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The essay should be written in paragraph form, with each paragraph unified around a clear topic sentence.
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Students will be graded on three distinct components:
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Supports that thesis with body paragraphs and a conclusion that summarizes the essay’s main argument.
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Answer the essay question.
1.What is the purpose of an election? Assess whether Canadian elections are “free and fair.” What are the implications for democracy?
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6
Elections
John Courtney
Canada’s electoral system is constructed on six pillars, or building
blocks. Five of these – the franchise, voter registration, electoral districting, election management, and the plurality voting system – are
the focus of this chapter. The remaining pillar – the financing of political parties, candidates, and campaigns – is examined in the Democratic Audit volume Political Parties (Cross 2004).
This chapter, which is divided into three sections, employs the
benchmarks common to the Audit project: participation, responsiveness, and inclusiveness. The first section examines the changes that
have been made to the first four of the electoral building blocks over
time and argues that, collectively, they ensure a solidly democratic
framework within which to conduct elections in Canada. The next section describes the arguments advanced in favour of or in opposition to
replacing plurality voting with some form of proportional vote, and it
cautions against unrealistic expectations about what can be accomplished through electoral reform. It also questions the appropriateness
to the Canadian electoral system of the voter identification requirement
adopted by parliament in 2007. The final section is devoted to an overall assessment of the institutional and operational framework within
which elections are conducted in Canada. It places elections squarely
at the heart of Canadian democracy and suggests that, without open,
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freely competitive, and recurrent elections, a citizen’s vote is of little
value, and any claim to legitimacy on a government’s part could not be
accepted at face value.
Two caveats should be noted at the outset. First, the term “electoral
system” can be used in two different ways. In its narrowest sense, it
means a method of voting – that is, how votes are cast, counted, and
converted into legislative seats. This view of the electoral system pervades political science literature, classroom discussions, and press
accounts of elections. It is less usual to talk or write of an electoral
system in its broader sense, as including all of the components of electoral machinery – from the franchise and electoral registration to
districting and method of voting. It is in this wider, more inclusive
sense that “electoral system” is used in this chapter.
Second, the following analysis is devoted to a study of electoral institutions at the federal level. Important though it is in a country such
as Canada to describe and assess the federal and provincial frameworks
for the conduct of elections, it is not feasible in a chapter of this length.
Where possible, however, appropriate references will be made to the
experience of the provinces. That is especially the case for the transference of electoral institutions from one jurisdiction to another and where
important electoral reform debates at the provincial level might help
to inform the larger issues of governance and representation at both
the federal and provincial levels.
A Changed Electoral System
The evidence to date powerfully demonstrates that four of the five
components of the electoral system (the franchise, voter registration,
electoral districting, and election management) have changed extensively from the time of Canada’s first post-Confederation elections. In
response to shifting social values, judicial rulings, and public pressures,
Canada’s electoral system has become both more participatory and
more inclusive. Canada now ranks as the most populous country among
the top 11 “full democracies” in a 167-country comparison of democracy
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worldwide (Economist Intelligence Unit 2008, 1-4). The plurality vote
system stands as the exception to the 140-year pattern of gradually
altered electoral institutions. That building block will be considered
separately, in the second section of this chapter.
Canada’s electoral system has many unquestioned strengths. Several of these, such as a universal adult franchise, a virtually complete
electoral registry, and an impressive array of independent election officials at both the federal and provincial levels, set Canada apart from
many other liberal democracies. Nowhere is that more the case than
by comparison with the United States. From the fiasco over the vote
counting in Florida, which occurred during the 2000 presidential election, to the arrantly partisan gerrymander of congressional districts
in a number of states, to the questionable application of electoral laws
by some election officers who obtained their jobs solely because they
were adherents of one party or another, the American electoral experience in the past decade stands in stark contrast to the Canadian. (On
the contested American election of 2000 and partisan electoral administration, see Rakove 2001. For a recent study of gerrymandering and
electoral redistricting in the United States, see Persily 2005.)
The current strengths of the Canadian electoral system have taken
decades to achieve. At the time of Confederation, elections were so
markedly different from what they are today that contemporary voters
would scarcely recognize them. With only short exceptions between
1867 and 1917, determining who could vote and creating the voters’ lists
for federal elections both came under the control of the provinces. Four
criteria establishing voter eligibility were common to all provinces:
electors had to be British subjects by birth or naturalization, as well as
male, property owners, and at least twenty-one years of age. By definition,
that excluded non-British subjects, females, the propertyless, and those
under twenty-one. In addition, government employees, government contractors, judges, court officials, and election officials were denied the vote
in many provinces on the basis that they depended on the government
for their livelihood. The poor, or those who received social assistance,
were barred from voting since they did not meet the criteria of either
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independence or of having a stake in the community. Criminals were also
denied the vote.
