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Spotlight on election 2015's ugly underside
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Friday
October 23, 2015
Winnipeg
by: Edward Hiebert
October 23, 2015
Winnipeg
by: Edward Hiebert
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Taking an independent review of the hard evidence publicly available concerning the 2015 election, an ugly underside emerges that shows up the clay feet to Trudeau's come from behind so-called groundswell of majority public support! However I do not advance this in a state of despair, knowing we the citizens of Canada, together have in our hand the peaceful and democratic wherewithal to avoid these antidemocratic outcomes in the very next election, including by-elections through voluntary but informed collective action!
Yes there is room to swoon over the fact that nearly 70% of eligible Canadians voted! Or that the Trudeau Liberals were awarded 184 seats, the Harper Cons 99, NDP 44, the Bloc 10 and Green one. On this much we can all agree!
As a little known hard truth however, merely one in four (26.25%) Canadians who voted, placed their x besides one of the 184 newly declared so-called Trudeau Liberal majority government members of parliament! An even less known fact, had as few as 9695* of the remaining 30% of Canadians who did not vote showed up strategically at 15 districts, Trudeau's majority of seats would have melted into a Trudeau minority!
Fear not, it gets worse before it gets better! Had simply another 1.5% of eligible Canadians been persuaded by Harper's dog-whistle wedge politics and showed up in 71 districts**, all Canadians who wanted and voted for change would have been subjected to and taken hostage by another smiling Harper Con "majority" government!
How can such a tiny fraction of voters shift the outcomes from one extreme to another extreme? Such national results have their beginnings at the local district elections whenever a majority of say 5 out of 9 voters do not like candidate C but throughout Canada when these 5 voters divide or split their vote between two similar candidates so that A gets 2 votes, B three and C receives the other 4 votes, then throughout Canada C is declared elected!!!
Thus in 2015, in voting district 24059 named Quebec, Liberal Jean-Yves Duclos was declared elected even though more than 72.5% of those who voted, never voted for him! From another perspective this means less than one in five of all eligible voters even bothered to go out and vote for Duclos!
Throughout Canada, Duclos in 2015 is but one of 206 out of 338 MPs where the 50%+1 or greater majority who voted never voted for the person now called their MP! Furthermore, 25 of these 206 including Duclos were declared elected when fully two out of three voters never voted for the person now called their representative in Ottawa!!! At the other end of the voting spectrum, a mere 17 of all 338 MPs, up from zero in 2011, were supported by at least 50% or more of the eligible voters!
These results undermine democracy and support ever more Canadians justifiably demanding electoral reform. However these requests are being side-tracked and before turning to a fix that works I will point out now already, the proposed proportional systems will not fix the above unfairness, only hide them more deeply behind cosmetic changes.
Concerning electoral reform, back when Paul Martin was the Liberal leader he would only acknowledge that a democratic deficit existed without ever pin-pointing the vote-split problem as just defined above. During the just completed election cycle May, Mulcair and Trudeau went so far as promising this would be Canada's last "first-past-the-post" (FPTP) election.
The truthfulness of those statements needs to be examined. First and foremost, the current single-mark voting system through its extreme vulnerability to vote-splitting as just defined regarding the above 5 and 9 voter example unjustifiably rewards party leaders with abusive top-down powers whereby all three of them are quite willing to practise Harper-lite divisive politics, even if not as blatant as Harper. Its rather misleading of May, Mulcair and Trudeau to not call a spade a spade, but whitewash the present system as "first-past-the-post". FPTP implies an absolute measure when its only a relative one where minority supported candidates are elevated to the status of being declared elected.
In as much as FPTP is a misleading term, May, Mulcair and Trudeau's proposed changes from FPTP to a "Proportional Representation" system, PR for short, is also highly misleading. In broad strokes, there are two forms of PR. Israel's PR system takes the voting results and lets each party leader know how many from their list they can appoint to parliament. This system of political partisan patronage appointments which rewards extremism would never fly in Canada.
