During one of the presentations to the special parliamentary committee on vote reform, there was an interesting remark on brokering power under different forms of voting. The speaker, an academic from Queen’s University, explained that in our first-past-the-post governments, the power brokering is usually done before the election, and, in a proportionally elected—which usually produces minority governments—it is done after. It is not something that would be noted by the average citizen but many of them who watched some of the U.S. Democratic convention recently saw that advance brokering in action.
They saw the brokering when Hillary Clinton supporters had to acquiesce to the Bernie Sanders supporters to include more of his left-of-centre policies in the Democratic Party platform. The ideological split between Clinton’s old style Democrats and Sander’s more modern left wing was there for all to see and Clinton has to have all those Sanders supporters on side and working hard for her to be sure to defeat the Republican candidate.
Whether Clinton will have sufficient support in Congress to pass any of those left-wing policies is something we will have to wait to see.
What the special committee studying our electoral system has to realize is that changes in our electoral system can have very far reaching effects. It is why the Conservatives will want to fight a change to proportional representation. They have already shown their opposition.
And why not? The Conservative Party prides itself on being a ‘big tent’ party. That tent includes both social and monetary conservatism. Most people outside Alberta still fail to grasp the differences between the provincial Conservative and Wildrose parties but the two provincial groups come together under the federal Conservative big tent.
With proportional representation in Canada, the Conservative big tent would go up in flames as the extremists on the religious, land-owner and monetary rights start to beat their own drums leaving the once impenetrable Conservative Party of Canada in tatters.
But the Liberals and the New Democrats would have nothing to laugh at. Some from both parties would unite under a new social democratic banner while the die-hard socialists and right-wing Liberals wander off looking for better hunting grounds.
In proportional representation, every half-baked protest group hopes to be just the right partner in coalition to get their own ideology on the table. The most interesting example of this is the proportionally chosen Israeli Knesset where extremist religious parties sell their support to the larger parties by promising to maintain the repressive Sabbath laws of the country.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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