History of vote-buying, item 4287

Recently Nathan Erskine-Smith, a federal MP and former Liberal cabinet minister, lost a nomination race to determine who would represent the provincial Liberal party in an upcoming by-election. He appealed the result based on allegations of improper voting.

Tempest in a teapot, sure. Who cares, really? 

The issue prompted veteran Ontario broadcaster and political observer Steve Paikin to write, "The Nomination Meetings are the Problem," an opinion piece that made no accusations against the winning candidate but fulminates over the disgraceful state of party political elections as he has observed them for decades. You might wsnt to read the piece even if you are not a Liberal, not in Ontario, and generally uninterested in minor-league party squabbles. Paikin:

This week on my podcast, I asked former Liberal MP Martha Hall Findlay to characterize party nomination meetings. Her answer: “rife with corruption.”

She’s not being hyperbolic, and this isn’t just a Liberal thing. Political parties are private organizations and, as such, are under no obligation to run these meetings under the auspices of more reputable outfits such as Elections Ontario. But after watching these processes for decades, I confess I’ve pretty much seen it all: police brought in to break up fights; lax oversight; dubious ethics; dead people signed up to vote.

After listing more of the routine improprieties that typify party elections, he wraps up, cautiously ("even going so far as..."?) but with a thoughtful suggestion:

It would be a good thing for politics if Erskine-Smith’s experience brought about a renewed commitment by the parties to clean up their acts, perhaps even going so far as to give responsibility over their nomination meetings to Elections Ontario, which has a lengthy history of competent election oversight.

In general, I take the view that if you enter a vote-buying competition and lose, you are not on solid ground to complain that the other side was buying votes. But Steve Paikin, who cares about these things, makes a strong case for finding a legitimate and independent authority to take over these nomination processes, which in their current form undermine the very heart of our parliamentary system, federal and provincial.

And for sure he should extend his analysis to federal and provincial party leadership races, even more corrupt because even more consequential.   

PS (same day):  Today it was reported that an Ontario Liberal Party internal investigation into the contested nomination found no evidence of improprieties. (Surprise!) The matter is closed.

 

History of voting, of accountability, of the conventions of the parliamentary system

This op-ed about electoral corruption in Alberta, by Rachel Notley, former NDP premier of Alberta, is worth reading (gift link) and very discouraging too. 

...the UCP proposed a plan for Trump-style gerrymandering. They rejected the independent boundaries commission report, silencing the voices of the thousands of Albertans who participated in a fair, transparent and democratic process. Instead, an advisory panel will propose a new electoral map for Alberta, overseen by a committee of politicians dominated by UCP members. They will not be required to consult with the public. It seems likely that the final say on the map will rest with the politicians.

Blatant corruption of the electoral process is troubling enough. What's worse is the sense that this kind of majoritarian autocracy is gaining ground across Canada. 

Today political parties are almost entirely run by professional managers and strategists instead of elected caucuses  and volunteer members. The faith that there are conventions of appropriate behaviour in politics is becoming harder and harder to maintain. Governance really is all about winning and getting one's way, and not only in Alberta. (Compare: Quebec, and examples don't lack in Ontario, either.) Political processes where customary behaviour is expected but not protected are widely endangered.  

It has long been shocking how deeply electoral gerrymandering has been routine and normal for both parties in American politics. Though the Democratic Party has long been prepared to ban the practice, the Republican Party defends it to the last ditch.  So it becomes more extreme  and more accepted --even necessary -- with each electoral cycle. 

(Add to that the constitutional gerrymanders of American Senate representation, the Electoral College, etc. US electoral problems do not start or end with the Trump regime.)

In Canada, the profoundly corrupt wartime election of 1917 persuaded even the winner of that election to support the Dominion Elections Act, which led to the establishment of the independent Chief Electoral Officer for Canada. Partisan influences in election processes, and eventually in constituency boundary-setting, were gradually replaced. 

Details of how electoral processes were gradually corruption-proofed -- and then corrupted again -- in the provinces are less well documented. But some provinces are demonstrating how easily independent commissions are easily bypassed by majoritarian interference of the kind Rachel Notley exposes in the article cited above.

Unlike the United States, we do have courts in Canada that will consider ruling against electoral corruption.  A 1991 Supreme Court of Canada decision sets out "effective representation" rights that courts can enforce.  Quebec has already run up against these, and Alberta now seems likely to. In both those provinces, setbacks in the courts tend to lead to "notwithstanding" legislation and/or separatist agitation.  

