You might not have noticed that Canada had a national election on October 14. In fact, more than 40% of Canadians didn’t notice either, or at least didn’t bother to show up at the polls.

 

According to the title of an article appearing on the website of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (the publicly funded radio/television network), “Voter turnout appears to hit all-time low” – the count was approximately 59%. Now I am certainly no mathematician, but I confess I was surprised by this headline since the same article also points out that the 1898 election had a voter turnout of 44.6%. I skipped the grade where they were teaching new math, so that probably accounts for my confusion.

 

The usual gnashing of teeth about the low turnout has already begun, and there will be renewed calls for electoral reform. There is already a strong movement afoot to introduce something called ‘proportional representation’, and although the various forms of PR can be complicated, they all boil down to some votes being more valuable than others. The upside, though, is that under a proportional system all votes have at least some value, which they most often do not under the current system.

 

Under the current ‘first past the post’ system, we regularly get results like we did October 14. That is, the head of our country is the leader of a political party that managed to garner only 37.6% of the vote. Keep in mind that since less than 60% of the eligible voters bothered to show up, he actually gets the job with the support of about 22% of the nation’s electors. And you know he’s going to claim he has a ‘mandate from the voters’. You gotta admit that’s a sweet deal!

 

Now, I am not crying the blues about this simply because our Prime Minister is a piece of crap – I would say the same no matter who got the job under these circumstances. But it strikes me as ironic that Canada is busy in Afghanistan trying to secure the peace so democracy can bloom (well, that’s the official BS they’re feeding us, anyway), while we so regularly fail to exercise it ourselves.

 

The highest turnout any Canadian election has ever experienced was 79.8% in 1958. In that one, people were eager to vote Conservative so they could punish the Liberal Party of Canada for a bunch of really stupid reasons, and they turned out by the bucketful. [It was a short-lived punishment, since four years later the same voters brought back the Liberals because of the incompetence of the Conservatives.]

 

What choice did we have?

 

Stephen Harper (Conservative)

He was Prime Minister before going in to the election, with a minority of seats in Parliament. That meant that in order to move legislation forward or to effectively govern, he needed the support of at least one other party in order to have a majority of votes on an issue. [In Canada, it is unthinkable for members of Parliament to vote contrary to their own party’s views – it usually costs them their jobs.] A leader who was less churlish than Mr Harper, and more amenable to compromise, might have had a successful administration. But he is churlish, and he has a lot of difficulty playing nicely with others.

 

Ironically, when he was first elected to the post in 2006, one of his first acts was to pass legislation that called for regular elections every four years. He chose to break his own law to call this one.

 

The result? He’s still got himself a minority government. So Canadians have spent several hundred million dollars to get what we already had. Harper did increase his seat total, but it’s still not enough to become an unfettered dictator, which is clearly his life ambition.

 

Harper is sometimes referred to as ‘Bush Lite’ – and one would normally think of that as the kiss of death. But, like the brilliant leader to the south, Harper enjoys huge support among evangelical Christians. Regular church-going folk seem to vote for parties in Canada in much the same proportion, regardless of the church. But the evangelicals really like this guy. He’s their kind of fascist.

 

It was interesting to watch Harper during this campaign – because he really didn’t have anything that looked like a platform. Most of his rhetoric seemed to centre around ‘vote for me, because I’m not any of them’.

 

Some Canadian observers have speculated that Harper called the election early to avoid what he perceives as a swing away from the hard right in the United States. It is generally agreed that he would be a better fit with McCain than Obama.

 

Pundits are already talking, however, about this election being Harper’s swan song. He couldn’t get the job the first time he tried, and now twice in a row he has failed to deliver a majority. The experts point out that he had almost a perfect storm of reasons to obtain a majority this time, but he misread the public on a few key issues.

 

Stéphane Dion (Liberal)

For any US readers, ‘liberal’ is not a bad word in Canada. The Liberal Party of Canada has been the head of government for close to 60% of our history. In fact, they and the Conservatives are the only governments we have ever had.

 

Stéphane Dion is an intellectual – very bookish, seeming to see much of the world with the wonder of a child. He is a visionary. He is also an appallingly bad leader of a political party. The results for the Liberals in this election are just about as bad as they have ever been, and most of the blame rests squarely on his shoulders. He was chosen leader of the party about two years ago, and most observers at the time saw him only as a caretaker until a better candidate could solidify support.

 

So even before the final votes were tallied on Tuesday, the knives were already out. His party’s constitution requires an automatic leadership review after every general election, and it seems quite unlikely that he will survive. Most pundits think he is smart enough to know that and will, for the good of his party, go sooner rather than later.

 

Dion ran his campaign almost entirely on the environment, using a complicated platform of ‘carbon tax’ policies that he insisted would benefit the environment, reduce taxes for average Canadians, and increase taxes for the polluters. Independent economists generally agreed it was a sound plan, and that the numbers added up. But his detractors had no difficulty claiming that the whole program was bunk, because it was far too complicated for most people to grasp.

 

One other shortcoming: Mr Dion is Québecois, and French is his first language. Canada is officially a bilingual nation, but Dion is very much challenged in English, and is unfairly ridiculed for it. [The last prime minister before Harper, Jean Chrétien, was a native Francophone as well, and had a speech impediment to boot. It was often joked that he couldn’t speak either official language.]

 

Although their seat count dropped precipitously, the Liberals still hold the second highest number of seats. But to enforce their will on the government, they will need to enter into alliances with other parties.

