Stephane Dion’s Shiny New Voting System

Did I read that right? Did Stephane Dion — former head of the Liberal Party, almost Prime Minister of Canada — just come out in favour of proportional representation? Better late than never!

Well, that’s not entirely fair. Dion has shown a willingness to consider electoral reform in the past, as he did by backing the resolution in favour of alternative voting at his party’s most recent convention (not proportional representation but still not bad). Earlier on as party leader, on the occasion of his non-competition agreement with the Green Party’s Elizabeth May in 2007, he promised to explore different electoral options if he became Prime Minister.

But now, in the National Post and, in more detail, in a publication of the Quebec think tank The Federal Idea, Dion is supporting a specific alternative much more forcefully than ever before. One that, on the spectrum between proportionality and plurality/majority, clearly leans heavily towards the former.

So what exactly does Dion propose? What he calls the proportional-preferential-personalized vote, or P3. It would achieve proportionality by enlarging ridings across the country to elect between three and five MPs each. The seats would be distributed to parties roughly in proportion to their respective shares of the vote in each one of these ridings. Sadly, the resulting proportionality would only be partial because of the relatively small size of the multi-member districts. There is a well-known correlation in proportional voting systems between district magnitude and proportionality (although, interestingly, the opposite is true in non-proportional systems). Dion prefers this “moderate” proportionality to the “pure” stuff we see in Israel and the Netherlands (a somewhat confused distinction, but I’ll let it slide).

P3 would also be preferential. In selecting their parties, voters would not simply choose their favourite and leave it at that. If they wanted, they could rank their second and third and fourth choices as well. The smallest parties — those that do not have a large enough share of votes to win seats — would be eliminated and their second-choice votes distributed to other parties. This procedure would continue on to progressively larger parties — redistributing third- and fourth- and fifth-choice votes if necessary — until the only parties left are those with enough support to win seats.

Finally, although voters would primarily be choosing parties, P3 would also be personalized in the sense that they would have the option of selecting a favourite candidate running for their first-choice party. Seats would be distributed to individual candidates on the basis of these selections.

(The faint of heart are advised to please skip the next paragraph.)

To my ear, Dion’s proposal sounds a lot like open-list proportional representation — just with smaller-than-usual electoral districts and a slight preferential element (slight because the vast majority of ballots’ second and third preferences would likely not come into play). I see no reason to prefer P3 to any of the other proportional systems commonly recommended for Canada, such as mixed-member proportional representation (MMP) or the single transferable vote (STV). All three should be just as good at achieving local representation, but MMP surpasses P3 in terms of proportionality and STV surpasses it in terms of preferential and personalized features. In fact, with the institution of the alternative vote for constituency elections, MMP could surpass P3 by all three of its signature criteria. And a simple threshold, something included in most MMP systems, could help it elude concerns about instability due to the proliferation of smaller parties.

Nevertheless, what Dion proposes is in almost every way far superior to the first-past-the-post system Canada is currently stuck with. It is, on balance, a reasonable proposal from a reasonable person. On those few occasions when Dion still makes his way into the news, I cannot help but wonder what could have possessed the Liberals to give him up as their leader. He is green, he is thoughtful, and he is committed to democratic reform. I would take him any day over his right-wing predecessors Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, or his warmongering heir Michael Ignatieff.