Judicial review is something. But look how easy it is to corrupt the process for appointing judges!   

Leadership and electoral systems after Michael Chong's big Wednesday

 

We get mail. Jared Milne writes from Alberta:

I really liked your article on the Reform Act and your praise of Michael Chong. I may have the answer in my archives somewhere, but what are your thoughts on proportional representation? [emphasis added] I know that the likes of Dale Smith hate it and the idea of what he calls the "(garbage)" Reform Act (he literally phrases it like that in his blog), but I've always felt that FPTP makes too many parts of Canada look like politically homogenous blobs when they're really not. That only reinforces stereotypes and corrodes national unity, with the feeling that conservatives can hardly win east of Manitoba and progressive parties can't win on the Prairies.

Brief version: I think proportional representation is the dumbest idea since the Triple-E Senate. And the rest of this is just the longer version.

I'm not really against proportional representation in principle. There are parliamentary countries where it seems to work well enough. But as Chairman Mao (and every other astute political observer in history) has said, you have to study the concrete situation. In the Canadian political context, PR must tend to reinforce the worst things about our politics.

I'm hostile to proportional representation for the same reason I approve of Michael Chong's work, so let me come to PR from that direction. 

Chong is a conservative and a Conservative, and I'm neither. But he is pretty much the only MP (or provincial MPP, MLA, MNP) in Canada who thinks legislatures are important and who actually works to make them work. I think that makes him uniquely significant. Chong left a cabinet position to go back to the backbench, and it did not put an end to his influence in parliament. What other Canadian politician of the last century can you say that about?

As Wednesday's events showed, the Reform Act driven by Chong does encourage accountability of leaders to caucuses, though only to the extent of getting rid of failed leaders efficiently. Chong grasped a long time ago the significance of having party leaders (and hence prime ministers and premiers). chosen by extra-parliamentary processes, as is customary here in Canada.  Bluntly, parliamentary accountability vanishes and MP and legislatures become essentially ceremonial ("dignified" rather than "efficient," in Bagehot's nineteenth-century terms). That's why Canadian MPs, mostly unable to exert any leverage over their own leaders, are generally just claques cheering for what the boss says. When the two, three, four party leaders in a legislature are the only ones there allowed to have opinions, what's the point of a legislature? 

I resist proportional representation because in Canada it too would reinforce the accountability of MPs to leaders and legislatures to governments -- rather than the other way around, as it must be in a real parliament. 

PR assumes the democratic problem in Canada lies with elections and proposes to tinker with the electoral machinery as a fix. Broadly speaking, and greatly to oversimplify (nothing about PR is simple), it does that by ensuring that we no longer vote directly for our representatives.  Instead we would give our vote (a substantial share of it, at least) to one or other of the parties, and they would appoint their representatives to the legislatures. We have an appointed Senate; is an appointed House of Commons really something to advocate for?*

The deep question is one of political culture.  In Canada any lack of support by MPs for their party leadership is routinely categorized by leaders, political scientists, observers, and the public as "mutiny," "revolt," and "coup d'etat." Canadians actually encourage and demand authoritarian party leadership. Canadian MPs absorb that political culture , and as a result they routinely act as if PR has already been enacted; that is, they act as delegates appointed by their parties rather than representatives of those who elected them. At the moment, that is a cultural failure in Canadian political life. PR would entrench it in law, so I would not welcome PR. 

The real crisis is parliamentary, not elective. I don't really give a toss about the disjunctures between popular vote percentages and party seat counts in the legislature. The crucial democratic deficit in Canada is the inability or unwillingness of our elected representatives to hold power to account. That will endure as long as leaders are not accountable to caucuses and governments are not accountable to legislatures. As far as I can see, Michael Chong has been the only active politician in Canada trying to change that. PR would make that situation worse. I admire Chong but not PR; QED. 

You would have to ask Dale Smith about his phrase "the (garbage) Reform Act." But I think he says that because he is a bit of a parliamentary purist. He insists, I think, that MPs should control (and hire and fire) their leaders simply because they are MPs, the legitimately elected representatives of the Canadian people, not because of some recently passed and flawed law. He complains that the Reform Act places limits on the freedom of MPs (e.g., how many it takes to trigger a leadership review). As well, the law does not require MPs to choose new leaders after they fire the failed ones. The Tories are now about to re-enact the same long, tedious, costly, corrupt orgy of vote-buying that made Erin O'Toole leader, probably with similar results.

