Friends are Electric

Anyone in Canada over the last week will know what this is about. The Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, issued an economic update to the budget he released last year. The update’s purpose was to reflect the changing world economic situation and its effect on Canada. Some information can be found here.

I am not going to say anything on the reaction to this, enough has been said. However, I have not heard one particular argument as to why dropping the $1.95 per vote subsidy that each party gets to fund their operations. The argument relates to our plurality system.

Like the United States and Great Briton, Canada runs on a plurality, rather than proportional, system. This means that a candidate in a riding must only receive one more vote than the candidate with the second highest number of votes to be declared the winner in that riding and represent it in Parliament. Even if 10 parties run and split the vote roughly equally, with one party receiving a few votes more than the others, that party gets the whole seat. The other parties get nothing. Except, of course, this subsidy.

It is a commonly known fact that in plurality based systems, votes are wasted. What most people don’t realise is that they are wasted both ways. Most people understand that if one party gets 40% of the vote, the second place one receives 35%, and a third party has 25%, then a full 60% of the people in that riding did not have their voices heard, since total popular vote doesn’t mean anything. However, if there are three or more parties in a given riding, then every vote over the bare plurality of the second place parties vote count + 1 also counts to nothing, since the party already has been granted the seat.

Now, the person who’s vote was wasted on the winning side might not mind, since their vote might just as well have been one of the votes which allowed the candidate to win, but this still poses an interesting problem. If the government is supposed to be democratically elected, yet in Canada’s roughly three party system up to 66% of the population could have no say in the formation of government. (A truly frightening statistic is that, in such a three party system, a party can receive a majority if they get a bare plurality of about 34% in only 50% + 1 of the ridings, which works out to approximately 17% of the popular vote.)

So here is where the economic update comes in, specifically the fate of the $1.95. So long as this subsidy exists then the otherwise wasted votes have meaning. The Green Party may have gotten no seats, but they did receive a fairly large share of the popular vote, meaning they will receive a fair amount of money to keep their party alive to mount a campaign again another day. By garnering roughly 7% of the national vote, they have proven that their platform has a level of support unheard of by most other niche issue parties.

I have seen a few comments around stating that the Conservative Party has the most to lose by this measure, and it is true that they will lose the largest dollar amount of all the parties. However, they will be losing the lowest percentage amount compared to their total income intake in a given year. Some have argued that the other parties should focus more on raising funds in other ways, especially donations. My only thought on this is that a fiscally conservative party would likely have the wealthiest voter base. There is nothing wrong with this. Social Democratic parties like the NDP tend to focus more on those who would not be able to afford donations to political parties, while the Greens tend to be a party of the young, people who are using what money they have for schooling. While these parties should probably focus more on fundraising, especially in light of this event, the fact remains that the Conservatives are better based to receive large amounts of funding from private persons. We must remember that government must speak for everyone, not only those who can afford to keep their choice party afloat.

This issue, like so many others in Canadian democracy, should really not exist. A diverse group of political parties ensures that all beliefs have the chance of being represented. So long as a belief receives votes it is worthy of a continued existence, no matter if the people pushing it are willing or capable of funding it personally. That is the true tragedy of this, Canada has a comparatively diverse political landscape when compared to other plurality countries. This funding helps contribute to that, without it we would have fewer parties, fewer new ideas and a much more bland political culture.