Electoral Reform Is Dead! Long Live Electoral Reform!

You may be familiar with the Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

American culture and movies, which dominate Canadian culture as well, tend to focus on the second part – having the courage to bring about change, if you try hard enough and are persistent enough. Accepting unpleasant reality is not as common a theme.

Now, we all have “pet” social or political issues; things that are close to our heart or are passionate about.

Sometimes it is something personal, based on something that happened to us in past – like when someone or their family is affected by a disease and they adopt the related charity, like cancer or kidney disease. Sometimes, it is a very broad or abstract concept like world peace. And sometimes these issues are closely aligned with political beliefs or partisanship, much as abortion is identified with conservatives or the right, and women’s rights identified with progressives or the left, even though there are at least a few people who don’t follow these usual patterns.

In Canada, one idea identified with the left is electoral reform, even though “democracy” is a very broad and abstract concept that both sides of the political spectrum usually embrace, though as of late, right-wing populists seem attracted to authoritarianism or strong autocratic leaders.

A few weeks back, a big story in the news was the vote in Parliament over a Private Member’s Motion, not even an actual Bill, proposing a federal Citizens’ Assembly (CA) to look at electoral reform. When this motion M-86 came up for a vote, it lost by 219 to 102. Just three Conservatives were in favour, and under a third of Liberals were on board, while the NDP, Greens and nearly everyone else voted for it.

It was no surprise that Trudeau and the Liberal front benches voted against potential electoral reform, given the broken promise from the 2015 election that it would be the last election under “First Past the Post” (FPTP). Trudeau himself is on the record as supporting ranked choice voting, which is what is used in Australia – and the major political parties themselves use it to elect their own leaders.

Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) uses “Ranked Ballots” and has a variety of names: Alternative Vote (AV), Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), Preferential Ballot, or sometime just Ranked Ballots. It is a simple process of elimination until someone gets a majority.

Essentially, people can choose their 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd etc. choices when they mark their ballot, and then when the ballots are counted, votes are transferred from the candidate that comes in last to each voter’s next choice, until a candidate has 50% of the votes. Australia requires people rank all the candidates, while in most cases people choose to rank as many as they like, in which case some ballots are “exhausted” and not used for the rest of the process.

Proportional Representation (PR) proponents complain that “Ranked Ballots” is not the accurate name for a system, since STV or other systems include the ability of voters to prioritize their choices with a ranked ballot, but the term Ranked Ballots is often used as the common term for RCV.

Electoral reform has been an issue for roughly 100 years. After WWI, many new democracies were being created in Europe out of the old monarchies, and many countries opted for some form of proportional representation, including Germany. Here in Canada, the Liberal government in the 1920s (under Mackenzie King) flirted with the idea of proportional representation too, but the idea was quickly abandoned.

Many people, even proponents of PR, don’t mention that it was PR that let the Nazi Party quickly grow from 1928 to 1932 in a rapid series of elections, and this instability and polarization lead to Hitler being named Chancellor, from which he used his position to become dictator. Even so, after WWII, most European democracies again opted for PR.

Debate over proportional representation in Canada started to gain traction around 30 years ago and the non-profit Fair Vote Canada (FVC) was formally incorporated in 2001. No doubt internet and email campaigns helped to bring this about, but both the Green Party and the NDP have long supported PR – though despite the NDP having formed governments in 6 provinces, they have never implemented it.

Fair Vote Canada only supports “proportional representation”, unlike its similar US cousin Fair Vote, which is open to RCV or other systems beside FPTP.

Around 20 years ago, there were two Citizens’ Assemblies on electoral reform. One in BC under the NDP, and one in Ontario, under the Liberals. BC’s process chose Single Transferable Ballot (STV) which combines ranked choice ballots and multi-member ridings. Ontario’s process chose Mixed Member Proportional, which has a reduced number of ridings that still use FPTP, and then “tops up” the party with people elected based on lists and some formula to ensure that those elected are close to the proportion of the overall popular vote.