The second method is similar to the much touted PR models of Germany and New Zealand. Mixed PR (MPR) as the name implies is a blend or hybrid of two systems. Namely some candidates would be appointed to Canada's House of Commons similar to the Israeli model of patronage appointments as part of the party fix to the current system. Namely, the others would continue to be elected by our current "FPTP" system. However, not to inflate the size of parliament with the extra party fix appointed candidates, all of Canada's electoral districts would have to be enlarged in order to have fewer MPs elected this way. Can you just imagine the gerrymandering windfall this change alone would provide to our party leaders without even fixing the so-called FPTP system but renaming it PR after adding the lip-stick of PR patronage appointments?
To Trudeau's credit, when he was running for the job of party leader he like I for years urged the adoption of a ranked vote123 ballot system while offering the justified critique that appointments to parliament were not appropriate! Incidentally the vote123 ballot is the method or its equivalent by which all our three federal party leaders including Harper were elected party leader. If its good enough for them, why not for our civi elections?
The vote123 ballot, as in the political party leadership elections, empowers the majority to do away with vote-splitting and elect the one candidate preferred by a majority. Simply put the vote123 ballot is the equivalent or even better than having run-off elections until one person has the support of more than half of those voting
A change to a ranked vote123 ballot not only fixes the above anti-democratic shortcomings listed it also is but a tiny change to the present system. Certainly a miniscule change compared to moving to PR.
This is not to say further changes would be warranted, however as a first next step the vote123 ballot system is not only a small step change providing a large democratic step forward, it also reduces our party partisans from being able to paint the recent musical chair elections as if real and substantive change.
In closing, I note now already, should Trudeau renege on his leadership campaign promise and only deliver PR, as a community in any electoral district we have the power to conduct our own voluntary pre-election vote123 straw-vote poll and with this information empower ourselves on voting day to avoid vote-splitting and elect the one person preferred by a solid majority. Thereby ending our misery where the majority who votes may still be without voice as to who is declared our MP.
Yes there is room to swoon over the fact that nearly 70% of eligible Canadians voted! Or that the Trudeau Liberals were awarded 184 seats, the Harper Cons 99, NDP 44, the Bloc 10 and Green one. On this much we can all agree!
As a little known hard truth however, merely one in four (26.25%) Canadians who voted, placed their x besides one of the 184 newly declared so-called Trudeau Liberal majority government members of parliament! An even less known fact, had as few as 9695* of the remaining 30% of Canadians who did not vote showed up strategically at 15 districts, Trudeau's majority of seats would have melted into a Trudeau minority!
Fear not, it gets worse before it gets better! Had simply another 1.5% of eligible Canadians been persuaded by Harper's dog-whistle wedge politics and showed up in 71 districts**, all Canadians who wanted and voted for change would have been subjected to and taken hostage by another smiling Harper Con "majority" government!
How can such a tiny fraction of voters shift the outcomes from one extreme to another extreme? Such national results have their beginnings at the local district elections whenever a majority of say 5 out of 9 voters do not like candidate C but throughout Canada when these 5 voters divide or split their vote between two similar candidates so that A gets 2 votes, B three and C receives the other 4 votes, then throughout Canada C is declared elected!!!
Thus in 2015, in voting district 24059 named Quebec, Liberal Jean-Yves Duclos was declared elected even though more than 72.5% of those who voted, never voted for him! From another perspective this means less than one in five of all eligible voters even bothered to go out and vote for Duclos!
Throughout Canada, Duclos in 2015 is but one of 206 out of 338 MPs where the 50%+1 or greater majority who voted never voted for the person now called their MP! Furthermore, 25 of these 206 including Duclos were declared elected when fully two out of three voters never voted for the person now called their representative in Ottawa!!! At the other end of the voting spectrum, a mere 17 of all 338 MPs, up from zero in 2011, were supported by at least 50% or more of the eligible voters!
