THE VAGARIES of the first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system, whose fate in the UK is being decided by referendum today, have once again turned a Canadian election into an electoral carnage. This time the beneficiaries are outgoing Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper and the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP).
Harper’s minority Tory government has emerged with a clear majority (40 per cent vote, and 54 per cent of seats), while the NDP has trounced the old official opposition Liberals, soaring from 37 to 102 seats in the 308-seat Commons.
Harper will feel the Liberals’ pain – in 1993 support for his party’s predecessor Progressive Conservative Party collapsed and its parliamentary representation dropped from an absolute majority to only two seats.
The NDP’s success came courtesy of an outstanding result in Quebec where it routed the nationalist Bloc Québécois, taking 58 of the 75 seats. In 2008 it took just one. Benefiting from a four-way party split, the party was rewarded by FPTP with a seat-share almost double its vote – 77 per cent of seats on 43 per cent of the vote. Similarly, in Ontario, Canada’s largest province, the NDP took twice as many seats as the Liberals on an identical share of poll.
Led by Jack Layton, the NDP has governed in several Canadian provinces but had always been placed a distant third on the federal scene. It argued during the campaign that the other parties ignored basic voter concerns such as the cost of home heating and help for the unemployed, campaigning for more family doctors and improved pensions, for higher corporate taxes and an end to subsidies for the powerful energy sector.
Harper played on fears of economic instability and “dangers” of a left-wing coalition government. He promised to cut corporate tax, and yet more tax cuts once the federal deficit is brought under control. His re-election with a majority was celebrated by investors as well as the markets.
Both the leaders of the Liberals and Bloc Québécois, Michael Ignatieff and Gilles Duceppe respectively, suffered the double humiliation of losing their own seats as they saw their parties’ fortunes crash – the Liberals in half, and the BQ, a party that has championed Quebec separatism for the last 20 years, from 47 seats to four (in a proportional system it would have won 20).
Both have offered their resignations as leaders. Their only consolation, perhaps, that what FPTP gives it can also take away just as brutally. Remember 1993.