BC had 3 referendums on the issue. The first vote had a majority in favour of STV, but the rules required 60% to pass. The other votes saw voters reject PR by about 60%. Ontario has had one in 2007, but it too failed by about 60%. Other provinces have also looked at the issue or even had referendums, but the details of all these votes can be found on Wikipedia or other resources, and I will not go into the details.

One common trend has been that once a party promising electoral reform gets elected with a majority, it tends to see electoral reform as not particularly to its advantage – so it either changes its mind or only provides tepid support to getting it implemented. This is clearly true of Trudeau federally in 2015, but also in Quebec with the CAQ.

After the 2015 federal election, Trudeau delayed as long as he could before setting up the ERRE Parliamentary Committee, in which the Liberals did not have a majority. The recommendations were weak and split =, with the parties breaking ranks to write 3 different Supplemental Reports. Trudeau did nothing to push for his preferred ranked choice ballot system.

The federal NDP has since campaigned on a policy that it would implement some form of PR if elected, without a referendum first. Instead, it would pass PR and implement it, then have a referendum later for the voters to decide to keep it or not. Needless to say, the NDP has not come close to forming a government, and the Liberals have resisted including it in any deal to get the support needed to govern with a minority.

The exact policy of the NDP as in the 2021 platform was this:

“A New Democrat government will bring in mixed-member proportional representation that works for Canada – and we will do it in our first mandate in government. We’ll establish an independent citizen’s assembly to recommend the best way to put it in place for the next election to ensure both local representation and a federal government that reflects the voters’ choice of parties.”

So, having lost the 2021 election, the recent motion M-86 was an attempt by the NDP and Green parties to kick-start proportional representation at the federal level. Both parties refuse to consider ranked choice, operating on the assumption that just as Citizens’ Assemblies in BC, Ontario and any provinces have never recommended ranked choice and always chosen some form of PR over FPTP, then any future Citizens’ Assembly will do the same.

Despite the best efforts of the NDP, Greens and Fair Vote Canada, M-86 failed by an overwhelming 219 to 102. Any future Citizens’ Assembly or direct means of implementing PR seems remote.

The Conservative Party is opposed to PR, since it has the least problem with vote splitting. It would gain the least with PR, since it would never get a majority and would need the support or acquiescence of one of the other parties to its left to govern – given that the small People’s Party of Canada (PPC) has no MPs and is unlikely to win.

Maybe this would change if the political right were to split apart again, like in the 1990s, but the PPC is nothing like the Reform Party and its leader, Bernier, is a Quebecer who lacks the appeal to the West that Preston Manning had. Poilievre seems to have unified the CPC, for now, but if the social conservatives were to leave or get pushed out, then possibly parties on the left and on the right could unite to push PR through over any objections of the Liberal Party.

The Liberal Party is itself roughly split 3 ways: a third for FPTP since it has worked well for the party in past and they might still get majorities from time to time (though the trade-off might be that the Conservatives also might sometimes get majorities as well); another third of the party is willing to adopt PR and some have even been active in Fair Vote Canada; and then the remaining third are in favour of ranked choice ballots, like Justin Trudeau. At a March 2023 national Liberal convention, the last two thirds composed enough of the assembled delegates to pass a resolution in favour of a Citizens’ Assembly, consistent with a 2014 resolution calling for “an all-Party process to be instituted, involving expert assistance and citizen participation”.

So, unless by some miracle the NDP and Greens can win enough seats to ram through electoral reform, or the Liberal Party elects a leader willing to go against roughly two-thirds of his or her own party to pass proportional representation, the political process for PR seems dead federally. Maybe if one or more provinces adopted PR, this might change.

But that is not the only route to changing the electoral system, since we also have the courts, and a Charter of Rights.

In 2023, Fair Voting BC initiated a court challenge to the use of FPTP against the federal government (the Attorney General of Canada) on the basis that it was contrary to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Their website includes the following:

“Fair Voting BC is proud to be partnering with Springtide (Nova Scotia) in challenging the constitutionality of our current First Past the Post voting system on the grounds that it denies representation to half the voters and results in discriminatory treatment of a variety of groups, including women, visible minorities, younger people, and people who hold local minority political views.”

