FPTP FTW!*
Small parties don’t like Ontario’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system. They prefer proportional representation (PR) because it’s the easiest way to get seats in Parliament.
Depending on the type of PR in use, parties obtaining as little as 5% (Germany), 3% (Italy) or even 0.67% (Netherlands) will get at least 1 seat. This would be great if winning seats was the point of politics. However, if you are trying to effect change rather than just win seats, then first-past-the-post offers a compelling advantage that proportional representation doesn’t: leverage.
Large parties understand the leverage inherent in first-past-the-post. In Ontario’s three-party system, about 40% of the vote will give you more than 50% of the seats and 100% of the power. For instance the 2014 Ontario general election saw the Liberals win 38.65% of the vote and 54% of the seats. Most Canadians also understand this phenomenon. That’s why there is a campaign calling for a switch to proportional representation federally. It’s also why Justin Trudeau make the promise in 2015 that “this will be the last election held under first-past-the-post”.
Because the large parties understand how FPTP can give them more seats than their share of the vote, they have an all-or-nothing expectation around election outcomes. They expect either to win absolute power, or to be denied any power whatsoever. There are times when a minority government is possible and they may position themselves for greater (rather than absolute) power in this scenario, but generally the Liberals and PCs expect to be the government, or to be not-the-government.
Things are different under proportional representation. With PR 40% of the vote will give you 40% of the seats (plus or minus a few depending on the type of PR system in place). Almost every election will result in no party receiving a majority of seats. That forces parties to negotiate amongst themselves for cabinet posts and the contents of the legislative agenda in a coalition government.
Because no party is likely to win government outright, they all understand they will have to take some water in their wine. The expectations of the major parties are much lower in a PR system. From the moment an election is called, they already understand that they will never win outright power and that compromise is a given.
The expectations of minor parties are reversed under these systems. In a PR jurisdiction, minor parties may think they will win 5–10% of the seats. Depending on which major party does well, this could give them entrée into government and a seat or two at the cabinet table. Now they have the expectation of getting some of their agenda passed.
Under first-past-the-post, minor parties have no expectation of either a seat in the legislature (never mind a seat at the cabinet table) or of ever getting a single bill through the house. The best they can hope for is that a good result today will lead to more media coverage and a better result at the next election. And then 20 years from now they will win a seat in some demographically peculiar riding.
With this understanding we can see why small parties prefer a PR electoral system, and why Green Party leader Elizabeth May was so disappointed when Trudeau broke his electoral reform promise.
So why should smaller parties embrace FPTP?
Let’s come back to leverage. Not only does leverage allow larger parties to obtain absolute power with significantly less than a majority of the votes, it allows minor parties to terrify larger parties by denying them power entirely.
In Ontario both the Liberals and Progressive Conservatives have a number of seats that they will almost never lose. For the Liberals these are urban seats in the downtown cores of Toronto and Ottawa. No matter how high electricity rates climb, no matter how big our debt gets, no matter how badly our schools fail or how long waiting lists at the hospital become, Kathleen Wynne can depend on voters in these areas to send Liberals to Queen’s Park. This was demonstrated in November when Ottawa-Vanier returned Nathalie Des Rosiers with 50% of the vote, despite the PCs running high-profile candidate André Marin. Similarly the PCs enjoy an advantage in many southwestern and southeastern rural ridings that is insurmountable by the Liberals or NDP under any kind of normal election scenario.
Government is not won by taking away these seats from the incumbents. Government is won by winning on the margin.
In 1999 Mike Harris won his second majority government. The results looked like this:
However if the PC’s had won 4% less of the vote across the board, and if the NDP and Liberal vote had remained stagnant, the results would have been like this:
The PCs would have lost their majority government and the Liberal and NDP could have entered into coalition. But let’s imagine an even more stark scenario.
Assume that a minor party, an NDP of the Right, was running a campaign with the express purpose of holding the PCs accountable. Assume that the PC Party under Mike Harris had gone off the rails and was pushing a liberal agenda on social values, climate change and other issues (of all Canadian politicians, Mike Harris would arguably be the least likely to do that, but stay with me — we’re conducting an experiment here!) and this minor party was giving voice to conservatives who felt their party had abandoned them. Now assume this party was being managed by a political genius who was expert at identifying the PCs weakest winnable ridings and getting out their own vote in those ridings. Let’s say this genius spent all the party’s resources on 8 marginal PC ridings. How many votes would it take to deny the PCs those 8 ridings, and thus deny them power?
Eight-thousand seven-hundred and thirty-two. Out of 4,385,172 votes cast province-wide, 8,732 would have cooked the PC goose.
That’s an average of 2.5% of the vote in those 8 ridings — only 0.199% of the votes in the province. A fifth of one percent of votes cast in 1999 decided whether we would have a PC majority government, or a Liberal/NDP coalition. Thankfully for the sake of Ontario these votes broke the right way.
This scenario is only a mathematical possibility and doesn’t in any way represent a realistic prospect. But it does highlight the leverage available to a small party in our current first-past-the-post system.
Any doubt that the PCs are unaware of the power of fringe candidates to threaten marginal seats was laid to rest during the August 2016 Scarborough-Rouge River by-election. This seat had been held by the Liberals since its creation in 1999. While not impossible for the PCs to win, they knew that everything had to be in their favour in order to snag it from the government. On August 10, the PC brain trust saw their plan start to unravel when Queenie Yu entered the race as an independent candidate. Yu ran to oppose the Wynne government’s new sex-ed curriculum. While some in the PC Party opposed Wynne’s changes, Patrick Brown embraced the new curriculum after winning the leadership of the party. Brown’s positioning on the issue was confusing as he seemed to oppose the curriculum changes while still a candidate for leadership. Yu’s candidacy was designed to get Brown’s attention, and that’s exactly what it did. The Tories were torn between their leader’s new position and the need to not lose too many social conservatives to Queenie Yu’s candidacy. In the end their attempts to have their cake and eat it too resulted in a flip-flop so cynical it made the gas plant scandal look like an act of Churchillian principle.
The PCs eventually won the byelection by a large margin. Whether their capitulation to Yu on the sex-ed issue won or lost them votes, it demonstrated the influence fringe candidates can have on those who see their path to power being threatened. The PCs (and Liberals) fight elections to win power. They expect to get it all, or get nothing. They are susceptible to electoral pressures that major parties in PR jurisdictions would never feel because of our FPTP system.
This represents a huge opportunity for an NDP of the Right. A party that faithfully and forcefully represents real conservatives on fiscal matters, social and cultural issues, and democratic reform doesn’t need a lot of money or manpower to make a difference. It needs to be smart about how it spends resources and where to apply the pressure. By threatening to take away enough of Patrick Brown’s base an NDP of the Right can force Brown to be the conservative he is meant to be. To be the conservative that Ontario needs.
And that is why, its *first-past-the-post, for the win.
Craig Dellandrea can be found standing in line at the consulates of Switzerland, Monaco and Lichtenstein applying for refugee status. He can also be reached at craigdellandrea@sympatico.ca
