A11

Elsie Hambrook
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When Doris Anderson, former and famed editor of Chatelaine and lifelong activist, came to Saint John on a stormy winter night in 2003, drawing hundreds of women to hear her speak on electoral reform, she confided something that, years later, still makes some of us think.

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Capt. Chris Reeves, seated at left, assists a soldier at a remote forward operating base in Afghanistan cast an advance ballot on Oct. 4. Many Canadians make the effort to vote – so why don’t we have an electoral system in which every vote counts?

She was more than 80 years old, feisty as ever, and she said if she had it to do over, she would spend all her energies on electoral reform. She had had many causes and careers, several to do with advancing Canadian women's equality, and she had become convinced that without an electoral system that better reflected the actual votes, women would not gain political equality.

With another election looming - and especially in this election - we have heard lots of talk of strategic voting. New websites and software have been developed to help people work out how to vote to get or avoid certain results - and even to swap votes to that end. We hear people complaining that they cannot vote with their heart - they have a favourite local candidate but they feel they must instead use their vote to produce a certain result nationally.

As one such site says, Plan A is voting for your favourite candidate or party but only if, as the campaign ends, it looks like they can win your riding. Plan B is, vote strategically.

Most of the world does not have to do such calculations before voting.

Most of the world's established democracies don't have a system like ours. They have voting systems based on proportional representation. There are many forms of such proportional representation systems and many Canadians think that "PR" is what is needed to address some of the problems that Canada tolerates in our current way of electing a government. What is certain is that something is needed.

Those problems include remarkably low numbers of elected women and remarkably little attention to women's issues. But improvements in those areas would be side effects of a proportional representation system. The main reasons for reform lie elsewhere.

Governments, even "majority governments," have been elected in Canada with less than 40 per cent of the popular vote. In fact, in the last 100 years, Canada has had only four legitimate "majority" governments - if majority is defined as being elected by a majority of voters.

Voter turnout is dropping. Some believe that this is related to our "winner takes all" system, where only the votes cast for the winning candidate are considered in the makeup of the House. Some psychologists might tell us that it is a sign of intelligence when people finally stop doing something that brings them no result.

As one Canadian wrote recently, "I live in Calgary, land of the Yellow Dog Tory - people who would vote for a yellow dog as long as it calls itself Conservative... I'm like the guy in Montreal's Westmount who isn't fond of Liberals. We'll both toddle off to the election hall come October and achieve exactly nothing."

He might want to visit a new website, orphanvoters.ca, for "democratically neglected, abused and abandoned citizens who find the doors of Parliament slammed in their faces because their votes elected no one."

"Orphan Voters have all but disappeared in most major democracies" which eliminated the cause - the winner-take-all voting system - last century.

In the 2006 federal election, the Green Party elected no candidate even though they had about 665,000 votes - more than the votes cast in each of six provinces, including New Brunswick.

Four times in Canadian history, including the 1979 government of Joe Clark, a party finishing second in the popular vote formed the government, because our skewed system gave them more seats for fewer votes than the opposition party.

In 1984, Brian Mulroney received 50 per cent of the votes, but won 75 per cent of the seats.

In the 2000 federal election, the Alliance received twice as many votes as the Liberals in the west, but gained five times as many seats. One MP in the 2000 election actually won a seat in Parliament with less than 33 per cent of the vote.

Such distortion in the results is why major democracies scrapped our winner-take-all type of voting system in the last decades.

About half of Canadians' votes do not serve to elect anyone. Fair Vote Canada, a group that Doris Anderson presided over until shortly before she died, showed that in the six federal elections between 1980 and 2000, more than 6.2 million Canadians voted but elected no one.

With out current system, what we say is not what we get. The percentage of seats that a political party gets after an election often has an eccentric relation to the percentage of votes received by that party.

Of course, the majority should rule. But everyone's vote should count for something and everyone should be represented.

Fair Vote Canada says, "The first step is to decide we need to change the voting system and then we can decide what's best for us."

The other benefit is that countries with proportional representation electoral systems elect a greater number of women than the few remaining countries that use our system. Most of the countries with 30 per cent or more women in their national parliaments use PR-based systems. The proportion of women in the national parliaments of Sweden, the Netherlands and Belgium stands at 47 per cent, 39 per cent and 35 per cent respectively. These countries also had the advantage of solid gender equality traditions and the existence of progressive political parties. However, in PR systems, women and minority candidates are sought out because parties are under public pressure to present balanced lists.

Something to remember when we look at the voter turnout, popular vote by party and whether our vote made a difference.

Elsie Hambrook of Quispamsis is Chairperson of the New Brunswick Advisory Council on the Status of Women.