The matter was heard in Ontario, and the court ruled that the FPTP system is in fact constitutional. The November 2023 decision is now being appealed to the Supreme Court. The written decision is thorough and well reasoned, and includes the following, where FPTP is referred to as Single Member Plurality (SMP), and I have added underlining:

[122]      Collectively, these constitutional provisions set up the district, or constituency-based system for electing representatives to the House of Commons. They specifically provide for a new parliament to be elected at least every five years, and for the number of districts to be adjustable to match the population growth. Each electoral district is to be represented by a single Member of Parliament (with the original exception of Halifax, whose two MPs were allotted to the area that covered both the City of Halifax and the County of Halifax, and which in 1968 reverted to one MP per riding like the rest of the country)…

[138]      The upshot of this is that PR may well be made to comply with the Constitution’s existing electoral principles, if not its mechanics. In fact, there are scholars who view all questions of constitutional interpretation to ultimately be grounded in the principle of proportionality: see David M. Beatty, The Ultimate Rule of Law (Oxford University Press, 2004), at 159-188.

[139]      However, even if a PR system could be made to fit the Constitution’s requirements, one cannot say on the basis of the constitutional text that an SMP system is unconstitutional. As indicated at the outset of these reasons, the question is not whether PR works, but whether SMP is prohibited. SMP is, in fact, the paradigmatic example of a constitutionally valid electoral system in Canada; it is specifically called for in the Constitution Act, 1867.

[140]      An alternative to SMP might or might not be made to fit the bill, but that is not relevant to the constitutional question raised here. The relevant constitutional sections, and the Supreme Court of Canada in its elections jurisprudence, actually describe SMP as the constitutionally valid system against which challenges are measured.

[141]      Respondent’s counsel point out that, in fact, implementing PR will inevitably entail some form of constitutional amendment, even if it is held to be a system that in principle conforms to constitutional norms. Assuming that PR representation in the House of Commons were to be determined on a province-by-province basis, as it would have to be under the Constitution Act, 1867, section 51A guarantees four seats to Prince Edward Island. Given P.E.I.’s small percentage of the national population, that would, in turn, require the addition of hundreds of additional House seats to other regions of the country in order to maintain the proportionality of result the Applicants seek.

This is pretty damning to PR and to the proponents’ claims, and even if the Supreme agrees to hear an appeal, it is hard to believe that the final court decision would be much different from this. The implication is that PR would not just require Parliament to pass a bill to implement PR, but likely a Constitutional Amendment would be needed – requiring ALL TEN provinces to accept it.

The Constitution could be amended province by province, but that would mean a patchwork where some provinces were proportional and others were not, and Quebec is unlikely to accept any change it doesn’t itself ask for without major concessions.

So Proportional Representation is dead, assuming this decision stands. The NDP, Green Party and Fair Vote Canada so far seem silent on the implications of this decision.

But electoral reform is not dead, and in fact, PR itself may not be dead – as it is defined by the court decision.

The decision includes these paragraphs:

[22]           By contrast, a PR election, as its name suggests, will have multiple winners in proportion to the votes each attains in any given electoral district. All candidates who pass a pre-determined minimum number or percentage of votes, regardless of how may parties field a candidate in the district, will be seated in Parliament as representative of that district. There will ultimately be more MPs than districts since PR requires a division of the district’s seats among multiple candidates.

[23]           Again, assuming a contested election, a PR system will result in substantially all members of the electorate having a representative in their district for whom they voted. The number of representatives in any district may potentially be sizeable since PR requires a multi-party presence reflecting a proportionate division of the multiple political alignments in the electorate.

[24]           Another of the expert witnesses, Professor Benjamin Ferland of the University of Ottawa, opines that as an upshot of this, parties whose MPs are elected by in proportion to their votes rarely can form a government without entering into coalition agreements with other parties. As a result, while multiple parties may be part of a governing coalition, their policies and electoral platforms are typically compromised, traded off, or abandoned in forming agreements with their coalition partners.

