the citizen-viewer

You wouldn’t know it from scanning the headlines in the US, but Canada held an election yesterday. The results were, well, not all that newsworthy, in that nothing much changed.

The ruling Conservative minority government gained but not enough to become a majority. The former majority Liberals lost seats. The New Democratic Party (if the US Democrats split into right and left parties, the NDP would be the left and the Liberals the right) picked up a few. The Bloc Quebecois held, while the Greens added a couple points in the popular vote but failed to win a seat in parliament.

The breakdown:
PARTY SEATS SEATS POPULAR VOTE
Conservative 143 46% 38%
Liberals 76 25% 26%
Bloc Quebecois 50 16% 10%
New Democratic-NDP 37 12% 18%
Independents 2 1% 1%
Green 0 0 7%

One occasionally hears laments from US liberals that if we had a parliamentary democracy the left would get a better hearing in government, because it would win more seats in the federal legislature. The theory is that our winner-take-all rules privilege big parties, and these parties go to the center right and ignore the left. In a parliamentary system, a third party has a better shot at gaining power because they have better odds under plurality-winner rules that allow for minority governments (no matter who wins the popular vote, the US president must get 51% in the Electoral College).

A look at the election results up north shows that multi-party democracy is enabling the conservatives, at least for now. The Tories pulled down only 38% of the vote, a 2 point gain from 2006. Meanwhile their rivals split the remaining 68% four ways. Of the four other parties all are to the left of the Tories. Had just the NDP and the Liberals fused they would run the government now.

A decade ago Canada’s right was split into rival parties, and that helped the Liberals. Now it’s reversed. But who is to say that in the coming crisis the left would be better served by one umbrella party that governed, rather than four dissenting parties that spar with each other, while a minority government from the right runs the show?