Canada Needs An Alaskan Style Electoral System

Canadians might justly feel a little smug when we read stories over the gerrymandering in the US that Trump has instigated, and worse, that American courts see no problem with partisan gerrymandering as long as it is not done to benefit minority groups who were traditionally marginalized. Of course, Alberta is a little different than the rest of Canada and gerrymandering is also an issue there these days.

Drawing boundaries here in Canada is done almost exclusively by using non-partisan commissions, and we have nothing here like the Citizens United court decision that gives free reign to rich donors to skew elections. So, the major issue of electoral fairness here has been around the push to replace First Past The Post (FPTP) with some form of Proportional Representation (PR). This push has mainly come from the NDP and Greens, even though no provincial NDP government has ever implemented PR.

But our problems extend far beyond FPTP, as Andrew Coyne describes in his excellent recent book The Crisis of Canadian Democracy, though he is short on solutions.

In Toronto, my MP, Nathaniel Erskine Smith, lost the provincial Liberal nomination race in the riding (electoral district) next door, and the issue of potential irregularities arose. But Liberal nomination races at both levels have often been contentious, in large part because of the recruiting of “Instant Liberals” – often immigrants who are rounded up by a leader in their ethnic or religious community and willing to vote en masse for the candidate that community leader recommends. This process is ripe for corruption and backroom deals. Candidates without a cohesive community of their own behind them, or who are unwilling to make promises to leaders who control blocks of voters, cannot win a nomination election.

This is not restricted to the Liberals either, but it is a downside of multiculturalism and high immigration. We have also had the problem of foreign governments trying to interfere in nominations, where even Canadian permanent residency or citizenship is not required.

Registered political parties at both levels are not properly regulated, except for fundraising and spending during election periods. There is no requirement that political parties be democratic, or regulating who can join and vote, even though political parties get substantial government funding not only during elections, but also between elections if they are popular enough.

We also have the problem of “safe” electoral districts, where the demographics of the voters mean that one party dominates the results and the chances of losing are slim, unless there is a major collapse like the Progressive Conservatives in 1993, or the Liberals in 2011. Getting the nomination of the dominant party is a 99% sure ticket to a seat in Parliament in these safe districts, but the party leader can directly appoint the candidate, or “vet out” people they dislike though something like a “Green Lighting” process. Even if the leader or party do not interfere, at best a couple of hundred local party members pick the candidate, and voters are left with  a fait accompli as to who will represent them for up to five years.

Proportional Representation generally does not address this problem of safe ridings and undemocratic processes for picking the candidates on offer.

In contrast, for decades the US usually has state by state primaries to pick candidates, where all registered voters can potentially choose to vote if they want. Each state has different rules, and some party primaries are “open” which allows anyone (even “independent” voters) to vote in the primary of one party, while other primaries are closed and a person has to be registered with that party (on the public record). Open primaries tend to pick moderate or more bipartisan candidates for office from each party, while closed primaries tend to pick more extreme and partisan candidates, and it is the prevalence of closed primaries in many states that has lead to the extreme or hyper-partisanship of US politics in the last 30 years, and particularly since 2015.

But there has been some change in the US primary system, as anyone following the current governor’s race in California should know. California has one big open primary for everyone instead of separate ones for each party. Only the top two candidates go on to the November mid-term election, so Democrats have been worried as there are so many Democrats running for governor that two Republicans are topping the polls and no Democrat would make the general election. Similarly, France has runoff elections.

But Alaska has an even better system in my view.

Like California, Alaska has a single combined open primary, but the top four candidates go to the final general election, which uses the ranked ballot/instant run-off voting method similar to Australia. Ranked ballots are used in Canada in most party leadership races, as well as most elections for local candidates like the vote Erskine Smith just lost.

Canadian federal and provincial elections could be converted to be like the Alaskan system by having a two-stage process like France, since we do not have US style primaries. In effect, the election period would be extended or revised to include both rounds, like in France where there is a mere 14 days between the voting rounds, with voting held on Sundays. Canada’s current writ period is a minimum 37 days, and only 28 days in Ontario (as one provincial example) but has been as long as a 50-day minimum set in 1982, later reduced twice to the current minimum.

I am not a constitutional scholar, but this proposal is more likely to be ruled as constitutional by our Supreme Court than forms of PR that have two classes of MPs, multi-member ridings, or other major changes that might be deemed unconstitutional.

Essentially, this proposal is a variation on the Australian ranked ballot system, which has served Australia’s Parliament well for over a century, but with the twist of having a second early stage to narrow the number of candidates running in the final weeks of the campaign.

This reform would make foreign interference in our elections less likely (or harder), eliminate the use of “instant” party members to stack nomination meetings, take power away from party leaders to vet out candidates, and mean that even in safe ridings, voters could choose between several candidates from the dominant party instead of rubber stamping the only choice the party has picked to represent all voters.

In short, the system is more open, and more bottom up than top down like it is now.