This is quite different from the way that the two main forms of PR are described by Fair Vote Canada or in the ERRE Parliamentary Committee report, and there are a large number of variations of PR. The first two BC referendums proposed STV, while the third in 2018 had these three alternatives to FPTP:

• dual-member proportional representation (DMP)
• mixed-member proportional representation (MMP)
• rural–urban proportional representation (RUP)

I won’t go into the details of these options, which have lengthy descriptions on Wikipedia for those interested, but in effect there are two key ways that PR systems differ from FPTP.

First is the use of multi-member ridings, like in STV or in fact the system used in Halifax until 1968. This is not really “proportional”, yet it gets included as a form of proportional representation, as usually ballots are ranked and votes transferred so that parties other than the one with the candidate with the most first rankings gets elected.

The second is the use of “at-large” MPs, meaning that some or all MPs are chosen from areas that cover more than one riding. The extreme version of this is in Israel, where there are no local ridings, only a national vote and national lists and members of the Knesset are chosen from lists in proportion to each party’s vote. Nobody is proposing this pure “List” system for Canada, with a single national list or even one for each province.

MMP uses “at large” MPs chosen from “open lists” (ones where voters pick who gets elected for each party) or “closed lists”, where each party decides on their list themselves. MMP lost in Ontario in part because it had a “closed list” method that was seen as cutting out the voters and therefore being not particularly democratic.

The Fair Vote BC v. AG Canada decision is pretty clear about how we elect a parliament. In effect, we have 338 MPs, or some other total number. Each province (and territory) gets a specific number of MPs. Then within each province, it is divided into non-overlapping “Electoral Districts” (traditionally referred to as ridings) and each riding has one MP each – though until 1968, Halifax alone had two MPs. End of story.

So, our system is really 338 separate elections held on the same day, to elect individuals as representatives by geography, though if there is a vacancy, we hold by-elections to replace any missing MPs. Party names may be on the ballot, but MPs are not tied to that after being elected.

How we vote, who can vote, who is on the ballot, how we count ballots, how we pick the winner, and otherwise how our federal election is run, is all part of the federal Elections Act. And there have been lots of changes over the years. For example, before the 1972 election, party names were not printed on the ballots.

Canada’s first couple of elections (1867 and 1872) did not even used the secret written ballot. In theory, the federal government could simply change the Elections Act when it comes to HOW we express our choice for MP.

In effect, nothing in the Fair Vote BC decision suggests that using ranked ballots is not precluded under the Charter in the body of our Constitution, since written ballots themselves are not required, nor is there anything to prevent people from changing their vote or ranking their preferences except in the Elections Act.

So, when Justin Trudeau had a majority from 2015 to 2019, he could have implemented Australian-style ranked choice voting by just passing a normal law to amend the Elections Act. The only questions would have been if there was a Constitutional challenge to it, which might have delayed it coming into force, but the main issue would have been public tolerance for unilaterally changing the law.

When Stephen Harper banned union and corporate political donations soon after being elected in 2006, there were loud complaints that this benefitted the Conservatives, who were proficient at raising money directly from individuals, and hurt the Liberals and NDP far more – entrenching an advantage to the Conservatives.

Similarly, the NDP and Greens, and Fair Vote Canada, have been critical of Ranked Choice Voting on the basis that the centrist Liberal Party would likely be the big winners if RCV were implemented, so their passing RCV would be a conflict of interest or self-dealing. Some polls asking voters who their second choice is for party seem to confirm this, since the Conservatives do badly as a second choice (except with the few PPC voters) while the other parties to their left tend to benefit, the Liberals most of all.

Yet, this might not always be the case. For example, the Liberals did terribly in 1984, and even worse in 2011, with just 34 MPs and less than 19% of the vote.

