The Truth About Canada (44 page)

And next time you come across an economist or a politician or a journalist equating GDP per capita with standard of living or quality of life, tell them they can get a copy of
Economics for Dummies
at any good bookstore.

Lastly on this subject, within just a few days of each other, our leading Canadian newspapers ran the following headlines: “Canada-U.S. Prosperity Gap Grows Wider,” which began a story featuring the annual report of the University of Toronto—based Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity;
¹¹
followed four days later by “Canada’s Fortune Reversal,” showing how our Canadian per-capita income increased at almost twice the U.S. rate between 2002 and 2006;
¹²
followed three days later by “We’re Lagging Behind the U.S. in Productivity.”
¹³

Confused? You should be, given everything that’s been drummed into you about how vitally important productivity is to our standard of living. John Godard of the I.H. Asper School of Business at the University of Manitoba writes:

There is no automatic association between productivity gains and either the wealth or well-being of workers. The question
is not just how we can achieve productivity gains, it is also how such gains are to be distributed. Until such time as proponents of the productivity agenda explicitly address this part of the equation, their cries are likely to fall on deaf ears. And so they should.
¹⁴

Bravo to John Godard!

PART NINE

39

REFORMING OUR DYSFUNCTIONAL ELECTORAL SYSTEM

SOMETHING THAT SHOULD BE OUR NUMBER ONE PRIORITY

W
herever I go across Canada, during the question-and-answer session after one of my speeches, someone in the audience invariably asks me what my most important priority would be to make Canada a better country. My answer has been the same for much of the past 30 years. We urgently need election reform.

Remarkably, almost 40 percent of those who didn’t vote in recent elections said that the elections didn’t matter, or that they felt they had no one to vote for. In a UN list of 179 countries, when voter turnout was calculated as a percentage of all eligible voters, Canada placed way down in an astonishing 93rd place (the United States was 134th).

Poll after poll has shown that the public has become increasingly disillusioned with politicians and politics. Only a small percentage say they trust politicians and feel their votes matter. In one poll, 70 percent said they believed politicians were corrupt. Among the 30 OECD countries, 18 have a greater proportion of respondents than Canada who say they have a high level of trust in parliament.
¹
Voters have become more and more cynical and turned off. But why shouldn’t they be, given the shenanigans and corruption and broken promises we’ve seen in Ottawa during the Mulroney, Chrétien, Martin, and Harper years?

(Peter C. Newman says that Canadians have become so cynical about politics that even when Cabinet ministers admit they lied nobody believes them.)
²

One appalling result of all this is that over 80 percent of adult Canadians have never belonged to a political party, and fewer than 2 percent of adult Canadians make a donation to a political party. In fact, it’s worse than that. In the 2006 federal election, only 0.75 percent of eligible voters made a political donation.
³

How can we begin to change this? I believe we urgently need a mixed-member proportional representation system. Here are just a few examples of the absurdity of the present system (with special thanks to Democracy Watch and Fair Vote Canada).

• In the 2006 federal election, the New Democrats received a million more votes than the Bloc, but the Bloc received 51 seats in the House of Commons while the NDP got only 29.

• The Green Party received over 650,000 votes across Canada yet elected not a single MP. The Liberals in Atlantic Canada received only 475,000 votes and elected 20 MPs.

• The Conservatives in the Prairie provinces got three times as many votes as the Liberals but elected almost 10 times as many MPs.

• In 2006, with proportional representation, the Conservatives would have won 113 seats instead of 124, the Liberals 93 seats instead of 103, the NDP 59 seats, not 29, the Bloc 31 seats, not 51, and the Green Party 12 seats, not zero.

With proportional representation, regional representation would be infinitely fairer, and would much better reflect voter intentions.

