Avalon

“Every government degenerates … “ – Thomas Jefferson

It is not clear who should lead this country, the Conservatives or an opposition coalition. During this debate you hear the claim that Canadians decided their government during the last election, isn’t that what elections are for?

But whom did Canadians choose to govern? Harper says himself but his opponents say only one in four Canadians voted for him yet a Liberal+NDP combination does not have the support of one in two voters. We have an electoral system that produces muddles like this rather than clear results.

When Canadians vote are they voting only for their representative? Are they picking a Prime Minister? Or are they indicating a preference for a party? Or perhaps it is a mix of the three. We just don’t know and so the result is open to political manipulation over the heads of citizens. Will our leader be Harper, Dion, perhaps Layton or as yet some unspecified future Liberal Leader? And of course while all of this is going on government is paralyzed.

It is time for a reformed electoral system where citizens directly elect their Prime Minister.

There is an interesting but pointless debate in Nova Scotia. Liberal Leader Stephen McNeil has introduced a bill into the provincial legislature to lower the voting age from 18 to 16 in conjunction with an increase in civics and history education in response to the historically low provincial and federal voter turnouts. Premier Rodney MacDonald has mocked the suggestion and NDP Leader Darrel Dexter considers it a ‘drastic’ action while refusing to state where he stands on the issue.

Let’s take a step back. This voting age muddle is a perfect example of why people don’t vote. A party leader introduces a bill with no hope of passing. The merits of the bill will not be freely debated in the Legislature. The bill is intended to be window dressing for the current political process by simply raising turnouts without getting to the root of the problem. Even in ‘dressing the window’ the bill seems ill conceived since youth tend to have the lowest of voter turnouts. But since there is no free debate on the subject voters will never know, all voters have is ‘spin’ in the media. Why would voters pay any attention to any of this?

Raising voter turnout requires real substantive changes to invite the citizen back into the governance system but that means diluting the power of the parties and the leaders, but the parties and the leaders control the system and change is not in their interest. So no matter which way we turn we are back to where we started; a system that cannot fix itself and is divorced from its citizens. Why would voters involve themselves in any of this?

Fixed election dates is an issue both federally and provincially. In 2006 Mr. Harper brought in legislation to limit the term of a federal government to four years; thereby fixing the date of the next general election to the fall of 2009. An election begins when the Prime Minister asks the Governor General to dissolve Parliament and to authorize the writs of election. Assuming the government has not lost confidence, the timing of the election call resides completely with the Prime Minister and is a considerable advantage for the leading party. By taking advantage of short-term events, opposition weakness, or sudden good news the Prime Minister can sway an election to his or her advantage. As a result governments may be winning elections they otherwise would not and manipulation of election dates for political gain erodes the citizen’s view that elections are important and should be participated in. So fixed election dates are correctly deemed a good thing. Mr. Harper said it himself in 2006, “ … fixed election dates stop leaders from trying to manipulate the calendar simply for partisan political advantage.”

However fixed election dates cannot work. Why? Canada and its provinces use a confidence system of governance. If the government looses the confidence of the House it must resign and an election must be called to restore confidence regardless of any fixed election date scheme. Also the right of a Prime Minister to ask for dissolution of Parliament is constitutionally protected. Any law passed by Parliament fixing election dates cannot interfere with that power. So even with fixed election dates on the books what sanctions can be used to prevent a Prime Minister from calling an election by resigning before the next election date? And this of course is precisely what happened and why we went to the polls a full year before the ‘fixed’ date.

Fixed election dates is a needed reform but is incompatible with our confidence-style of governance. So let us take a hard look at whether Canada and its provinces should move beyond confidence based governance.

It’s not who got elected where, it’s not the outcome of various ‘grudge’ matches around the country, or the final seat totals, it’s not even the resulting minority government for Mr. Harper. The most important result is buried in the data from Elections Canada, a footnote really. It is the historically low turnout of 59.1%, the first time ever that less than six out of ten people have voted. And that is based on registered voters, estimates claim an additional 5% to 15% of potential voters are not registered and therefore do not vote. Including this fact places the actual turnout at around 50%, perhaps less!

Why are people not coming out to vote? Disinterest in or cynicism of politics in general? We have always had that. No, the reason is the growing knowledge that our representatives do not really represent us, the voters. Yes they ‘represent’ us in a superficial fashion, they stand for our riding. But they don’t express our political wishes on the issues of the day since the party dictates their votes in the House. So voters are, correctly, stating ‘why should I vote if my representative will not vote for me’.

Shrinking turnout is a bad thing. Less and less involvement in the democratic process de-stabilizes the whole system (for instance Mr. Harper’s claim to government rests on only 5.2 million votes out of 23.4 million potential votes, that’s less than one in four). However low turnout does point to something good; more and more citizens are becoming political sophisticates and can see how they are sidelined politically and this sets the stage for the coming rebirth of our democracy in terms of political and electoral reform.