I'd say Dale Smith is not wrong in these complaints. But I'll take the good until the perfect comes along. The Reform Act has led to a Canadian political party caucus formally replacing a national leader against his will for the first time in much more than a century. (Happened all the time in the nineteenth century, without a Reform Act, but that's another story.) Let that happen a time or two more, and I think the appetite will grow with the eating, as they say, and not only in that one party.  (I see Andrew Coyne thinks so too.)

_____________

*Okay, I simplify PR workings. There are myriad forms of proportional representation, and some do seek to address this issue. But the form called MMP, with a substantial proportion of party representatives in caucus, is far-and-away the likeliest if Canada ever adopts PR. Ultimately PR has to be proportional for the parties, not for us.

  

 

History of the 41st --oops, 44th -- federal election

Can't show you my vote,
but this was my pencil

I've long disliked election "campaigns" that mostly mean leaders jetting about the country seeking media soundbite exposure, and this year I seemed more than ever to avoid the whole thing:  never saw even a clip of the debates, fast-forwarded through the ads, skimmed the newspapers.  

But that does not mean I'm avoiding the election.  

Election results are important. They do a lot to shape what the country will do and not do in the coming years.  I was happy to vote this morning; I never miss the voting part.  And without paying much attention during the campaign, I still know well enough what the salient issues are, where the parties stand , who the leading characters are, how the "strategic" vote plays out . In this as in most other elections, I could have voted the day after the election was called, and it would have been the same vote.

The 35 days and millions of dollars seem mostly about goosing the turnout a little and trying to shift the votes of a fairly small number of undecideds or not-much-interesteds.

But go to vote.  It ain't the campaign that matters, it's the election.

Today in history: federal election produces minority government

King Byng Meighen

October 29, 1925 saw a Canadian election in which the incumbent Liberal government lost the popular vote and won substantially fewer seats than the Conservative opposition -- but remained in power, counting on the support of a third party.

The minority prime minister this time was William Lyon Mackenzie King. Eight months after this election, looming defeat in the House led King in June 1926 to request a dissolution and a new election. Governor General Byng's decision that the opposition Conservative were entitled to form a government and meet the House led to the King-Byng affair, in which King furiously attacked the governor general's refusal to take his prime minister's formal advice for a dissolution and a new election.

When King's government resigned, Conservative leader Arthur Meighen formed a government, was promptly defeated in the House, and was granted dissolution. King's campaign attacks on the governor general were popular on nationalist grounds but have not been, shall we say, much respected on constitutional grounds. In the election of September 1926, King again lost the popular vote but his Liberals secured more seats than the Conservatives and formed a new minority government, one that endured until 1930. Six different parties were represented in the 1926-30 parliament.

You may draw your own parallels to 2019 and possible 2020 events.

The small truth in the big lie

During the 2015 federal election, Stephen Harper declared that if he won the most seats, he got to be prime minister again.  Many journalists and pundits said, no, actually whoever can reliably hold the confidence of a majority of MPs in the House of Commons gets to be prime minister.

Now Andrew Scheer has repeated the same claim.

Both Harper and Scheer know perfectly well what they said is inaccurate. Both have long experience in working the rules of the parliamentary system, and Scheer, as Speaker of the House, actually enforced them for many years.

But they are kind of right in recognizing that Canadians do run our elections as much as possible like presidential contests. Justin and Andrew and Jagmeet and Liz, who's it gonna be? Therefore it makes a kind of crude sense to assume that most seats (seats being the tally markers) ought to win. "Those MPs who fill the seats are all nobodies, right, how come they get to have an opinion on this?"

By playing to folk wisdom about elections, both Scheer and Harper claim a kind of populist cred and set up a possible future folk grievance, while also pre-emptively delegitiming any alliance that might successfully keep them out.  But mostly they are just blowing smoke in our eyes.

Update, October 23:  Jared Milne comments:

It's an interesting example of how new constitutional conventions can be formed in Canada. What Harper did in 2008 reminds me of what William Lyon Mackenzie King did with the King-Byng affair in 1926. Everything Governor General Byng did was constitutional, but King's stirring up public opinion arguably made it illegitimate in the eyes of the public. Even if only the party with the most seats has the right to form government is not a constitutional convention, it could end up becoming one.

