Swompdonkey

The Electoral Reform Parliament?

On New Year's Eve, I was deep into a discussion on the election campaign with some of my fiance's family, speculating on all sorts of scenarios the morning after the polls close, when someone raised a fairly straightforward question:

In the event of a Conservative minority, what issue could the NDP and the Conservatives possibly find common ground on?

My answer: Fixing our democracy and changing the way we vote

As
this article reveals, both the Knee-dippers and the Tories lament the fact that our "First-past-the-post" system tends to exagerate and distort voting patterns, leading to the impression that "Alberta is Conservative" and "Ontario is Liberal", when in fact no region or province in the country votes as a homogenous bloc, and vote percentages are nearly always much narrower than final seat tallies would indicate. That's how some parties have won solid electoral majorities in the past in spite of not necessarily garnering a large plurality of the popular vote --Jean Chretien's back-to-back-to-back majorities comes to mind.

Both parties favour electoral reform in some form or another, mostly in order to fix a system that seems designed to produce Liberal Government after Liberal Government, often at the expense of the NDP and smaller parties. A proportional representation system, or some combination of A and B, might be a solution to this problem. One which Conservatives and NDPers could work on together in spite of the ideological chasm that divides them. I can think of a few more. Senate reform, for example.

The "strategic voting" phenom of 2004 (soft NDP supporters who switched to the Liberals in the polling booth because a Conservative victory "scares" them) must be a spectre that loom large in the mind of Jack Layton. Although pundits indicate that Layton favours holding the balance of power in a Liberal Minority, his "Results for Canadians" campaign theme could get flushed down the crapper in 2006, if the Liberals steal his votes and a puny, impotent NDP caucus results.

It is clear that the NDP has choices to make. Generally, sending more NDPers to the house means sending less Liberals, because that is where the electorate on the centre-left intersects. The story is a bit different in BC, where you have three-way horse races, and in Quebec, where the NDP and Conservatives barely register, but in Ontario, the 900lb gorilla in the Canadian electorate, NDP fortunes will live or die depending on how many 905ers get spooked back to the Grits.

Knowing this in his heart, can Layton make common cause with the Tories and convince people to not fear a non-Liberal Government in the second half of the campaign in order to steal some Liberal seats? I'm not sure. I imagine he recoils in disgust at having to do so. But both the NDP and the Tories have stated their desire to see the Liberals punished --what better way to do so than being bounced from Government? --and it is useful to look at areas of possible collaboration in a house with a decimated grit caucus, a strong NDP, and a fragile Conservative minority looking to get things done.