Harry Shannon
If you believe the latest projections, the Liberals will get the most seats in the next Canadian Parliament. The excellent website 338Canada.com has the Conservatives slightly ahead in the popular vote, but getting only 123 seats compared with 137 for the Liberals. Still not the 170 needed for a majority, though. It seems that the Bloc Quebecois or the New Democratic Party (NDP) will hold the balance of power.
This means Andrew Scheer, the leader of the Conservatives, made a big error a few days ago. At the time it looked as if his party would get several percent more of the vote and than the Liberals and maybe one or two seats more. He stated that the party with most seats should be the one to form the government. He should have said the party with the most votes should (try to) rule the country. That would have been more to his advantage.
How, you might ask, can a party get the most votes but not the most seats? It’s all about the distribution of votes in the different ridings. (Ridings are what other countries call districts or constituencies or some such name.) Let’s look at a simplified example.
Suppose there are three ridings. In Riding 1, the Conservatives get 50 votes and the Liberals 10. The Conservative is elected. In Riding 2, the Conservatives get 25 votes and the Liberals 35. And the same in Riding 3: the Conservatives get 25 votes and the Liberals 35. So two Liberals are elected to one Conservative. But the total number of votes for the Conservatives is 100, for the Liberals only 80.
In effect this is what would happen if the projections stay the same. In Alberta, the Conservatives would win all or nearly all ridings, often by very wide margins – think Riding 1 in the example. But the rest of the country is more like Ridings 2 and 3. So nationwide the Conservatives can get more votes than the Liberals, but not as many seats.
Of course, this is one principle behind gerrymandering. I’m not suggesting that it’s happening here. But if a governing party wants to consolidate its grip on power for the long term, it can redraw the electoral boundaries to make things look more like the ridings in the example. You just have to look at maps of districts in the U.S. to see how prevalent it is there.
Another way to gerrymander is to have ridings of very different population sizes. In Canada, Prince Edward Island has a population of about 155,000. It elects four Members of Parliament (MPs). Yet the population of Calgary Shepard is over 147,000 and elects only one MP. PEI votes are worth nearly four times a Calgary Shepard vote.
It’s even worse in the US. There are two senators per state. Two senators for Wyoming with a population of less than 600,000; and still only two for California with roughly 40 million people. Wyoming votes are worth more than 60 California votes! Now that’s serious gerrymandering.