Larry Gordon of Fair Vote Canada puts this important topic well:

First-past-the-post has a devastating effect on Canadian unity by exaggerating and exacerbating regional differences. By over-rewarding parties with a strong regional base of support and suppressing … minority political views, the resulting electoral map masks the variety of political views held in all regions. Canadians in all regions have a diversity of
views, but the electoral map makes Canada look like a hodgepodge of partisan fiefdoms.

Fair Vote Canada (
www.fairvotecanada.org
) put out a superb report analyzing Canadian federal elections between 1980 and 2000. Among their conclusions:

• In 1984, Brian Mulroney won almost 75 percent of House of Commons seats with 50 percent of the vote.

• In 2000, over 200,000 Alliance voters in Saskatchewan elected 10 Alliance MPs, but in Quebec over 200,000 Alliance voters elected zero MPs.

• Canada ranked a terrible 36th among nations in our percentage of women MPs.

• In 2000, 2.3 million Ontario Liberal voters elected 100 Liberal MPs; 2.2 million other Ontario voters elected only three MPs from the other parties.

• In the six federal elections between 1980 and 2000, over 49 percent of the votes were wasted; that is, they elected no one. In countries using proportional voting systems, only 5 percent of votes in New Zealand were wasted, only 6 percent in Scotland, only 7 percent in Germany.

Some more distorted election results:

• In 1988, Alberta Conservatives won 100 percent of the seats with 52 percent of the vote.

• In 1997, Liberals won all four P.E.I. House of Commons seats with only 45 percent of the vote, and three years later all four with 47 percent of the vote.

• In Quebec in 1980, Liberals won 74 of 75 seats with 68 percent of the vote.

• In the 2006 federal election, hundreds of thousands of Conservative voters in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver
should have elected about nine MPs, but instead elected no one.
⁴

• In 2004, fewer than 180,000 Conservative voters in Saskatchewan elected 13 Conservative MPs, but over 300,000 Conservative voters in Quebec elected no one.

• In 1993, Kim Campbell’s Conservatives won two million votes, but only two seats; that is, only a single seat for a million votes. Meanwhile, the Liberal Party won a Commons seat with an average of 32,000 votes.

• In 2004, more people in Ontario voted Conservative than their combined vote in British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. Yet the Conservatives elected only 24 MPs in Ontario compared to a total of 61 in the three Western provinces.

• In 2004, 1.7 million people voted for the Bloc, which won 54 seats in Parliament. In the same election, the NDP received 2.1 million votes and won only 19 seats.

• In 1980, the Liberals received about one-quarter of all votes in Western Canada, but instead of getting 20 seats they elected only two MPs.

• In 1998, the Parti Québecois lost the popular vote in the provincial election, but won the most seats and formed the government.

• In 1999, the Parti Québecois received 42.7 percent voter support, but won 60.5 percent of the seats in Quebec’s Assembly. The Liberals won more support than the PQ, with 43.7 percent of the votes, but they took only 38.7 percent of the seats.

• In Ontario, Bob Rae won a majority and 55 percent of the seats in the legislature with only 38 percent of the vote. Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal majority of 70 percent of the seats came from only 46 percent voter support.

• In 2001, the B.C. Liberals won 77 of 79 seats with only 58 percent of the vote.

• In the 2006 federal election, the Bloc took more than two-thirds of the seats in Quebec with less than half the vote.

• In 1987, Frank McKenna’s Liberals in New Brunswick took 100 percent of the seats in the legislature with 60 percent of the vote.

• In three federal elections, Jean Chrétien never received more than 41 percent support, yet won majorities ranging from 51 percent to 60 percent of the seats in the House of Commons. In 1997, he won a majority in Parliament with only 38.5 percent of the popular vote. In 2000, he won a majority with the support of only one in four eligible voters.

As Fair Vote Canada has pointed out, it took only 30,432 votes on average to elect a Bloc MP in the 2006 federal election, 43,314 votes to elect a Conservative MP, 43,468 to elect a Liberal, and 89,338 votes to elect a New Democrat. And, of course, with 665,940 votes, the Green Party elected no one.

