Chris Selley: It’s official. Some Canadians’ votes are more equal than others

For a while, the razor-thin election-night outcome in Terrebonne, a riding just north of Montreal, struck many Canadians as an example of the system working as it should: Liberal Tatiana Auguste was initially declared the winner by just 35 votes; standard validation procedures flipped the riding to the Bloc Québécois by 44 votes; and then a judicial recount, triggered automatically because the outcome was so close — less than 0.1 per cent of the turnout — found Auguste had won by a single vote.

“Aha, see, every vote does count!” was a popular sentiment on social media. It was Christmas come early for the “turnout nerds,” as my colleague Colby Cosh calls those irritating people who insist you have a “civic duty to vote,” no matter how uninterested or disillusioned or pig-ignorant you might be.

Ironically, in the end, precisely none of the votes cast in Terrebonne might wind up counting. Turns out Elections Canada put the wrong return postal code on at least some of the mail-in ballots it sent out. At least one was returned to sender, and it was a vote for the incumbent Bloc MP Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné. That would make the election a tie.

“Since Elections Canada cannot by themselves ask for the election to be repeated, we have to bring this situation in front of a judge, in a court, in order to do the election all over again,” Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet told reporters outside the House of Commons.

I argued recently that while Canada’s hand-counted paper-ballot system routinely looks great compared to more supposedly technologically advanced alternatives, Elections Canada really isn’t as good at what it does as it should be. Its website crashed while polls were still open on April 28, when some Canadians would have been trying to figure out where to vote. And for the second election in a row at least, voters in some remote districts were denied their ballots because the fly-in poll staffers bugged out early — in some cases six hours before polls were meant to close.

On what principle would we run the election in Terrebonne election over again, but not the election in Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, where voters encountered signs apologizing for polls that shut down at 2:30 p.m.? Certainly not a democratic principle: If all votes are equal, then a vote denied is a vote denied. Rather, we do it on a practical principle: Those votes wouldn’t have changed the outcome, so Elections Canada just apologizes and moves on.

“I deeply regret that some electors in Nunavik were not able to cast their vote,” Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perreault said, which is a bit like an airline pilot saying he deeply regrets having missed the runway while landing.

It’s only when the outcome in a particular riding is close that anyone seems to really care about these things, which is a sure sign that every vote absolutely does not count, and the agency tasked with making them all count clearly doesn’t make that its Number 1 priority.

I’m open to certain forms of proportional representation, as insufferable as many of its proponents are. I’m open to it in large part because representation-by-population, as currently represented in the House of Commons, is a silly joke. Canada’s federal ridings range in population from 26,665 in Labrador to 134,415 in Kingston and the Islands in Ontario. The population per riding apportioned to the provinces ranges from 38,583 in Prince Edward Island to more than 115,000 in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia.

That’s not unique to Canada, by any means. Labour MP Torcuil Crichton was elected to the British House of Commons by roughly 21,000 registered voters in the riding of Na h-Eileanan an Iar, comprising Scotland’s Outer Hebrides islands. Labour MP Tracy Gilbert was elected in Edinburgh North and Leith by roughly 77,000 registered voters. The idea that creating ridings should consider factors other than simply population is as old as parliamentary democracy itself. It seems natural, for example, that the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut (or the Outer Hebrides) should each have their own MP. It is nevertheless a crazy distortion of the basic idea of bicameral Westminster parliaments: One house is meant to represent population, another is meant to represent the regions.

The effects of this are not small. The average Conservative candidate elected on April 28 received 33,348 votes; the average Liberal candidate, 30,181 votes; the average Bloc candidate, 25,120 votes; the average NDP candidate, 20,601 votes, that number being pulled down by its win in Nunavut, where just 2,945 votes sent Inuk lawyer Lori Idlout back to Ottawa for a second term. The NDP’s Gord Johns needed more than 10 times that many votes form to win Courtenay—Alberni.

If the territories were one riding instead of three, there would be 341 seats in the House of Commons instead of 343, and there would be one fewer New Democrat. (Liberals took the Yukon and Northwest Territories.) If the northern Saskatchewan ridings of Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River and Battlefords—Lloydminster—Meadow Lake were at the same time combined to form one riding of 122,000 people — which is smaller than dozens of other Canadian ridings — there would be 340 seats in the House of Commons, and one fewer Liberal.

Liberal Buckley Belanger won Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River with 2,301 votes. Conservative Rosemarie Falk needed 28,634 to win Battlefords—Lloydminster—Meadow Lake. In a tight minority parliament like we have now, the effects are all the more magnified.

Canada is a functional democracy. Foreign interference aside, we do elections pretty well. But the democratic ideals to which we turn in times of crisis, like elections that are too close to call, are something of a fraud.

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