These results undermine democracy and support ever more Canadians justifiably demanding electoral reform. However these requests are being side-tracked and before turning to a fix that works I will point out now already, the proposed proportional systems will not fix the above unfairness, only hide them more deeply behind cosmetic changes.
Concerning electoral reform, back when Paul Martin was the Liberal leader he would only acknowledge that a democratic deficit existed without ever pin-pointing the vote-split problem as just defined above. During the just completed election cycle May, Mulcair and Trudeau went so far as promising this would be Canada's last "first-past-the-post" (FPTP) election.
The truthfulness of those statements needs to be examined. First and foremost, the current single-mark voting system through its extreme vulnerability to vote-splitting as just defined regarding the above 5 and 9 voter example unjustifiably rewards party leaders with abusive top-down powers whereby all three of them are quite willing to practise Harper-lite divisive politics, even if not as blatant as Harper. Its rather misleading of May, Mulcair and Trudeau to not call a spade a spade, but whitewash the present system as "first-past-the-post". FPTP implies an absolute measure when its only a relative one where minority supported candidates are elevated to the status of being declared elected.
In as much as FPTP is a misleading term, May, Mulcair and Trudeau's proposed changes from FPTP to a "Proportional Representation" system, PR for short, is also highly misleading. In broad strokes, there are two forms of PR. Israel's PR system takes the voting results and lets each party leader know how many from their list they can appoint to parliament. This system of political partisan patronage appointments which rewards extremism would never fly in Canada.
The second method is similar to the much touted PR models of Germany and New Zealand. Mixed PR (MPR) as the name implies is a blend or hybrid of two systems. Namely some candidates would be appointed to Canada's House of Commons similar to the Israeli model of patronage appointments as part of the party fix to the current system. Namely, the others would continue to be elected by our current "FPTP" system. However, not to inflate the size of parliament with the extra party fix appointed candidates, all of Canada's electoral districts would have to be enlarged in order to have fewer MPs elected this way. Can you just imagine the gerrymandering windfall this change alone would provide to our party leaders without even fixing the so-called FPTP system but renaming it PR after adding the lip-stick of PR patronage appointments?
To Trudeau's credit, when he was running for the job of party leader he like I for years urged the adoption of a ranked vote123 ballot system while offering the justified critique that appointments to parliament were not appropriate! Incidentally the vote123 ballot is the method or its equivalent by which all our three federal party leaders including Harper were elected party leader. If its good enough for them, why not for our civi elections?
The vote123 ballot, as in the political party leadership elections, empowers the majority to do away with vote-splitting and elect the one candidate preferred by a majority. Simply put the vote123 ballot is the equivalent or even better than having run-off elections until one person has the support of more than half of those voting
A change to a ranked vote123 ballot not only fixes the above anti-democratic shortcomings listed it also is but a tiny change to the present system. Certainly a miniscule change compared to moving to PR.
This is not to say further changes would be warranted, however as a first next step the vote123 ballot system is not only a small step change providing a large democratic step forward, it also reduces our party partisans from being able to paint the recent musical chair elections as if real and substantive change.
In closing, I note now already, should Trudeau renege on his leadership campaign promise and only deliver PR, as a community in any electoral district we have the power to conduct our own voluntary pre-election vote123 straw-vote poll and with this information empower ourselves on voting day to avoid vote-splitting and elect the one person preferred by a solid majority. Thereby ending our misery where the majority who votes may still be without voice as to who is declared our MP.
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Eduard Hiebert was a registered 2015 Independent candidate in Manitoba's Kildonan St. Paul voting district where he unlike all the other candidates, all party candidates, refused to help empower the voters to elect the one candiate supported by a majortiy but rather sought to help their leaders benefit from the gaming practice where one of them Nevada Casino style would slip up the middle. Please note in KSP MaryAnn Mihychuk with 42.6% joins the group of 206 where the majority never voted for her.
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