Might as well tell you right away: my head is not made up of our voting system. I spontaneously think of this sentence: two things can be true.
Posted at 12:58 p.m.
True: Our first-past-the-post system sometimes creates absurd and unfair distortions. Like a government elected by 41% of Quebecers which won a super majority of 90 deputies out of 125, 72% of the seats.
Like the Parti Québécois which transforms 14.6% of the votes into three seats… Against 21 seats for 14.4% of the votes in the Liberal Party.
True: a purely proportional ballot, as many have been hoping for since Monday evening, would probably be a one-way ticket for a politically unstable system.
I know there are other forms of proportionals.
But many citizens have been circulating since Monday evening fictional election projections based on the portrait of a National Assembly appointed by a pure proportional system, extrapolating from the percentages collected by the five main parties in the running.
To summarize: the CAQ would be in the majority in this fictional election scenario, and the four other parties would be represented differently in the National Assembly.
And all those who dream of a ballot based on pure proportional representation (X percent of the vote = X seats) say, relaying these graphs: there, there, that would be fair!
Allow me to add a caveat to this enthusiasm.
First, the obvious: Quebecers would not vote the same way in a proportional system. Would the person who voted “strategic” in his constituency vote the same way proportionally? No one knows, everyone can suspect it. Would the PQ who does not vote in Westmount vote? Most likely.
Just for this reason, taking the percentages of the popular vote cast on Monday and projecting them into a fictitious National Assembly where each party has a number of deputies equivalent to its percentage of the vote is badly limited.
Then, this system promotes the multiplication of parties. Take Israel. The only barrier to gaining access to the Knesset is to collect 3.25% of the vote. Then, the number of seats is proportional to the percentage collected. In principle, it’s fantastic. In reality, it is problematic.
The current Israeli government is a coalition government. This is often the case. Do you know how many parties form the coalition?
Eight.
Few Israeli governments complete a four-year term because of instability. Coalitions in such a system are often unstable, of course.
Since 2019, Israelis have been called to the polls four times. And they are called to the polls again, on 1er november. Five elections in three years.
The pure proportional system that has been so popular since Monday also promotes the creation of marginal parties. If QS is too left for you, rest assured there would be even more left parties in a proportional system… Who could hold the balance of power. Ditto for the political space to the right of Éric Duhaime: it would be occupied by parties.
Our first-past-the-post system produces distortions that are so many injustices. Sure. But it also produces a stability whose importance is underestimated. It is this stability that makes it possible to pass laws that would probably never be passed in coalition parliaments.
An example: Law 101. The PQ of 1976 was elected with 41% of the vote, for a comfortable majority of 71 seats out of 110. All the other parties were opposed to Law 101. In a pure proportional system like many wish since Monday, not sure that law 101 would have seen the light of day.
The mixed proportional system hoped for by the New Democracy Movement (MDN) would retain 125 MP seats. But Quebec would increase to 80 constituencies: everyone would vote for “his” MP. The other 45 seats would be called “compensation”, where one would vote for a party from a list of candidates1…
So on Monday, you could have voted for “your” MP AND for another party that impressed you.
National Assembly entry threshold for this model: 10% of the votes, for the compensation component.
Would this mixed proportional system produce distortions? Maybe, but we don’t know how people would vote in a mixed proportional system.
Would this system produce instability? Hard to say: we do not know how many parties would emerge in such a system.
I want to say, sometimes, that I would prefer the current system, but with a fairer division of the 125 constituencies. One person, one vote, point, gender. Because, as a Montrealer, I cringe when I see that the Montreal riding of Gouin (42,067 registered voters) has the same political weight as the North Shore riding of René-Lévesque (32,522 registered voters) and those of the Îles- de-la-Madeleine (11,151).
That too is an injustice: the vote of the citizens of the regions has more weight than that of the townspeople.
But at such times, I pull myself together: the Quebecer in me finds that the purely mathematical formula “one person, one vote” would be unfair to my compatriots who do not live in major centres, even if it were fairer to voters in major centres. The great territory of Quebec is part of its identity and it must live, politically. It is an injustice that I accept.
In short, as I said: two things can be true. The current system may create injustice, but the alternative is not necessarily fairer.
1. https://ici.radio-canada.ca/info/2022/elections-quebec/distorsion-vote-reforme-mode-scrutin-uninominal-majoritaire-proportionnelle/