Still others could not vote because of their race or national origin.
Status Indians were denied the franchise on the grounds that their treaty
rights made them dependants of the government. British Columbia refused to enfranchise Orientals, a group defined initially as Chinese but
later widened to include Japanese and other East Asians. In the early
twentieth century, Manitoba introduced a “literacy test” that denied the
vote to residents who had recently emigrated from Ukraine or another
central European country, even though many had become naturalized
British subjects through immigration. The restrictive nature of the franchise is demonstrated by the fact that, in the twelve federal elections
between 1867 and 1911, an average of only about 20 percent of the total
Canadian population was entitled to vote.
Restrictions on the right to vote were gradually removed through
the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The initial shift came
at the end of the First World War when parliament, following the lead
of the three Prairie provinces, enfranchised women. This effectively
doubled the size of the electorate. Under the Dominion Elections Act
1920 (now the Canada Elections Act), property restrictions were abandoned as a criterion to vote. Oriental Canadians were added, in stages,
to federal and provincial electoral rolls after the Second World War, as
were the Inuit and status Indians, who were granted the federal franchise in 1950 and 1960 respectively. In 1970, parliament lowered the
voting age from twenty-one to eighteen, thereby adding an additional
2 million Canadians to the voters’ list in the largest increase since
women received the vote a half century before.
Progressively more liberal social values and participation of organized
interests regarding vote entitlement (especially in the case of women’s
groups in the first decades of the twentieth century) account for these
developments. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, adopted
in 1982, added yet another instrument for change. According to section
3 of the Charter, “every citizen of Canada has the right to vote.” The courts
have interpreted this section generously. In 1988, the Federal Court of
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Canada ruled that the prohibition on judges voting clearly violated section
3 of the Charter. In a 1988 case launched by the Canadian Disability Rights
Council, the same reasoning applied to the exclusion of mentally challenged Canadians. Anticipating a possible Charter challenge by expatriate Canadians, parliament amended the Canada Elections Act in the
1990s to extend the franchise to Canadian persons living abroad for up
to five years who intend to return to Canada. Prisoners were the single
remaining group prohibited from voting. A series of cases and appeals
over a protracted period ended in 2002 when the Supreme Court of Canada,
in a five-to-four decision, ruled that all prisoners eighteen years of age
and older holding Canadian citizenship were entitled to vote. (For court
cases accepting Charter challenges to franchise restrictions, see Muldoon
v. Canada 1988; Canadian Disability Rights Council v. Canada 1988;
Sauvé v. Canada (Chief Electoral Officer) 2002.)
The inclusiveness of the franchise is now without question. The cumulative effect of more than a century of changes to the franchise is seen in
the fact that the share of the total Canadian population now eligible to
vote in a federal election has grown to its highest level ever: over four and
a-half times what it was in 1867 (70 percent versus 15 percent). (The 30
percent ineligible to vote are Canadian citizens under eighteen years and
persons residing in Canada who are not citizens of the country.)
Canada and the provinces have used two different methods to construct the lists of electors in advance of elections. In the past, enumerations were conducted door-to-door by one or two enumerators named
by local party officials soon after an election was called. The enumerators were selected from lists supplied by the two candidates receiving
the highest number of votes in the preceding election. This bipartisan
element of the process was intended to serve as a check against possible
registration fraud. Because enumerators were paid on a per voter basis,
there was a built-in incentive to ensure a complete and accurate list of
voters. Door-to-door enumeration was premised on the idea that the
state plays a significant role in making certain that the voters’ lists are
as inclusive of eligible electors as possible.
The advantages of enumeration were obvious. The lists were prepared and updated (through revisions) mere weeks in advance of voting.
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This process ensured that voters’ lists were current, complete, and
(because they were drawn up only as needed every three or four years)
cost-effective. The lists captured between 95.0 and 97.5 percent of
Canada’s eligible electorate, which is a remarkable figure by any comparative standard (Courtney and Smith 1991, 365, 451; Elections Canada
2001, 67).
Designed to record the names of voters in a country with elections,
on average, once every four years, and whose population was both
smaller and more rurally based than it is now, enumeration was found
wanting in the 1980s. Canada experienced a record number of elections
– twelve – between 1957 and 1988; over that time, the electorate doubled
in size (from 8.9 to 17.6 million); urban growth vastly outpaced that of
rural Canada, with metropolitan populations that were ethnically, linguistically, and culturally mixed; and enumerators were more difficult
to find and train than had been the case in the past. These developments
combined to place enumeration under stress.