I like the evidence here that 1926 remains relevant to 2019, or at least 2008. But I don't love this talk of conventions here. The right of a cabinet to remain in office unless and until Parliament withdraws its confidence is not a convention. It is constitutional bedrock, and ensures there is always a government in place, and that it is always subject to the confidence of the House.

Any MP, regardless of party support, who can gain and hold the support of a House majority is empowered to form a government. The place to determine that is in the House, not by convention or among the pundit community on election night. 

History of Voting and Residence

Chicago friend of this blog Mark Reynolds has a commentary up at the CBC News site, arguing that expat Canadians like himself should NOT have the voting rights recently granted to them.

Citizenship requires investment. Democracy is people together deciding how they, within the boundaries a mari usque ad mare, should govern ourselves. Giving non-residents the vote is roughly akin to giving people the right to tell their former roommates how to set their thermostats. It is the difference between deciding with and deciding for.

His argument for the link between community and voting may also, without his stressing it, be applicable to proportional representation, another process by which votes are divorced from locality.

Update, October 17:  Alan B. McCullough demurs:

Mark Reynolds’ metaphor - Giving non-residents the vote is roughly akin to giving people the right to tell their former roommates how to set their thermostats. - is weak. Roommates are typically renters; Canadians, whether living in Canada or elsewhere, are co-owners. And, like the PM says, a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.

History of Voting

Journalist Dale Smith questions the Supreme Court of Canada's recent decision that it is unconstitutional for Canada to remove the right to vote in federal elections from Canadian citizens who have resided outside Canada for more than five years.

The majority in the case focuses on Charter issues. They find the individual right of a non-resident to participate outweighs the interest of Canada in connecting voting to residence, and see no great problem in potentially large numbers of voters who don't live anywhere in Canada. Smith:

To reiterate – we vote for local representatives. We don’t vote for parties, or party leaders, no matter what we may have in mind when we go into the ballot box – we mark the X for the local candidate, end of story. For an expat, it’s not the connection to Canada that should be at issue – it’s the connection to the riding, because that’s how we allocate our votes. The dissenting judges got that, but the majority and virtually all of the commentary I’ve seen on the matter ignored it, despite it being the first principle of our electoral system.

My occasional reading of SCC decisions in my legal history work has left me with a very great respect for Supreme Court judges and how they manoeuvre through the thickets of constitutional interpretation. But on this one I think Smith, and the dissenters (and the Ontario Court of Appeal, which was overturned here) have a point.

Smith is essentially arguing on the principles of the 1867 constitution, now called the "Constitution Act, 1867," which sets out principles of parliamentary democracy. The judges here, however, are interested almost exclusively in the Charter, which sets out individual rights vis-a-vis governments.  It's as if lawyers and judges and many other Canadians kinda lost interest in much of the original constitution, once they had the shiny new Charter to work on.

Catalonia's PR election

The recent election in the Spanish state of Catalonia returned a pro-independence government. But most voters favoured continued union with Spain. Is this one of those first-past-the-post anomalies much decried by "fair vote" supporters of proportional representation?

Actually, no. Catalonia uses proportional representation, as Fruits and Votes (an electoral-systems site that is generally pro-PR) observes:

"the pro-union parties won more votes, but the way the separate parties’ votes were translated into seats by electoral system resulted in a pro-independence assembly majority. The voting result between the blocs was not even very close, those opposed to independence winning by about 4.6 percentage points. This sort of thing should not happen under PR"

In fact, it is not that infrequent.

Update, December 30:  Tom Morton offers a link to a Washington Post op-ed that expands on this issue.  Oddly, it is paywalled when I go to it, but not when Tom does, so try your luck.

Meanwhile, in Maclean's, true believer David Moscrop recently declared blithely that PR produces "fair " results, but predicts it will fail in Canada again because of "smear campaigns,' "lack of public education," or "arbitrary" rules. Yeah, it could not be anything serious that gives voters doubts.

Book Notes: Dutil and Mackenzie on the 1917 election

Ryerson profs Patrice Dutil and David Mackenzie today launch an important new book, Embattled Nation: Canada's Wartime Election of 1917.

Embattled Nation is a followup to Canada 1911, their earlier work on the general election of 1911. But 1917 is a special case among Canadian elections, undoubtedly the most corrupt general election ever held in this country. The government in power decided the great war for democracy was so important that democracy would have to be subverted in order to guarantee its reelection.

