“Quebec re-elects François Legault with landslide majority,” was The Globe’s front-page verdict on Monday’s election results. Other news organizations described it in similar terms, referring to “Legault’s crushing win,” the “largest majority in decades,” etc.
What actually happened? It’s true that Mr. Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec won 90 of the 125 seats in the Quebec legislature, the most for any party since 1989. But they did so with one of the worst popular vote showings, less than 41 per cent, of any election winner in the history of the province. Only four times before has a party won a majority with a smaller share of the vote.
How was the CAQ able to win 72 per cent of the seats with 41 per cent of the vote? Because the non-CAQ majority was split almost perfectly evenly between four other parties – and because our electoral system translates votes into seats in ways that wildly misrepresent the actual level of support for each party.
This election turned up some particularly egregious examples. The Liberals, who finished fourth with an all-time low 14.4 per cent of the vote – just a shade ahead of the fifth place Conservative Party – were nevertheless rewarded with 21 seats and the title of Official Opposition. The Conservatives, with roughly the same support, got no seats. The Parti Québécois and Québec Solidaire, both of whom did better than the Liberals, got 3 seats and 11 seats, respectively.
Put another way, the CAQ elected one member for each 18,706 votes it received. By contrast, it took roughly 28,000 votes to elect each Liberal member, 58,000 for each QS, and nearly 200,000 for each Péquiste. The more than 530,000 Quebeckers who voted Conservative elected no one at all.
We think of ours as a system that gives every adult citizen one vote. But it isn’t really. In practical effect, some votes are worth many multiples of others. If votes were actually distributed in the same way – if every CAQ voter were given 10 ballots to fill out, every Liberal voter seven, every QS voter three, every PQ voter one, while Conservative voters got none – the injustice would be manifest. But because we preserve the form of one person, one vote, we tell ourselves the democratic principle has been preserved.
I can hear the objections already. Aggregate voting shares are irrelevant. We don’t elect members at large but in individual ridings; there was not one election on Monday but 125. Fine. So don’t look at the misrepresentation of voter preferences in the aggregate – just look at the misrepresentation in each riding.
The winning candidate is commonly elected with a third or less of the vote, but even where a candidate is elected with a majority – a qualification that would apply to barely a third of those elected Monday – it still means 50 per cent of the voters get 100 per cent of the representation: winner take all.
Well, so what? That’s how our system works. Aren’t people who complain about this just sore losers? After all, there can be only one winner and – well, no. That’s just it. There’s no actual necessity that we elect just one MP for each riding. That may be our system, but it’s not the only system there is. Most democratic countries use multi-member electoral districts, dividing up the representation in each in rough proportion to the vote.
Yakabuski: Quebeckers now know what to expect from François Legault
That’s the fundamental difference between proportional representation and first past the post. It’s not about matching the number of seats with the share of the popular vote by means of some complex mathematical formula. It’s about more accurately representing the distribution of the vote in each riding. So instead of electing one member from each riding, we elect a few; maybe three, or five. Big honking deal.
Except it is a big deal. The disproportions in the whole are simply the sum of the disproportions in the parts. End the foundational distortion implied by single-member ridings, and all of the other distortions and inequities of first past the post – the way it favours parties that clump their vote regionally, the way it forces people to vote “strategically” to avoid splitting the vote, the way it makes some seats so “safe” nobody even bothers campaigning in them, and so on – also disappear.
Parliaments are supposed to represent us. But in our system, they don’t represent us – they represent the part of us, typically a minority, that supports the frontrunner in each riding. If it weren’t possible to fix this – if single-member ridings were the only kind there was – then all of this would be pointless. But as it is possible, why on earth don’t we fix it?