A 2013 Abacus poll and analysis showed that, at that time, an election under FPTP would have given the Conservatives close to a majority of 147 seats out of 308, with the NDP second at 108, and the Liberals at just 76 MPs. But, switching to RCV (called Preferential Ballot in this poll) would have given the NDP their first ever minority government with 127 MPs, to 117 for the Conservatives and 93 for the Liberals.

In effect, the NDP can actually form a minority government if ever the Liberals fall to third, but more typical is an analysis done in late 2015 which used the 2015 general election and tried to retroactively calculate the outcomes under different electoral systems.

With PR, no party is likely to get a majority without getting 50% of the vote – a rarity in the last 100 years. So, if PR had been used in 2015, it is no surprise that the Liberals would have been reduced from 184 seats to 134, with all other parties gaining MPs. But with an RCV/Preferential system, the Liberals gain 40 seats, while the NDP gains just 6 MPs, and the Conservatives are the big losers.

The problem with looking backwards is that with ANY change from FPTP to a different system, the entire political landscape will change. Changes include:

• Existing political parties themselves will split, disappear, merge or shift, and new parties will emerge, particularly with proportional representation where small single issue or regional parties will spring up.
• Parties will choose different leaders who might appeal to a broader range of voters, particularly with STV or RCV, where voters can rank parties or their local candidates.
• Party platforms and policies will be chosen to maximize the outcome under the system in use.
• Local candidates for MP might be chosen to have broader appeal, particularly with STV or RCV where voters can rank the local candidates.
• Campaigning will change, particularly with ranked ballots but even more so with much larger multi-member ridings where parties might run more than one candidate per riding, and they work as teams.
• Fundraising and spending patterns will change, such as if ridings become larger under PR or with multi-member ridings, or people vote separately for party and for local candidates (MMP).
• The role or use of the media might change, particularly with larger ridings etc.
• Style of campaigning will change, such as a shift away from negative advertising if ballots include ranking.
• Election day efforts to “get out the vote” could also change.

The NDP and Green parties are underestimating the changes that any transformation of the electoral system might bring. The NDP might break up into smaller parties under PR. In fact, the Conservative Party might also break up into something similar to the 1990s when there was a populist Western Reform wing and the Red Tory-ish Progressive Conservatives – as the current Conservative Party has been unstable given that the social conservatives have rebelled when a leader tries to move the party to the centre, as happened to Scheer and O’Toole.

Australia is the main country to use Ranked Choice Voting, and it provides an example showing the centrist Liberals might not dominate under RCV. Australia has the left wing Labour Party on one side, alternating with the “Coalition” of the right wing Liberal and National Party.

There are other alternatives to sticking with the current FPTP system beside PR and RCV. France uses run off elections, and Alaska has a 2-stage process with an open primary followed by a ranked choice runoff final election. Maybe a Citizens’ Assembly might have looked at these or other options, and if any provinces pursue electoral reform via a Citizens’ Assembly, then it is far easier for provinces to experiment, as some provinces in the past used ranked choice voting, multi-member districts or things other than FPTP.

So, the type of electoral reform that the NDP, Greens and Fair Vote Canada want seems to be dead, assuming the Supreme Court confirms the Superior Court decision in the Fair Vote BC case. Which brings us back to the Serenity Prayer of “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.”

If PR is effectively dead for the foreseeable future, and RCV is the only option possible, and if it might not actually benefit the Liberals to the degree PR advocates fear, then perhaps it is time for PR supporters to find the wisdom to know this is so, and find the serenity to accept that PR is dead.

But there might be a glimmer of hope regardless. If RVC is indeed constitutional and the Liberals are willing to pass a law to implement it, there are still several potential routes to PR.

If the Liberals agreed, the NDP and Greens could agree to support RCV on the condition that after two elections, there will be a mail-in referendum to keep it, and if they vote to not keep it, then to at that point convene a Citizens Assembly to consider PR or other types of electoral reform.