Dutil and Mackenzie document what they call "the great gerrymander," the removal of votes from (hundreds of?) thousands of women, the bestowing of the vote on a much smaller number of women expected to support the government, the calculated use of the soldiers' vote as a sort of slush fund to be applied where the government needed votes, and so on. Quantifying a great deal of previously unexamined data on the election, they establish (among many other things) that the 1917 election had the highest turnout of eligible voters of any election in Canadian history.

In the end, the authors conclude, much of the gerrymander, anti-democratic as it was, was not central to the outcome. "The Union's 'great gerrymander' had worked, but it had not been necessary. A majority of Canadians supported the Borden government and gave it a resounding mandate," they argue, presenting data to show the rigged soldiers' vote did not much effect the outcome, while the impact of the rigged women's vote is incalculable.

(Dutil and Mackenzie may understate the impact of women's disenfranchisement. "By 1917 women had won the vote in all provinces west of Quebec and there was talk of granting all women the vote federally," they write. But until the changes in election law were imposed in 1917, the provincial franchise had determined the federal franchise. Most if not all women west of Quebec did have the right to vote federally. That is, the Borden government did not refuse to enfranchise them; rather, its Wartime Elections Act specifically disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of them. See my exploration of this matter here, though more work is needed.)

That aside, the Borden government won re-election, they conclude, less by rigging the vote than by creating and exploiting war hysteria and ethno-cultural prejudices. Laurier, aged and ill, aided and abetted these divisions, they argue, by failing to create a coherent alternative. It was the profound English-French divide  -- that the Borden government actively encouraged and exploited and Laurier failed to head off -- that was the real calamity of the 1917 election, Dutil and Mackenzie conclude.

This is the story of how the country was almost lost by politicians blinded by ambition, lacking in imagination, and often paralyzed by incompetence and dithering.  Unable to create consensus, they brought their embattled nation to the brink of disaster. 

A sharp and negative assessment of the Borden government runs through this book. Borden often still gets a kind of residual credit for being the nation's war leader through the First World War, but Dutil and Mackenzie make clear how much his government's naval policy, its indifference to Ontario's anti-French educational policies, its neglect of francophone inclusion in the rapidly expanding military establishment, and its instinctive homage to imperialist sentiment made the Canadian situation consistently worse throughout the war.

A question Dutil and Mackenzie don't take up (maybe it's for their book on the next election?) is why the same government that so calculatedly manipulated the electoral process in 1917 moved soon afterwards to create the non-partisan Chief Electoral Officer and to create the institutions that have largely depoliticized both the design of electoral constituencies and the management of voters' lists ever since.  Guilty consciences?

When we see the profound and horrifying extent to which American constituency boundaries and voters' lists continue to be politicized -- and ruthlessly exploited to rig American election results -- the broad depoliticization of voting processes achieved in Canada in the wake of the 1917 federal election seems all the more remarkable. And to my knowledge, largely unconsidered and unexplained. 

History of electoral reform

The Canadian electoral system is far from perfect, but it has been robust, has served the people well most of the time and has preserved its legitimacy. It has created a system that is competitive federally, provincially and intergovernmentally.

At the Literary Review of Canada website, Patrice Dutil sums up the big takeaway of Potter, Weinstock, and Loewen, eds., Should We Change How We Vote.

On the other hand, he and the authors still take referenda to be a good idea.

History of referendums

Rules of grand strategy for democracies:

• Don't get involved in a land war in Asia
• Don't march on Moscow
• Don't hold a referendum on anything

Paul Wells makes the case particularly on electoral reform in Canada, but it applies pretty much everywhere.  

Referendums are polarizing by their nature. They put people on opposite sides of some question they never even thought they cared about. They offer no incentive to compromise or to make reasoned arguments. Each side’s pride gets bound up in the outcome, then its very self-definition. National referendums in Canada are deeply emotional and divisive events.

Then there are the details, technical on their face, more hell when you think about them. Would a referendum be held under the same set of rules and the same federal law, from coast to coast?....

John Ralston Saul enlarges on the thought:

 A referendum is little more than a "rumour of choice." The idea behind the mechanism, ever since its first modern manifestations two centuries ago under Napoleon, has been to replace democracy with the sensation of democracy. That is: to replace the slow, complex, eternally unclear continuity of democracy, and all the awkwardness of citizen participation, with something clear and fast which allows those in power to impose their agenda. Through an apparently simple question with a one-syllable answer, those who ask can get a blank cheque from the citizenry; that is, if they choose their moment well and come up with a winning question." - Reflections of a Siamese Twin

Clearly referendums don't always work for those in power, but even if they lose, the results of the  whole process are equally bad.

