[.ca] Elections (ISBN 0774809175)

A very readable history of Canadian election procedures:
John Courtneys book Elections is one in the Canadian Democratic Audit series, and provides an interesting history of elections in Canada. By todays standards the elections shortly after Confederation were extraordinarily poorly conducted. Ballots were not secret, the governing party ran the elections and used this to its advantage. Only 15 % of the population was on the voters lists, compared with 70 % today; you could not vote if you were female, aboriginal, or did not own property. Over the years much has changed; women got the vote in 1920, aboriginals in 1960 and prison inmates in 2002. An independent commission to establish the riding boundaries was only put in place after the first province to establish one, Manitoba, put one in place in 1995. One of the interesting things one learns is that most improvements were put in place in one or more provinces before being instituted federally. Examples are voting by women, voting by aboriginals, the voting age lowered to 18, voting by prison inmates and an independent commission to determine riding boundaries. The exception to this is the appointment of an independent Chief Electoral Officer federally before similar appointments provincially. Courtney recommends three further changes. The first is the allocation of House of Commons seats among the provinces; the current rules result in gross inequity if one accepts representation by population, from 34,000 people per seat in Prince Edward Island, to 109,000 people per seat in British Columbia (2001 figures). Changing this will be all but impossible. The second change that is clearly needed is that the Returning Officers for the individual ridings are to this day political appointees, despite the recommendation of the Chief Electoral Officer to have open competitions run by Elections Canada. This would be easy for the government to change The third change Courtney discusses is the voting system we use, commonly called first-past-the-post. Although there have been many calls for a change to proportional representation, there is no agreement on which form of PR would be best, and Courtney also urges consideration of the consequences. With the present system the major parties have to make themselves appeal to all regions of the country in order to gain a majority in parliament, and this might be lost if PR was instituted. In theory, Duvergers law states that FPTP leads to a two-party system. In practice, Canada does not fit this law. We normally have more than two parties in parliament, often because there is one or more parties with high regional support. They often have more seats than the votes they obtained warranted, while another party with a comparable number of votes spread across the country may have no representation in parliament. This is clearly unfair to the voters. There is a discussion about introducing voting using the internet, with the conclusion that this is not yet feasible because of the lack of ability to provide adequate security and checks. The usefulness of the book could have been improved by the addition of detail. For example By 1969 seven Canadian provinces had already lowered the voting age..; we do not learn which provinces and when. Such detail would have disrupted the flow of the book, but could have been provided in appendices.