There is one other final option: Single Transferable Vote is essentially Ranked Choice Voting but with some multi-member ridings. Proposals for STV in Canada, at the federal or provincial level, often accept the need for single member ridings in the huge northern and rural parts of Canada, where current ridings are larger than many European countries. Proposals for STV usually keep roughly the same number of MPs and effectively just combine 3-5 existing ridings to create multi-member ridings.

Adopting RCV, as Trudeau prefers, could be interpreted as a possible first step towards having STV in the future if one or more provinces are willing to adopt it, or as an option to be considered after 2 elections in a referendum over keeping RCV or returning to FPTP.

Conservatives might not find RCV appealing, and would likely oppose any change, but there may be a silver lining. The PPC might eventually replace Maxime Bernier with a leader with more appeal. In addition, there is a new small-c Conservative party forming and likely will be registered in 2024 – the Canadian Future Party, which has New Brunswick politician Dominic Cardy as its interim leader. A Red Tory party might have greater success in taking away Liberal votes than the current CPC, and if Poilievre fails to do well in the 2025 general election, the CPC might continue to be torn internally and find that it cannot both satisfy its social conservative base while also moving far enough to the center to beat the Liberals.

As long as the Bloc Quebecois continues to be a major force in federal politics in Quebec, it is very hard for the Liberals or the Conservatives to get a majority – though according to the current polls, the Conservatives would likely win a majority if an election was held in the next few months.

And FPTP gives the Bloc a disproportionate number of Quebec MPs. The Bloc currently is the only separatist or principally Quebec nationalist party, getting around one third of the vote in current polls. But with 5 federalist parties going after the other two thirds of the vote, the federalist vote is so split that it is hard for any single party to get more seats than the Bloc, though the Anglo and Allophone vote is concentrated mostly in Montreal, which helps to prevent it from being even more lopsided.

Moving to PR or RCV would be in the national interest in ending the over-representation of the Quebec separatist vote in Parliament, and in providing a stronger voice for Quebec federalists in Parliament as a whole, as well as within the major political parties themselves.

Proponents of PR are overly fixated on math. They campaign for PR on the basis of slogans like “make every vote count”, with the aim of having the number of MPs match their share of the popular vote. I am not going to make all of the arguments against PR here (including that the 3 territories each have 1 MP each, so PR cannot be implemented there or makes little sense if done province by province).

Advocates of PR are fixated on the first choice of voters in an era where only supporters of small or single issue parties have strong positive attachments to a political party, whereas a lot of voters vote based on “negative partisanship” which is the “tendency of some voters to form their political opinions primarily in opposition to political parties they dislike”. As such, they are trying to vote out a party or candidate, and are relatively indifferent towards which party they might vote for to do the job, picking the one they either object to least or is most likely to win.

It is important to note here that Fair Vote Canada considers Ranked Choice Voting to be far worse than FPTP because their position is that only a voter’s first choice matters, when most voters behave differently from this assumption. Despite their supposedly being champions of democracy, Fair Vote Canada seems afraid that if RCV was adopted (even as a temporary step), Canadian voters might actually like it, and then want to stick with it permanently.

How undemocratic for a group that claims to champion democracy.

It is unlikely that Fair Vote Canada and its most ardent supporters can be convinced to accept RCV as the only (or most pragmatic) path forward. But the NDP and Greens should show the wisdom mentioned in the Serenity Prayer, to accept the reality that their idea of electoral reform is dead, and even the idea of a citizens’ assembly on the topic is dead. They should instead acknowledge that it is in the national interest to work with the Liberals to change to a system which is possible to implement without re-opening the Constitution and that works well and is popular in Australia, which is the country that is most similar to us in its federalist structure and parliamentary system (save for the Aussies having an elected Senate).

Proponents of Senate reform have gone silent or given up, in part because any major Constitutional reform is too daunting, given that it seems impossible to get the ten provinces to agree to anything and could reawaken Quebec separatism. Similarly, opening the Constitution for electoral reform, abolishing the monarchy or anything else of that nature is too risky and not seen as worth discussing by any major federal party.

This is not likely to change anytime soon.