Not about the American election

History of voting and parties;  They just had a non-binding plebiscite on electoral reform in Prince Edward Island.  Vote was about split, with a small majority* in favour of the MMP version of proportional representation for the political parties.Here's a clue about the importance of the issue: hardly anybody turned up to vote.

Meanwhile, I got a phone call from an NDP telephone fundraiser, who led with "We're working for electoral reform."  Not pipelines and climate change, or treaty implementation and First Nations reconciliation, or CSIS and C-51 and national security abuses, or  even fair trade and inequality. They seem to see PR as a money pot. We actually had a nicely serious chat about electoral systems, the fundraiser and I, but no minds were changed. And he didn't raise any money with that call.

Mostly gratuitous history, but:  Some genealogist has reported that if you go to Hillary Clinton's mother, and back to her mother, and to her mother, and so on, as far back as you can get in North America, you don't find a Mayflower pilgrim, you find a good Catholic francophone fille du roi, Jeanne Ducorps. (Jeanne Ducorps, arrived 1666, married Martin Massé 1670 at Sorel, four surviving children, died 1727 at Montreal).

Meanwhile Ann Coulter is reporting that if only Americans with four grandparents born in the USA could vote, Donald Trump would win every state.  So there's that.

You know who else was interested in tracing people's bloodlines to their grand-parents? https://t.co/kVa6vQ5s69

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) November 8, 2016

* [Update, Nov 24, 2016:  Actually they used a ranked ballot system.  On a straight plurality count, First Past the Post had the most support. PR moved up on the transfer of second, and third choices.]

Year without books?  Is this a dull year in Canadian historical publishing? I skim the publishing lists, but I'm not finding much I'm on fire to post about.  (It's probably me.  If there's a book to change my mind, let me know.)

The Giller Prize last night reminded me I did not report on last week's Writers' Trust Awards (Nagging question: did I not get my invitation, or did I delete and forget about it? Unsettling either way). There was not a lot of historical work in the running, but west coast writer Deborah Campbell won the main nonfiction prize for A Disappearance in Damascus which has indeed had good notices for its meditations on the fraught relation on western reporters and the local people they rely on in covering Middle Eastern politica and war:

“In a seamless blend of storytelling and reportage, Deborah Campbell’s A Disappearance in Damascus draws us into the struggles of Iraqi refugees settled in Syria after the fall of Baghdad. The principal character, an Iraqi ‘fixer’ who is also a grieving mother and a nurturing humanitarian, is taken by secret police. Campbell’s account of the search to find her, written with compelling prose, nuanced context, and intimate narration, illuminates the dangers of life and work in a conflict zone through a riveting tale of courage, loss, love, and friendship.”—2016 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction jury

History of Voting

It's striking how debate on the merits and failings of proportional representation seems to be increasing, even though Canada probably will not have a referendum on the electoral system, and even though changing the voting system begins to seems like a promise the Trudeau government will be too busy elsewhere to keep.

Meanwhile Dale Smith goes to town demolishing (erroneous link has been corrected -- thx WH) the Broadbent Institute's case for PR. A lot of what he says hits the usual platitudes hard:

The highlights consist of “OMG First-Past-the-Post is old!” and a bunch of charts that show how terrible “false majorities” are, except that there is no such thing as a “false majority” ...It talks about “wasted votes” as if they were a Thing as opposed to an expression by sore losers for whom votes only count if the person they voted for wins. It makes a bunch of bullshit platitudes about how PR will magically increase voter turnout (not true) and ignores that declining voter turnout is a widespread problem across all democracies regardless of electoral system.

But Smith goes out on a limb, attacking the Broadbent Institute's claim that "FPTP limits accountability in its own way. Under FPTP in Canada, individual MPs are beholden to their party.... And those in government rarely stray from the party line."

A question: about the centenary of woman's suffrage

Later this week marks the hundredth anniversary of the Manitoba legislature becoming the first in Canada to recognize women's right to vote as of 28 January 1916.  (See Allan Levine's story of it here.) By the end of 1919, all the  provinces west of Quebec had followed Manitoba's lead.  But -- genuine question here, dear readers -- did that give women in those provinces the vote in federal elections?

