Ed Broadbent is pretty sure he knows how to stop a Donald Trump type from taking over in Canada. The secret, as he writes in a Wednesday op-ed for a duller rival newspaper, is proportional representation. He says it’s “the firewall against a northern Trump riding a right-wing populist wave to victory.”
I know, I know: this is not exactly a surprise. If you ask a PR advocate whether you should take an umbrella to work next Tuesday, he will find a way to work PR into his answer. But Broadbent’s argument is, in its context, even more revealing than usual. It highlights a cruddy little trick that lies at the heart of almost all proportional representation advocacy. I’ll point it out in the hope that it might be remembered after the federal Liberals finish kicking electoral reform down the road and we eventually come back around to it.
Broadbent’s column is part of the scramble to work the word “Trump” into promotional matter for every political nostrum, racket and crusade on the planet. His argument is pretty loose: boiled down, it says that because proportional representation is fairer than the existing system, its adoption must mean logically that nothing unfair, such as the election of a cunning right-wing populist with a fake suntan, could ever take place.
Maybe you find that convincing. But it is at least a little odd that Broadbent brings this up after, and in relation to, a presidential election. However you might arrange the choice of a head of state, you can have at most one. I don’t think anybody favours letting Jill Stein occupy the Oval Office for three days, 15 hours, and 40 minutes out of every year in the next four just because she drew one percent of the votes for President.
This reminds us, accidentally, that the same goes for choosing a head of government. We could do whatever we liked to make the legislative assembly of the Dominion more proportional, but when it comes to matters of executive prerogative we must still end up with one ultimate decision-maker. Votes that might have led to other choices are still “wasted,” in the lame schoolyard sense in which election reformers always use that term.
The Broadbent hypothesis is that making the Prime Minister answerable to a proportional House of Commons would still help discourage undesirables by ending “egregious” outcomes in which regionally dominant parties gain disproportional numbers of seats. This is certainly true when it comes to regions: our current electoral system is designed to positively favour region as a variable. What PR would do is to make non-regional, widely distributed ideological tendencies more prominent in the House. Everybody knows this is the reason a socialist like Ed Broadbent is so hot for it.
PR would spare the need for Canada’s extreme left to gather in a big tent. It would allow leftists to indulge their well-known taste for endless schism without paying a collective electoral price. And it would create the conditions for brokerage between centrists and small fringe parties of the left and sorta-left-oid-ish.
It should be instantly apparent that all of this goes equally for the right wing, or for any group of voters that shares an interest or a preoccupation. Broadbent accuses Kellie Leitch of trying to win the Conservative party leadership with objectionable Trump-style tactics, and I guess I agree that she is making cynical use of the Trump persuasive apparatus. But since we don’t have proportional representation, she is required to try and win the leadership of a major party in order to exercise power. If we had PR she could just quit the Conservatives and form a Leitch List. I doubt she would have much trouble getting ten or 20 seats in a proportional Commons, and such a Commons would feature members wayyyy to her right politically.
This is what brings us to the PR advocates’ trick: Broadbent says “extremists” could not exploit PR because “countries with such a system have established a threshold each must cross to win seats.” Put another way: no one on Earth, anywhere, really believes in proportionality in the legislature as a logical principle. They all support curtailed proportionality. Curtailed, that is, at some numerical point which suits their particular naked interest.
Our first-past-the-post system has a varying informal threshold which tends to hold down the New Democrats because their vote share is usually around 20 per cent. New Democrats like Ed find that devilishly unfair, but would happily cut off parties below ten per cent, or five. This is nothing but dismal intellectual shamelessness. It may be good politics — but only until we come to our senses and learn to laugh at it.
National Post
ccosh@nationalpost.com
Twitter.com/ColbyCosh
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