Door-to-door enumerations had worked well when elections were less
frequent than they became in the last half of the twentieth century and
when voters were fewer in number. For several reasons, constituency
returning officers found it difficult to recruit and train enumerators.
The pay scale was low; the increasingly mixed linguistic composition
of Canada’s population made it difficult to find the right “linguistic
match” of enumerators and polling districts; and election officials
voiced concerns for the safety and security of enumerators in some
large urban areas. The cracks that had appeared in the enumeration
process were flagged by Elections Canada and accepted by the Chrétien
government as sufficient reason for fundamentally changing the
method of voter registration.
The National Register of Electors replaced door-to-door enumeration
in 1997. It serves as a database of qualified electors and contains each
person’s name, address, sex, and date of birth. Information to maintain
the register continuously is received by Elections Canada from several government sources, including Citizenship and Immigration Canada (for the names of new Canadian citizens), Canada Customs and
Revenue Agency (for tax filers who consent to share basic demographic
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information), and such provincial agencies as vital statistics, election
authorities, and motor vehicle registration bureaus.
The register is not without its critics. Maintained 365 days per year
regardless of whether or not there is an election that year, it may in the
long run prove to be less cost-effective than election-generated enumerations. That remains to be seen. It is known that the register is marginally less comprehensive than enumeration lists. Ninety-three percent
of eligible voters were registered for the 2000 and 2008 elections, a
slippage of between two and four and a-half percentage points over
enumerated elections (Black 2002; Elections Canada 2008).
Those most likely to be left off the register or to experience difficulties getting on it tend to be the young, poor, mobile, tenants, and those
with limited language skills. These are “precisely [the] groups that are
most in need of assistance from the state in exercising their democratic rights” (White 2002, 4). (They are, incidentally, also the groups
least likely to vote when they are registered.) The register is blamed for
contributing to “increasing participation inequality” among potential
voters (Black 2000, 20; see also Black 2003). Moreover, what has been
lost with the replacement of door-to-door enumerations by the register
is a personal reminder of a pending election through “the human contact
that occurs between the potential voter and the compiler of the voters’
list” (Smith 1991, 37). Human contact has the potential to positively
reinforce a civic good – that is, taking part in an election. A positive
correlation between voter contact by parties and candidates and the
propensity to vote in federal elections has been established (Pammett
and LeDuc 2003, 24-28), and it is reasonable to assume that the same
relationship would exist between voter contact by election officials
through door-to-door enumeration and voting. One can only speculate
whether the shift to the register, possibly as a demonstrated instance of
the law of unintended consequences, has contributed to the decline in
voter turnout about which so much has recently been written.
Early in 2009, the privacy commissioner of Canada and the auditor
general of Canada took the unprecedented step of issuing a joint report
on the voter registration system. They found fault with a number of
aspects of the new system including data gathering, protection of
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voters’ personal information, and dissemination of information.
Voter lists were found to have made their way into the hands of a Toronto Tamil Tiger cell (classed by Canada as a terrorist organization),
and it was determined that paper and electronic copies of voter lists
had been widely circulated to candidates and political parties, none
of whom are subject to the Privacy Act’s provisions governing protection of privacy. Elections Canada responded to the commissioners’
criticisms by agreeing to bring, where suitable, the information gathering and dissemination processes in line with the relevant statutes.
Even so, some improvements to the registration process can be made
only by parliament through approval of appropriate legislative amendments (Auditor General 2009; Privacy Commissioner 2009).
Canada and the provinces have completely overhauled the way in
which electoral districts are designed. With House of Commons MPs
elected from geographically defined districts, and with the district
boundaries redrawn following every decennial census according to the
shifts in population, much rests on the configuration of the districts
for parties, candidates, MPs, voters, and, ultimately, public policy.
Elected politicians remain keenly aware of that fact, but the historical record shows that two remarkably different approaches have been
taken to the constitutionally mandated redistributions of each decade.
From 1872 to 1952, redistributions were carefully managed by the government of the day (Conservative or Liberal) in its own interest. The
great majority of the redistributions were partisan and blatantly selfserving affairs. In none of the nine redistributions over that period was
the public invited to participate; nor was it formally consulted. For the
better part of a century, Canada’s boundary readjustments were totally
partisan in-house exercises that, by design, excluded the public.
Such redistributions were regularly subjected to editorial and public
criticism. By 1964, parliament had responded to pressures to replace
the politically charged process by adopting the Electoral Boundaries
Readjustment Act (EBRA). Modelled on a plan instituted a decade earlier by Manitoba for its own provincial redistributions, the EBRA requires
that a three-member independent electoral boundary readjustment
commission be named in every province following every decennial
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census. A judge chairs the commission, and the remaining two members
are selected from the general public (often from universities) by the
Commons’ speaker.