Here's the complication. In 1898 the federal Parliament had passed legislation giving control of federal electoral lists to the provinces, so that provincial franchise rules automatically determined who voted in federal as well as in provincial elections. It was a federalism thing. In 1867 control of electoral lists had been left with the pre-existing provinces for the time being. When in 1885 Macdonald's federal government exercised the power to move control of the federal franchise to the federal government, the opposition Liberals accused them of altering the confederation agreement and centralizing what should be decentralized. In 1898 Laurier, who had been one of the critics in 1885, passed legislation to return control of the federal franchise to the provinces.

In 1917 and in 1918 the federal government began to take charge again of the federal franchise rules. A series of bills legislated new federal controls on the federal franchise and the keeping of electoral lists, finally providing in 1918 that women (in all provinces) could vote federally whether or not they could vote provincially.

I take this to mean that that when women's right to vote in Manitoba elections was confirmed by the Manitoba legislature in January 1916, their right to vote in federal elections automatically came with it. Amiright about this?

All my authorities at hand -- Elections Canada's History of the Vote in Canada, Canadian Women: A History (1988 ed, mea culpa), Canadian Encyclopedia online, Wikipedia -- fudge and fuzzify on this. They are clear enough that from 1898 control of the federal franchise lay with the provinces, and that did not begin to change until 1917.  But as I read them, all report that women got the right to vote in federal elections only with the federal government acts of 1917, the first beneficiaries being some some female military personnel,and then female relatives of soldiers. They seem to assume that the provincially-mandated enfranchising of women of 1916 and 1917 had applied to provincial elections but not to federal ones. Even Manitoba's official commemoration of this event declares that it applied to "the right to vote in provincial elections."

Now, there was no federal election between January 1916 and September 1917.  If Manitoba women had the right to vote in federal election in that period, by virtue of the Manitoba franchise rules applying to federal elections automatically, they would still not have been able to exercise their right -- but only because there was no federal election happening. That is, Manitoba women got the right to vote in federal elections in January 1916, but never got the chance to exercise the right before the feds took it away in September 1917 (before beginning to give it back again). N'est-ce pas?

I'm genuinely puzzled here. It's a smallish point, a technicality perhaps, and complicated.  But if our standard authorities have got the technical details wrong or at least fuzzy, is is not worth starting to put it right?

Can anyone confirm or correct me here? Put it this way: if there was a federal by-election somewhere in Manitoba in mid 1916, could Manitoba women have voted in it? The books seem to tell us they could not.  Seems to me they could have.  Emails go here.

Update:  Allan Levine offers a list of federal by-elections but none quite fits the test. Jonathan Scotland has some evidence:

I don't have a 100% confirmation for you, but it strikes me that you're right -- especially because one of the justifications of the 1918 Act to confer the Electoral Franchise upon Women was to correct the fact that (to quote the online version of A History of the Vote in Canada) the War-time Elections Act "effectively withdrew the vote from women who would otherwise have had it by virtue of provincial law but did not have a relative in the armed forces," something Laurier pointed out during the HoC debates in September 1917. Incidentally, Peter McDermott points out Laurier's position in his chapter "Enemy Aliens in the First World War" in Wright, Tucker, and Binnie, eds., Security, Dissent, and the Limits of Toleration in War and Peace, 1914-1939, p. 85.

Now that seems persuasive.

Laurier in the House of Commons, 6 September 1917, points out the Wartime Elections Act (then under debate) would disenfranchise women of Ontario and the western provinces who already had the franchise -- unless they happened to have relatives in the forces.  Following McDermott's footnote, we get at p.5421:

Mr Laurier:  Am I right in this: that while the women of Ontario and the western provinces have today, under the laws of those provinces, the right to vote, they will, with the exception of those who are qualified as the relatives of men who have enlisted, not have the right to vote in this election?

Mr. Meighen: That is correct.

Clearly they are talking about the federal vote in the forthcoming federal election.  The quotation above from the History of the Vote would be pretty persuasive too, except the rest of that book's coverage of the changes made by provincial legislatures consistently refers to the broadening of the provincial franchise only.

I think next Thursday marks the anniversary of the day women in Manitoba had their right to vote provincially and federally established -- the first in Canada.

  

History of October nineteenth

That was fast. UBC Press has produced Canadian Election Analysis,  a free-download e-book collection on the October 19 federal election.

