluelessness magnified by their apparent belief that, because they had a good idea for an app, they are also world-historical political and social visionaries. (Mr. Musk, in his recent interview with The Economist, claimed quite literally to be able to predict the future.)

Others defended it as the kind of “out of the box” thinking this country needs. And, again in fairness, Mr. Lütke is not the first to propose departures from the traditional democratic principle of one person, one vote. Some scholars in the United States, for instance, have suggested that Black people should be given more votes than whites – five-thirds, in one formulation – as a kind of reparations for four centuries of racial oppression. Mr. Lütke’s proposal is groundbreaking, however, for suggesting reparations be paid to its beneficiaries: wealthy, mostly white people.

Others have taken up the cause of disenfranchising the elderly, arguing that the “cognitive decline” from which some of the elderly suffer should cause all of them to lose their right to vote, much as we do not allow children to vote. This misses the point, as I have argued before, that what is the exception among the elderly – an inability to reason from cause to effect – is the rule among children. It is the difference between senescence and adolescence.

Still, lots of people seem quite drawn to the idea of restricting the vote to those “with a stake in the future,” just as there are presumably people who favour giving more votes to “those that foot the bill” – and as, in previous times, the vote was restricted to those who owned property, or who could pass a literacy test, or paid a poll tax, or were men. Lots of folks also like the idea of denying the right to vote to prisoners.

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So perhaps we need a refresher course in the principle of equal votes for all. The right to a say in how we are governed is not, in a democracy, based on how much we pay the government, or how long we might live under it, or how well educated we are or how many houses we own or what chromosomes we have or any of the rest. It suffices that we are governed: Because we are all affected by government’s decisions, we are all entitled to some input into them.

And the basis of that is simply the equal moral worth of every individual – not their equal moral blameworthiness, but their fundamental equality as human beings, and their capacity to feel the sorts of things that humans feel. In this respect, the right to vote is largely like other rights, to speak freely, to be considered innocent until proven guilty, and so on.

And yet it’s not quite the same thing, because the right to vote does not imply merely dominion over yourself, a say in how you are governed, but a say in how others are governed as well. So we narrow its application slightly: to citizens (people who are actually exposed to the government’s jurisdiction), and to adults: people who have some basic level of mental competence.

Both are controversial, especially these days the latter. I can understand the argument: If we wouldn’t want people to have to take IQ tests to vote, why should we impose an age bar? But we wouldn’t want babies voting either, so a line has to be drawn somewhere. The difference being: A 17-year-old who cannot vote today will be able to vote before long. An age bar, unlike other restrictions, is only temporary. It does not create a permanent class of the disenfranchised.

Indeed, this principle of one person, one vote is such a good idea that we really ought to apply it some time. In Canada, more than most democratic countries, we are very far from this ideal. It is true that we distribute one ballot to each voter. But each ballot is not of equal weight. Some votes count for more than others. Some don’t count at all.

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There is first the fact that ridings in Canada are of vastly unequal size – much more so than in virtually any comparable country. As of the 2021 census, the smallest riding in the country, Labrador, contained fewer than 27,000 people; the largest, Edmonton-Wetaskiwin, had more than 209,000, nearly eight times as large. The 5 per cent of ridings at the top of the scale are on average three times as large as the 5 per cent at the bottom. Compare that to the U.S. House of Representatives, where the gap between largest and smallest congressional districts is just 31 per cent.

If it takes eight times as many votes to elect an MP in one riding than another, that effectively means a vote in the former riding is worth an eighth as much as a vote in the latter. It is difficult to square this with the idea of equal votes for all.

But the distortion is even greater when you factor in the effects of the first-past-the-post voting system, in which the candidate and the party with the most votes in a riding – whatever small percentage that may be – gets all of the representation, while the other candidates and parties get none.

Sum that basic distortion – 30 per cent or less of the vote equals 100 per cent of the seat – over all of the ridings, and the number of seats a party can get will usually bear no resemblance to its share of the popular vote. In recent elections it typically took about 40,000 votes to elect each Liberal candidate, 50,000 votes to elect each Conservative or Bloquiste and 86,000 to elect each New Democrat – while the hundreds of thousands of voters who supported the Greens or the People’s Party were rewarded with as few as one or even no seats.

Again, this is a million miles away from one-person-one vote. And that leaves out yet another, even greater distortion in democratic representation: the 40 per cent or more of eligible voters in recent federal elections whose ballot was not counted because they never cast it. In some recent provincial elections, the did-not-vote “party” outpolled the winners.

Turnout in Canadian elections is now among the lowest in the democratic world. We think of this as inevitable, or certainly not easily fixable. But in fact other countries have succeeded in raising turnout by the simplest remedy imaginable: by making it mandatory. In Australia, turnout in the early 1920s had slumped to the 60 per cent range, much like ours. After voting was made mandatory in 1924, it shot up to the mid-90s, where it has stayed ever since.

The argument is analogous to the mandatory census: If we want a representative sample of the public, we can’t just leave it to the self-selected. The purpose of government is supposed to be “the greatest good for the greatest number.” Until and unless we extend the vote to all – and an equal vote to each – we will not have fulfilled that purpose.