Tinkering with how we vote

DON MACPHERSON
Montreal Gazette Tuesday, August 20, 2002

Parti Québécois governments have never been shy about using electoral reform for their own partisan purposes. The PQ's first and best-known reform, the political finances law, set the example.

The law allows only Quebec voters, not businesses, unions or lobby groups, to make contributions and requires parties and candidates to disclose the names of their donors. It largely cleaned up provincial politics at a stroke by eliminating secret political slush funds (with the notable exception of those for party leadership campaigns).

For the PQ, it also had the advantage of forcing the other parties to play by rules the PQ had already imposed upon itself and cutting them off from their traditional funding sources. And it didn't give them much time to adapt since it was adopted only a couple of years before the first sovereignty referendum in 1980.

More recently, the current PQ administration responded to illegal voting by federalists in the 1995 referendum by tightening up voter-identification requirements. But it ignored a proposal by the chief electoral officer at the time to take control of the polls on voting day out of the hands of government supporters, after sovereignist scrutineers illegally rejected valid federalist votes.

They Don't Hide It

The PQ no longer bothers trying to conceal its partisan intentions. On the weekend, the minister for reform of democratic institutions, Jean-Pierre Charbonneau, told members of the party's youth wing that he favours the introduction of proportional representation at least partly because it would help the PQ.

(Proportional representation, or PR, is a system of voting in which seats are distributed according to the parties' respective shares of the popular vote.)

Even though the present plurality or "first past the post" system favours the PQ, Charbonneau explained that showing voters the PQ is willing to change the electoral system would make up for its inability to achieve sovereignty.

But the voters will take some convincing that the system needs the radical overhaul proposed by Charbonneau, who wants nothing less than to replace Quebec's present British parliamentary system with an American presidential one.

Poll results published yesterday suggest that of all Canadians, Quebecers least favour introduction of PR and most support keeping the present system.

Those questioned in the survey, conducted by Environics/Focus Canada for the Montreal-based Association for Canadian Studies, were asked to choose the best electoral system for Canada. Only 30 per cent of Quebecers chose PR while 48 per cent preferred the present system. Support for PR was highest in the west, with 39 per cent of Albertans and 43 per cent of British Columbians preferring it.

Charbonneau challenged the results, referring to findings of another survey, this one conducted in Quebec only in May, suggesting that 73 per cent of voters were in favour of introducing at least an element of PR. Also, he might have pointed out that the question in the later survey referred to Canada, not Quebec, and that the poll was conducted in late June and early July, when interest in politics is low. But observers offered the explanation that the wide difference between the results of the two surveys merely shows that Quebecers don't hold firm opinions on the question because they haven't thought about it. Indeed, the consistently high turnout of Quebecers in provincial elections and referendums suggests that they don't think the system is so badly broken it needs fixing.

After Election

Charbonneau said again on the weekend that any reform won't be introduced until after the next general elections, which must be held by the end of next year. But there is one badly needed change the parties can and should make before the next election. That's to address the under-representation of Quebec's linguistic and cultural minorities in the National Assembly. The minorities make up roughly one-sixth of the population, but minority members hold only about one-tenth of the 125 seats in the present Assembly.

Since the parties have already begun choosing their candidate for the election, it's not too soon for them to say what steps they'll take to reduce minority under-representation in the next Assembly.

- Don Macpherson is The Gazette's Quebec-affairs columnist, based in Montreal. His E-mail address is dmacpher@thegazette.southam.ca