N.S. group wants separate vote for Parliament, PM

N.S. group wants separate vote for Parliament, PM

By commoner • Jan 29th, 2009 • Category: January 30 - February 5, News

Nick Logan
nc616634@dal.ca

Canada’s political turmoil has created an opportunity to reconsider how our parliamentary system works – maybe even to change it.

A group called Fair Vote Nova Scotia wants every ballot to count towards deciding who forms a government. The group’s president says the country is going through a period of “political maturity.”

“It’s been worthwhile to go through this process,” says Derek Simon.

“I think Canadians are beginning to realize that minority governments may become a more permanent feature in our political landscape and that coalition governments are a real possibility.”

The Liberal and New Democratic parties attempted to bring down the Conservative minority government in December, in hopes of forming a coalition government. The two parties combined did not have enough elected representatives in the House of Commons to form a majority. Together they only had 114 seats—compared to the Conservatives’ 143 — but led the Tories by almost 932,000 votes.

In order to have a government that works and fairly represents the population, Simon says we need proportional representation, a process that elects officials based on overall number of votes, not majority.

He says his group is for this system, but doesn’t align itself with any political party.

He thinks Canada needs to follow the lead of New Zealand and Ireland, where coalition governments have worked effectively.

About 30 people joined Free Vote Nova Scotia at Just Us Café on Spring Garden Road last weekend for a discussion called “Coalition Government: Real Democracy or Democracy Hijacked.”

People didn’t like the idea of a coalition, said speaker Lori Turnbull, a political science professor at Dalhousie University, because they didn’t vote for it. She says we don’t actually choose our government anyway.

“Nobody gets to choose a government. You go to an election, you choose a member of Parliament. You only get to check one box.”

A coalition government, she said, wouldn’t be a bad idea for Canada, especially after years of minority governments.

“You wouldn’t have this constant threat that someone was going to pull the support out from the government and the government will fall.”

Like Fair Vote Nova Scotia, Turnbull thinks we need to vote for our members of Parliament and our prime minister separately. It would give us a better expression of what kind of government Canadians want, she says. “The fact that it was on the table changes things.”

Turnbull thinks people would vote with the possibility of a coalition in mind if we had proportional representation in our government. But it only matters if people vote. Only 59 per cent of eligible Canadian voters bothered to cast a ballot in the October federal election — the lowest turnout on record.

“We don’t know that the people who didn’t vote care at all,” she says about the debate over a proposed coalition government.

Audience members asked if mandatory voting was a good option, such as in Australia. Compulsory voting has been in effect there since 1924 and people face a fine if they don’t turn out to the polls. The Australian government reported a 95 per cent voter turn out in the 2007 federal election.

Anne-Marie Dubois, a Dalhousie law student, wondered if such a policy would work in Canada, especially when people were offering online to “vote-swap” during last fall’s election.

“You don’t know that if you had mandatory voting if you could take that as an accurate reflection of people’s strong preferences or did they vote ‘however’ because they had to,” Turnbull responded.

Neither Turnbull nor Simon anticipated a coalition government to form following this week’s budget vote. They both think Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff needs more time to “appear prime ministerial.”

While the New Democrats and Bloc Quebecois plan to vote against the budget, Ignatieff said Wednesday the Liberals would support the Conservatives if the prime minister promised regular updates to the House throughout the year.