As the campaigning for the October 21 election continues, the outcome remains unpredictable. Opinion polls suggest that one or none of the major parties could get a majority in the Legislative Assembly. But one thing is not in doubt: the resulting seats in the Legislative Assembly will not reflect the preferences of the voters.
But, you might well ask, “Isn’t a democracy with representative government supposed to have elections that produce legislatures that reflect voters’ preferences?”
In fact, in the last couple of decades more and more people have been asking this question. They’ve been reaching the conclusion that our electoral system should be changed.
One problem with the first-past-the-post system, in which the winning candidate only needs to get one more vote than the others, is that it consistently produces lopsided results.
For example, the previous provincial election in 2020 saw the Progressive Conservatives (PCs) get 39 percent of the vote, 55 percent of the seats and all the power. Smaller parties are typically underrepresented or not represented at all. The Greens got 15 percent of the vote and 6 percent of the seats, while the People’s Alliance got 9 percent of the vote and 4 percent of the seats.
Put another way, it took 5,474 votes to elect a PC MLA, 7,590 to elect a Liberal, 17,263 to elect a People’s Alliance MLA and 19,084 votes to elect a Green MLA.
The principle that everyone’s vote should have the same weight is clearly being violated. Only some form of proportional representation, where the composition of the Legislature reflects the distribution of the popular vote among the political parties, can produce results that satisfy this fundamental principle of equality.
In practice, about half of all votes count for nothing in determining the makeup of the Legislature. For example, someone voting PC in a ‘safe’ Liberal riding might as well not bother. The vote will be ‘wasted’ in the sense that whether or not it was cast makes zero difference to the outcome. Obviously, this discourages participation except by those with a strong sense of civic duty.
A further undesirable feature of the current system is its exaggeration of regional and (in the case of New Brunswick) linguistic divisions. In the last election, the PCs won no seats in the north, while the Liberals won none in the southwest. This happened despite substantial minorities (or even majorities) of voters supporting the losing parties in those regions.
A system with proportional representation avoids these problems.
Growing dissatisfaction with first-past-the-post is not unique to New Brunswick. Over the last 20 years or so, it has led to Citizens’ Assemblies being appointed in British Columbia in 2004 and in Ontario in 2007.
A Citizens’ Assembly is a nonpartisan, representative group of citizens brought together to study the evidence for alternative electoral systems. They hear from voting system experts and fellow citizens before deliberating amongst themselves, and then recommending the best way forward. In both British Columbia and Ontario, the Citizens Assemblies recommended forms of proportional representation (although in the end no action was taken to change the system in either province).
The New Brunswick Liberal Party’s last convention adopted a motion that a Liberal government convene a Citizens’ Assembly within a year of forming a government.
When she was a candidate for the leadership, Liberal leader Susan Holt said that she would make electoral reform a priority. She supported creating a Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform, saying that she would move forward quickly with its recommendations.
Unfortunately, this commitment to a Citizens’ Assembly has not appeared in the recently-released Liberal Platform.
Keeping a Citizens’ Assembly and electoral reform on the public agenda will likely require a higher level of public awareness of problems with first-past-the-post. We may well get an unpleasant reminder of those on election night.
Rod Hill is a member of Fair Vote NB.
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