Each commission is to construct the province’s federal districts according to two important principles. First, constituency populations
must not vary by more than 25 percent of that province’s average per
district population unless there are “exceptional circumstances.”
Second, consideration should be given to community of interests or
identity, historical pattern of a constituency, and a manageable geographic size for sparsely populated or isolated regions of a province.
Moreover, the public is encouraged to participate in the process by
presenting written briefs and making representations at public meetings of the commissions.
The introduction of independent commissions has dramatically altered the electoral boundary readjustment landscape in Canada. Determining the size and shape of an electoral district is no longer the
exclusive preserve of elected politicians. Districts are now far more
equal in population within each of the ten jurisdictions than had previously been the case, which represents an important advance for those
who support Canada’s moving toward acceptance of the principle of
“one person, one vote.” The new process encourages public participation,
and as it is federally structured (with one commission for each province),
it rests on the premise that, in a diverse federal system such as Canada’s,
differences of communities, regions, and geographic size deserve consideration when electoral districts are designed (Courtney 2001).
At the time of Confederation, electoral machinery was firmly in the
hands of the governing party. Those chosen to conduct elections were
known partisans, and the party in office saw electoral administration
as an institutional mechanism easily manipulated for its own benefit.
Countless examples of unscrupulous behaviour and of blatantly partial
decision making by election-day officers have been recorded. The ballot
was open and public, not secret. Voting took place over an extended
period of time (six weeks in 1867 and three months in 1872), an individual could stand as a candidate in more than one constituency in the
same election, and election expense limits were either non-existent or
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unenforceable. Intimidation and bribery of voters were not uncommon,
and money and liquor often played an instrumental part in determining
election outcomes in a number of constituencies (Ward 1950, part 4).
None of the corrupt or blatantly partisan practices of conducting
elections in the nineteenth-century has survived. An expanding population, a widening franchise, a better-informed electorate, strict enforcement of election laws, and honest and trustworthy election officials
have combined to make widespread electoral “manipulation and corruption impracticable” (ibid., 277).
There are two significant dates in the democratization of Canada’s
electoral system. In 1874, parliament approved the secret ballot and
same-day elections, and in 1920, it created the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer. Both were responses to, in the first instance, early postConfederation corrupt electoral practices and, in the second, partisan
manipulation of the franchise and the electoral process in 1917. The
chief electoral officer (an officer of parliament whose independent
agency is now widely known as Elections Canada) has brought legitimacy and credibility to the management of elections. The professionalism
in the administration of federal and provincial elections (agencies
similar to Elections Canada exist in every province and territory) is
unquestioned. Possibly the best measure of the strength of Canada’s
electoral machinery comes from the fact that international agencies
and emerging democracies regularly call upon Canada to provide either
impartial election observers or expert assistance in running fair and
open elections.
In all, these four pillars of electoral democracy in Canada stand as
proof of the institutional change and improvement. As now constituted,
they are exemplars of the three benchmarks common to the Democratic Audit series. The franchise has been expanded to include all
Canadians eighteen and older. The voter registration system, although
it captures a slightly smaller share of eligible voters than does enumeration, is nonetheless impressively comprehensive. Electoral districting
by independent commissions charged with redrawing constituency
boundaries is participatory and stands in marked contrast to the partisan, self-interested dealings of the past. And the management and
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operation of the electoral machinery, in response to the earlier manipulated processes, have been turned over to legitimated and authoritative
bodies that brook no political interference. In all, the Canadian electoral system has many impressive strengths.
That said, however, some unresolved questions hang over these building blocks. Voter participation has declined at an alarming rate in recent
elections, both federally and provincially. This cannot be laid at the feet
of either a limited franchise or a glaringly incomplete voter registry.
The fault lies elsewhere. Declining individual and group interest in the
political and electoral process? A growing distrust of politicians, combined with a heightened cynicism about the value of elections? Newly
created outlets, such as Internet social-networking sites, offering alternative venues for citizen participation? An educational system that,
from primary to post-secondary schooling, places less value on electoral participation than it previously did? Whatever the combination of
factors accounting for the decline in voter turnout, there remains a
challenge to civic, educational, and electoral authorities to direct even
greater resources than has so far been the case to resolving the issue
(for more on this, see Gidengil et al., Chapter 5 this volume).