I was struck by a line or two in Jamie Gillies's piece, "The Presidentialization of Executive Leadership in Canada (at p. 39, bolding added by me):

Power and authority over government decision-making has shifted from cabinet and Parliament to the prime minister and a group of unelected officials that work directly for the Canadian executive in a very concentrated and centralizing way. In this regard, presidentializing leadership is compounded by the weakness of Canadian party mechanisms that force executives to bend to Parliamentary caucus will. This makes removal of party leaders by cabinet and elected members more difficult than other Westminster democracies.

He says it began in the Pierre Trudeau era, which is poli-sci speak for "in the mists of antiquity" or "since time immemorial." It began long before Trudeau pere.  But a decade ago, a sentence like Gillies's last one was simply unthinkable among political commentators.  Actually, they said so all the time: leadership accountability to caucus is "unthinkable in Canada," I was told again and again. No one favours doing anything about it yet, but the idea begins to enter the discourse.

History of electoral systems

When the Liberals got 54 percent of the seats on 39.5% of the vote last week, Fruits and Votes, my favourite analyst of electoral systems, called it "a fairly objective case for the adoption of proportional representation."

Today the same site reports that after yesterday's election in Poland, the leading party is likely to get 53% of the seats... on 39% of the vote., Poland does use proportional representation.

Fair voting: actually, it's complicated.

History of proportional representation: why it always loses UPDATED

Marie Bountrogianni... says reform would stand a better chance of gaining popular approval today. Bountrogianni, now dean of continuing education at Toronto's Ryerson University, says many more Canadians tend to go online for information now, which would make it easier to explain a new way of voting and to build support.... "So I think there would have to be an education process of some sort, and then a vote." (John Geddes, "Fixing the Vote," Maclean's, July 6/13 issue, p.21, not currently online, it seems)

I am regularly struck by how consistently supporters of proportional representation think and talk like this.  PR is not an issue to be debated, it's just something you have to educate the peons about. I don't doubt there are arguments for proportional representation, but its advocates generally lose the debate because they fail to hear or recognize that there are arguments against and issues to consider.

The most salient, I think, is that proportional representation is not proportional for us, it's proportional for the political parties.  Essentially we would give our votes to one or other of the parties, and they would appoint their representatives to the legislatures. In a political culture where the autocratic rule of parties over legislators is already becoming a crisis, the blindness of PR advocates to this issue is going to kill them again, while the Bountrogiannis are setting up their re-education camps ("You disagree with giving even more power to the parties? But let me explain it again, a bit louder.")

Update, June 29:  Writing about PR seems like clickbait: I rarely do, but it always attracts commentators.

The responses are considerably longer than my original post, so I've put them below the jump.

HIstory of Voting

I'm going to be travelling next Thursday, so I voted in the Ontario provincial election advance poll yesterday.  It's an uninspiring experience, advance voting: a quiet returning office in a rundown building that has been vacant a while, where I checked in with some friendly but bored election officials, and we did the business as if I were renewing my health card, not another voter in sight. At least when you vote on the day, there is that small uplift of joining all your fellow citizens streaming in to play their part, greeting the neighbours who have also made time to walk over to the local school or church hall, considering the possibility of some excitement in the evening coverage, etc etc.

Chantal Hébert argues there's another problem with advance voting, particularly as the number of people voting in advance continues to grow. We miss the last week of the campaign, which is usually when the voting population begins to take the election semi-seriously and when large shifts in voter choice are often taking place.  Advance voters, she argues, remove themselves from that discussion, particularly in an election like this one, which seems ripe for strategic voting that responds to polling indications.

At least I voted, sour thoughts and all.  More than a majority of the voters will do, possibly.

History of Voting

The Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder, recently proposed that almost 6 million Americans who have served out their sentences for a criminal conviction but remain stripped of their right to vote should be re-enfranchised. The United States is in a small minority of democratic countries in which ex-convicts can remain permanently stripped of their right to vote.

It is striking how hesitant support for this measure is, even among progressive commentators. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones declares that the right to vote is as important as free speech and the rule of law -- but he'd negotiate a cautious, maybe after five years, restoration of the vote to ex-cons. He's aware that disenfranchising ex-cons is most an anti-black, anti-poor, anti-Democrat voter suppression tactic, but he also senses behind the rules a deep visceral tough-on-crime sentiment that is politically popular, so he temporizes.

In Canada, voting is a right of citizenship. It is not just ex-cons who vote, incarcerated prisoners vote while they are in prison. They have a sentence and they have to serve it, but that doesn't make them non-citizens.