 

Jack Layton (New Democrat)

The New Democratic Party (NDP) is the offspring of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, the party that brought universal healthcare to Canada. And unemployment insurance, and old age pensions, and a bunch of other social safety net thingies. At the federal government level, most of these ideas were co-opted by other parties since the CCF/NDP has never held power nationally.

 

Historically, then, this is a party that considers itself the party of the Left. It is not, and it has not been for many years. It is fair to say the NDP is not as far to the right as the other parties, but they are still somewhat right of centre – despite all their protests to the contrary.

 

The NDP fared better this time than they have in many years. Layton’s party took about 17% of the votes, the highest proportion they have ever attained. But they still didn’t equal or surpass their highest seat total. Some might be tempted to think these results signal a shift to the Left, but I would disagree. There is a strong contingent of anti-Harper voters, even among some traditional Conservatives, who would have voted Liberal – but they couldn’t hold their noses tightly enough to get around Stéphane Dion. They mostly voted NDP instead. Once Dion is gone, they will likely drift back to the Liberal fold.

 

Layton has, however, solidified himself as a strong leader for his party. During the election campaign, voters of all stripes seemed to think he was a pretty solid guy. But not enough of them translated that into votes.

 

The NDP platform was the typical mix of ‘environment, jobs, economy, jobs, Afghanistan, jobs, native Canadians, jobs’. All are important issues, but none seem to excite Canadians in a big way, unless they are personally affected.

 

Gilles Duceppe (Bloc Québecois)

Non-Canadians might marvel at this concept, but we never said we were sane.

 

The BQ is a party whose existence is predicated on the principle of separating from Canada. The party is active only in Québec, never runs candidates outside Québec, and is just itching to turn the province into its very own country. In fact, they don’t even call themselves a province – they are the Québec Nation, and their legislature is known as the National Assembly (or L'Assemblée nationale du Québec, for you pedants).

 

From time to time, there are gripes about having Duceppe, or the Bloc, charged with treason. But that is never going to fly – as much as provinces voted to join Canada, they can vote to leave.

 

Despite being a one-trick pony, there are enough federal parliamentary seats in Québec that the BQ has been the second or third largest party in every election since 1993. And that has created the dizzying situation where a party that vows to break up the country has served as ‘her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’ – we’re really big on anachronisms here.

 

The Bloc managed this time out to maintain most of its seats, and pretty close to the same percentage of popular vote. And they did this despite the fact all the polls told us Harper’s Conservatives were going to make big inroads in Québec. Duceppe is already crowing that he deserves credit for stopping Harper’s bid for a majority.

 

Apart from its separatist leanings, it is often hard to plug into exactly what the BQ represents and believes. Duceppe usually comes across, when not talking about separatism, as the most rational of the national leaders. He appears to be a mix of Left-leaning socialism and fiscal responsibility – the sort of compromise that would normally appeal to most Canadians. But there is no yardstick to measure them against since they have never held power and, so long as they are confined to Québec only, they never will.

 

However, there is a counter-part to the BQ that operates at the provincial government level – the Parti Québecois. And the PQ is hard right. Not so far right as the Conservatives, but quite cosy and comfortable with them.

 

In any event, the Bloc Québecois presence in national elections, and in Parliament, adds a little insanity to Canadian politics that should at least suggest to outsiders that we’re not nearly so dull as we usually seem.

 

Elizabeth May (Green)

Increased the party vote over the last election, got the same number of seats: Zero.

 

The Greens suffer from their name. It suggests to everyone that they are tree-hugging bunny lovers, and nothing else. The environment is very much a core of their philosophy, but there is a great deal more to them than that. They are actually a bewildering mix of hard right and hard left thinking, with most of the variations in between.

 

This is one of the parties that would benefit immensely from some sort of proportional voting. To put this in perspective – they got zero members elected with 6.8% of the popular vote; the BQ got 50 seats on less than 10% of the vote.

 

May probably made a tactical blunder when she first became leader of this party – she chose to run in a constituency that was held by the sitting Minister of Defense. Even without being Minister, this man is enormously popular (only God knows why) and unseating him was never going to happen.

 

Everybody Else

In order to run in an election in Canada, all you need to do is gather a few signatures and cough up a few bucks. They’ll put you on the ballot. And if you’ve got a friend who feels the same way you do, you can cough up a few more bucks and call yourselves a party.

 

Altogether, there were about 30 parties fielding candidates in this election, and an untold number of Independents. In fact, two of those Independents actually got elected.

 

 

So now what have we got?

Same old, same old. We spent a lot of money for nothing. It’s not really any wonder that Canadian participation in elections has dwindled over the years. Internationally, we are apparently in 83^rd spot for our voter participation. There are even dictatorships ahead of us.

 

According to our law, which is apparently somewhat fluid in its application, we are going to vote every four years. Some of us will, but an increasingly large number of us won’t. That’s partly because a multi-party election that doesn’t proportion the results means a lot of people consider their ballots wasted. And it’s partly because we really don’t give a shit. We know that whomever is elected is going to stumble along, just like any of the other goofs who are running. We have far greater interest in other people’s elections, particularly the United States, than our own.

 

Frankly, we’ve just got better things to do with our time. And we’re not going to change until some real alternative to the status quo comes along – we can only hope that will be a good alternative, rather than a negative one. Then maybe we’ll take this ‘democracy’ thing out for a spin, to see if we like it.

 

 

© Copyright 2008 by AxisofLogic.com

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Paul Richard Harris is an Axis of Logic editor and columnist, based in Canada.  He can be reached at paul@axisoflogic.com

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