As responsive as Canadian policy makers and courts have been to
gradually more liberal and generous social values, and as inclusive as
such electoral pillars as the franchise and voter registry are, the fact
remains that legislative authorities have made some unexpected (and,
arguably, unwarranted) intrusions aimed at “fine-tuning” Canada’s
election machinery. As will be discussed below, the 2007 statutory recasting of voter identification requirements for federal elections was
underlain by a questionable rationale and may already have had a
deleterious effect on voter turnout. The new statutorily defined voter
identification requirements are at odds with the spirit of the massively expanded and inclusive franchise, and the tradition of a substantial measure of mutual trust between electoral officials and voters that
characterized Canadian elections for decades.
As noted earlier, the introduction of federal independent electoral
boundary commissions has opened the redistribution process to public
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participation and has the merit of encouraging commissions to take
economic, social, and group differences into account when they design
parliamentary districts. This is in keeping with the time-honoured
Canadian practice of accepting differences within the country’s political fabric. But the acceptance of differences has come at a cost. Critics
of the current redistribution process point to two of its features that
work against equality of the vote in Canada.
First, it is noted that permitting variances in average federal district
populations within a province (of greater or less than 25 percent) allows
commissions to construct seats with markedly disparate populations.
In reality, there is far less to support that criticism than might on the
face of it seem to be the case. The record shows that the overwhelming
majority of federal seats have been constructed to contain populations
that are only 10 percent greater or lesser than the provincial average.
This is a distinct improvement over the redistribution record prior to
the introduction of the EBRA in 1964, and by most international standards, it is judged to be quite satisfactory (Courtney 2001; Handley and
Grofman 2008).
Second, although there has been a demonstrable move toward
intraprovincial population equality, interprovincial differences in average district populations have unquestionably increased. This has been
the result of differential growth rates among the provinces in recent
decades (the growth in Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta has
greatly outpaced that in the remaining provinces) and the application
of the senatorial and grandfather clauses to the allocation of seats to
the provinces every ten years. With continued uneven population growth
among provinces, interprovincial variations in district size will persist
as a dominant feature of redistributions in Canada so long as the current formula remains in place. In 2007, the Harper government introduced a bill to grant additional Commons’ seats to Ontario, British
Columbia, and Alberta. By early 2010, the legislation, which had gone
through different iterations over the course of three parliaments, had
not been approved. (For an additional criticism of the current redistribution formula, see Pal and Choudry 2007.)
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Plurality Voting and Voter ID
Plurality Voting
Plurality voting or, more commonly, first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting,
stands as the exception to the other electoral building blocks, for in no
major respect does it differ now from what it was in 1867. A voter marks
a single “X” on a ballot paper opposite the name of a chosen candidate.
At the end of the day, election officials in each geographically designed
electoral district count the ballots and, in turn, declare one candidate
elected. The winner receives either a clear majority of the valid votes
(as was the case in the early post-Confederation period when, typically,
only two parties contested each district) or a plurality of the valid votes
(as is more usual now, with a greater number of parties competing in
every constituency). The fact that the plurality vote is still employed
federally, and in all provinces and territories, is in some measure a
function of the varied and sporadic expressions of competing political
and representational interests calling for either its replacement or its
retention. Unresolved as the debate over FPTP remains, the plurality
vote survives alone among the pillars of Canada’s electoral democracy
in essentially the same manner as it existed at the outset.
FPTP voting is claimed by its supporters to have several strengths.
It is undoubtedly the easiest electoral system for the voter to use and
to understand. Nothing could be much simpler than marking an “X”
for a single candidate and having all the “Xs” counted at the close of
polls to determine the winner. As a rule, FPTP elections in Canada have
produced single-party majority governments. This is seen as an advantage insofar as majority governments tend to last longer and to bring
greater stability to the political system and the economic order than
do minority governments. Of Canada’s forty federal elections to the end
of 2008, three-quarters produced majority governments. They lasted,
on average, two and a-half times as long as minority governments: 4.0
years compared to 1.6 years. (These figures exclude the extraordinary
parliament of 1911-17, whose life was extended by constitutional amendment for one year beyond the constitutionally defined maximum of
five years.)
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In the past, FPTP has been conducive to broadly based, accommodative, centrist parties that succeeded in gaining sufficient support from
the various regions, religious and linguistic groups, and ethnocultural
minorities to win office. These parties (the Liberals and Conservatives)
drew their strength from the fact that they were intraparty coalitions
composed of socially and regionally diverse interests. That has long
been considered an important stabilizing element of the party system
in a country with as many potently centrifugal forces as Canada.
Finally, because majority governments are more likely to result from
FPTP elections than from more proportional methods of voting, ultimate political responsibility and accountability is easier for voters to
establish at election time. By contrast, multi-party coalitions make it
more difficult for voters at election time to assign blame or give credit
to individual par
