«« Réforme électorale et parlementaire

Keep Vote Reform Simple

Éditorial - After months of stage-managing, Quebec's electoral-reform crusader did finally get a little of what he wanted out of a hand-picked crew of "representative" Quebecers last weekend. As a result, we're now in greater danger than before of being saddled with some form of proportional representation.

Pulling the strings at this estates-general on the reform of democratic institutions was Jean-Pierre Charbonneau, a cabinet minister whose only job seems to be agitating for change. He and estates-general director Claude Béland, a retired businessman, have now retreated to their offices to assess the results of last week's exercise, before making recommendations.

There were supposed to be 1,000 "delegates" to the event, most of them drawn from those who had chosen to attend previous regional meetings. We may presume, then, that these were largely people with pet schemes to promote or partisan agendas to push. Of these, only about 775 actually stayed around to vote.

And even they surprised Charbonneau by giving the back of their hand, by a slim majority, to his cherished scheme to set up a presidential system in Quebec. Other proposals met varying fates with the group - participants liked the idea of fixed terms in office, although nobody suggested what might happen in a minority Assembly if a government lost a confidence vote. They liked measures to get more women into politics. And they liked some kind of proportional representation.

We don't. True, there is something fundamentally unfair about a system in which the Liberal Party can get more votes than any other but far fewer seats in the National Assembly than the Parti Québecois - which is exactly what happened in our last election. But consider this: In a proportional-representation system, there might be no Action démocratique du Québec today. Such systems make it very hard for an independent to get elected, and that's how Mario Dumont started.

We're wary, in general, of talk about "reforming" our electoral system, federal or provincial. When it comes to campaign spending, or advertising, or qualifying for official party status, or any of the system's other major aspects, the net effect of too many reform proposals is to strengthen the stranglehold on power of existing major parties. As with pay raises for MNAs or MPs, those who can enact such proposals are the ones who stand to benefit; it's the clearest conflict-of-interest scenario you can imagine. Proportional representation is just the opposite: It doesn't serve the interests of the big parties but in fact is a hothouse for the forced growth of a proliferation of special-interest parties. This can lead to agonizing minority-government coalitions and paralysis.

We have a better idea: Premier Bernard Landry and Charbonneau and anyone else who really wants to reform elections should put aside their various schemes and pay attention to two easily fixed problems:

First: vote-counting should not be in the hands of party hacks. Charbonneau, for all his preaching about democracy, has shown little concern about the persistence of the practices that led to the scandalous disallowance of thousands of No votes in the 1995 referendum.

Second, and going to the very core of democratic legitimacy: Ridings need to have equal populations. The huge variations allowed under current law mean rural people speak more loudly in the National Assembly than urban voters. Fixing this absurd and dishonest denial of democracy would go a long way toward making sure that the party that wins the popular vote wins the election.

Quebec's regions vary widely. Each has distinct interests and unique problems. Each needs its own voices in the National Assembly. That's why we need individual ridings to elect regional champions. But the current over-weighting of rural votes works systematically against the cities, which are the mainsprings of Quebec's economy and society.

All of Charbonneau's brave talk about improving democracy is just fraudulent carnival patter until the day he provides us with uniform riding populations. One person, one vote out-ranks all his cunning proposals. One person, one vote is too important to be obscured, ignored or denied.