Making every vote count

DON MACPHERSON
Montreal Gazette Wednesday, November 14, 2001

When was the last time you voted in a Quebec election, not just out of a sense of a citizen's duty, but in the belief your vote would actually make a difference?

That you really voted for somebody, and not just against somebody else who was worse?

That you helped elect a member of the National Assembly who represented your views on more than just the sovereignty-or-federalism question and maybe one other big issue?

Probably about the same time we last had an Assembly that wasn't composed entirely of members of parties that were more or less nationalist and pro-business, shades of the same colour, huddled together in the middle of the political spectrum like sparrows on a wire on a cold morning.

Well, some pretty big names in Quebec society think it's time the voting system were changed to make every vote count and to broaden the range of views represented in the Assembly.

They want to do so by introducing at least an element of proportional representation, or PR. This is a voting system in which seats in, say, the Assembly would be distributed among the parties according to their respective shares of the province-wide vote instead of which candidates got the most votes in the individual ridings. Among other effects, PR makes it easier for small parties to get seats.

It also reduces distortions between a party's proportion of the vote and its share of the seats. In the last Quebec election, the Parti Québécois captured 61 per cent of the seats in the Assembly with only 43 per cent of the popular vote. In fact, it received fewer votes across the province than the Liberals, whose 44 per cent of the over-all vote gave them only 38 per cent of the seats.

And Mario Dumont's Action Démocratique party received more than 475,000 votes but elected only Dumont, while the PQ averaged fewer than 33,000 votes for each of its elected candidates and the Liberals fewer than 36,000.

As Claude Charron, former Parti Québécois cabinet minister, said yesterday: "Quebec is a society that lives in colour. So why should we have an Assembly that's only in black and white?"

Charron, now well-known as a television journalist and a successful producer, is one of 125 people who have signed a petition calling for a broad public consultation on changing the voting system.

Other signatories of the petition, being circulated by a non-partisan "rainbow coalition" called the Mouvement pour une Démocratie Nouvelle, include Claude Ryan, former Liberal leader and cabinet minister, and Jean Allaire, founder of Mario Dumont's Action Démocratique party.

The movement points out that the British "first-past-the-post" system we now use has been abandoned everywhere except Great Britain, the United States and Canada. And in Great Britain, the Blair government has commissioned a study on changing the system. "Will Quebec be the last to turn out the lights on the least bad of the bad voting systems," asked Marc Laviolette, president of the CNTU, another member of the movement.

All four MNAs elected in last month's by-elections, including cabinet minister Richard Legendre, signed the petition during their campaigns. Speaker Jean-Pierre Charbonneau has given the movement tangible encouragement in the form of a $5,000 grant. And all three parties in the Assembly are on record as favouring reform of the voting system.

But the closer a party is to power, the less interest its elected members have in changing a system that is serving them well. Premier Bernard Landry is opposed to reform. And Charron recalled that the PQ lost much of its zeal for reform after it went from being a victim of the system when it was a small third party to a "profiteer" when it took power 25 years ago tomorrow with only 41 per cent of the vote.

He remembered how his elation on election night was dampened when somebody told him the party's share of the vote. " 'Only 40 per cent?' I said. 'You mean 60 per cent of the people voted against us?' "