February 20, 2017: The worst form of democracy ‘except for all those others’

By Michael Regenstreif

“We are committed to ensuring that 2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system,” said Liberal leader Justin Trudeau during the last federal election campaign. A commitment that was reiterated after the Liberal Party formed a majority government and Trudeau became prime minister.

Trudeau charged his minister of democratic institutions, Maryam Monsef, with finding a consensus that would allow for an alternative system. Trudeau, it was said, favoured a ranked ballot in which voters would somehow rank the candidates so that votes for candidates who don’t cross a threshold would be redistributed to the voter’s second choice.

Conventional wisdom had it that Trudeau favoured a ranked ballot on the theory that the Liberals would be many voters’ second choice thus almost guaranteeing Liberal majority governments in the future.

Meanwhile the New Democratic Party and the Green Party favoured some sort of proportional representation so that parties would hold the number of seats in Parliament reflective of their share of the popular vote. The theory being that the NDP and Greens would see their share of seats increased in a system of proportional representation.

And the Conservative Party, it seems, was OK with first-past-the post, the system in which the candidate receiving a plurality of votes in a riding wins the seat and the party with the most seats is given the opportunity of forming government.

Monsef – who was moved out of the democratic institutions portfolio in last month’s cabinet shuffle – did not find that elusive consensus, and it was left to her successor, Karina Gould, to announce that the search for an alternative to first-past-the-post was over. Despite Trudeau’s oft-stated commitment, the first-past-the-post system will endure for the next election and, likely, well into the future.

But, most Canadians, it seems, are fine with first-past-the-post.

Count me among them. I’m reminded of Winston Churchill’s famous quote from 1947, when he said, “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

That’s the way I think of first-past-the-post. It’s probably the worst form of democracy “except for all those others.”

A ranked ballot system that would permanently favour one party doesn’t seem like a democratic ideal, and I fear that proportional representation would not serve us well.

I say that because I pay a lot of attention to Israeli politics, and the system there is proportional representation, a system that encourages many small, often single-issue parties rather than the kind of big-tent type parties that have to appeal to a broad electorate.

Because the parties are small, it is virtually impossible for any party to win a majority of seats in the Knesset. Coalition governments are always the rule. In the 2015 Israeli election, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud was first among the many parties with 23.4 per cent of the vote, and he was able to form a coalition by making deals with the small parties. Thus, we see the two religious parties, which together received just over 10 per cent of the vote, able to impose haredi Orthodox control on many aspects of Israeli society – from who may marry and divorce, to what kind of prayer services may be undertaken at the Western Wall, and much more.

And, when Netanyahu sought to strengthen his weak coalition, Avigdor Liberman – leader of a party that received just five per cent of the vote – was able to demand and receive control of the Defense Ministry, Israel’s most important department.

I’m relieved we won’t be seeing small parties in Canada wheeling and dealing and taking control of important ministries.

November 9, 2015: Canada’s strong friendship with Israel will endure

By Michael Regenstreif

By the time you read this column, Justin Trudeau will have taken office as Canada’s new prime minister after leading the Liberal Party of Canada to majority government status in the October 19 federal election.

No one saw the magnitude of Trudeau’s victory coming. The opinion polls – from day one to day 78 of the longest federal election campaign in modern history – always suggested a minority government. At the beginning of the campaign, the New Democratic Party under Tom Mulcair was in the lead and Trudeau’s Liberals were in third place.

Then Stephen Harper’s Conservatives inched into the lead with the Liberals and NDP so close behind that it looked like any of the three parties might capture a plurality of seats for a minority government. This gave rise to speculation about a possible agreement or coalition between the Liberals and NDP to topple a Conservative minority. That was the state of affairs a month ago, when I wrote my column for the October 12 issue.

By the end of the campaign, support for the NDP had fallen significantly and increased enough for the Liberals that polls suggested a Liberal minority with about 140 of the 338 seats.

But, as the results came in on election night, the Liberal wave took enough formerly safe seats from both the Conservatives and the NDP that the Liberals went from 34 seats and third place in the last election to 184 seats – a solid majority – this time.

Harper’s Conservatives scored a breakthrough in the 2011 election when exit polls indicated they received the support of 52 per cent of Jewish voters, apparently on the basis of Harper’s strong support for Israel (even though the Conservatives never changed Canada’s policies in regard to West Bank settlements, the peace process, the two-state solution, or the status of Jerusalem).

But, in the election campaign, the other party leaders also pledged their support and Canada’s friendship for the Jewish state. There was virtually no substantive policy difference between the parties on Israel – a point Trudeau made forcefully when Harper brought up Israel in the leaders’ foreign policy debate.

While I doubt Trudeau will have the same kind of personal relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as did Harper – I don’t think Netanyahu had a closer personal friend than Harper among the leaders on the world stage – I am sure Canada’s nation-to-nation friendship with, and support for, Israel will continue at the same high level as recent years.

In the 2011 election, all but one of the five seats in Canada with statistically large Jewish populations went to the Conservatives. The only one that didn’t was Mount Royal, where Irwin Cotler’s support among Jewish voters fell sharply. While I’m yet to see any exit polling data on how Jews actually voted in this election, four of those five seats – Mount Royal in Montreal, Eglinton-Lawrence and York Centre in Toronto, and Winnipeg South Centre – were won by Liberals. Only Thornhill, just north of Toronto, remained in the Conservative tent.

Here in Ottawa, all of the ridings with measurable Jewish populations went to the Liberals. The same was true in ridings in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and perhaps elsewhere across the country.

There were three Jewish members of previous Parliament: Liberal Irwin Cotler (Mount Royal), who did not run in this election, and Conservatives Joe Oliver (Eglinton-Lawrence) and Mark Adler (York Centre), who both went down to defeat.

There are six Jewish members – all of them Liberals – in the new Parliament: Jim Carr (Winnipeg South Centre), Julie Dabrusin (Toronto-Danforth), Karina Gould (Burlington), David Graham (Laurentides-Labelle), Anthony Housefather (Mount Royal) and Michael Levitt (York Centre).

Given the results from across the country, and anecdotally from conversations I’ve had with several Jewish voters, I assume that, if or when we see exit polling data on Jewish voters, it will show that at least some – if not a significant amount – of the vote captured by the Conservatives in 2011 went to the Liberals this time around.

With increasingly dismal results after each of the preceding four elections, many were ready to write off the Liberal Party. If Trudeau governs with the same skills with which he rebuilt the party, it will be an exciting time in Canadian politics.