Fair Vote Canada makes another important point:

Since World War I, Canada has had 15 “majority” governments. In each case, one party held a majority of seats and exercised 100% of the power.

But only 4 of the 15 actually won a majority of the popular vote. Four legitimate majority governments over the past eight decades!
⁵

There are scores of other similar examples in Canada.

Now let’s look at how fair the regional distribution of seats has been in the House of Commons. The answer is not very. Alberta now has 28 MPs, but based on population it should have 33. B.C. has 36, but should have 43. Ontario has 106, but should have 120. (While Stephen Harper has proposed partially rectifying this situation, his formula still leaves Ontario badly short-changed by 11 fewer seats than its population warrants,
and the 22 proposed additional Commons seats in B.C., Alberta, and Ontario would not come into effect until 2014.)

Toronto has a population larger than all four Atlantic provinces put together, but Toronto has only 23 MPs and the four provinces have 32.

Does the unfairness of the system turn people off? Judge for yourself. One survey said that of the 40 percent of Canadians under 30 years of age, only 5 percent belonged to any political party. In 2003, polls showed that only 3 percent of 22-to 29-year-olds worked as a volunteer for a political party.

Now let’s return to the question of voter turnout.

How do Canadians feel about our democracy and the way it functions? In April 2006, in a Leger Marketing poll, only 36 percent of respondents said that Canada is governed by the will of the people. If this is how people feel, is it any wonder that in recent years voter turnout has been declining? In 1958, 1962, and 1963, it was over 79 percent. In 1984 and 1988, it was down to 75.3 percent of eligible voters. In 1993, it was down again, to 69.6 percent, and down once more in 1997, to 67 percent. And in 2000, it dropped to a low of 64.1 percent, though it was back up slightly to 64.7 percent in 2006.

How well does our democracy function? In 2000, only 25 percent of eligible voters voted for the winning party, while 39 percent did not bother to vote. In 2006, the Harper government was elected with 36.3 percent of the eligible vote.

Of course, aside from our highly unrepresentative voting system, there are other important reasons for low voter turnout, including the corruption, disillusionment, and disappointment of the Mulroney, Chrétien, and Martin years, already mentioned, plus the seemingly perpetual list of broken political promises and the perception (correct for so much of the past) that a wealthy plutocracy’s big money has been calling the shots in politics in this country.

How about young people, “the future of our country”? Between 70 and 75 percent of 18-to 24-year-old registered voters don’t bother to vote. Why don’t young people vote? In 2000, 38 percent of eligible young people said they didn’t vote because of lack of interest, and 41 percent
between the ages of 25 and 34 gave the same answer. Asked to name the most important issue in an upcoming federal election, almost 30 percent said either that there wasn’t one or that they didn’t know of one. Of the non-voters, 37 percent said either that the elections didn’t matter or they didn’t like the choices.

All in all, a dismal picture.

In one poll of adult voters, when asked if big business was in charge of our politics because of globalization, 74 percent agreed. When asked if political leaders told the truth and kept their promises, 73 percent said no — the same percentage that said government didn’t care about average people. In a March 2005 Leger Marketing poll, when Canadians were asked who, out of a long list, they trusted, they put politicians dead last, at only 14 percent.

How does voter turnout in Canada compare with other countries? I’ve already mentioned one comparison that put us in 93rd place. But in May 2004, Fair Vote Canada reported that for the decade of the 1990s, Canada ranked all the way down in 109th place in voter turnout.

109th place!

In 2005, 84.5 percent of eligible voters voted in the Danish election. In 2007, 85 percent voted in the French presidential election. Seven other Western democracies have voter turnout rates in the 80 to 90 percent range. All of the following countries have had voter turnouts of 80 percent or better: South Africa, Costa Rica, Argentina, Chile, Guyana, Uruguay, Israel, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Belgium, Bulgaria, Italy, Malta, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden.