Westmounters would benefit from two-ballot system, claim electoral reformers

Westmount-St. Louis holds the dubious distinction of being the Quebec riding where the lowest voter turnout, 49 per cent, was recorded in the province's general election last March.

The ADQ, the Quebec Green Party and Quebec Solidaire are working as a coalition to obtain changes to a voting system they claim has long favoured Quebec's few mainstream parties — to the detriment of the smaller ones.

Their group, the Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights (APDR), has launched a lawsuit in Quebec Superior Court through which they hope to invalidate the current electoral system.

The case, which is being argued by Westmounter Julius Grey, is scheduled to be heard in December of next year.

In a summary analyzing the current system's faults, the APDR proposes a mixed-member proportional model involving two ballots. One ballot would be for single-member districts, a second would be used to calculate each political party's support. One of the ballots could also be cast for candidates running in a single, province-wide, multi-member district.

"The second ballot will bring about effective representation for citizens who at present do not have a voice in the National Assembly," says the APDR. Although a "strategic" voting dilemma would continue to exist in the single member districts, the group maintains all voters would be able to express their authentic choice on the second ballot.

Some critics of Quebec's present electoral system believe it is skewed in favour of francophones who live outside the Montreal region. They say that general elections are decided in the 80 regional ridings where the electorate is 90 per cent or more francophone, compared to an 80 per cent proportion across the province.

Henry Milner, a professor of political science at Vanier College and the author of the 1999 academic work, Making Every Vote Count: Reappraising Canada's Electoral System, notes that while the province's anglophones don't split their votes among the parties as much as other Quebecers, Liberal candidates in anglo ridings typically win by very large margins, leading to wasted anglophone votes.

"The proposed electoral reform, by making the system more proportional, will reduce the second aspect of under-representation," he says.

Patrick Daoust, who ran for the Greens in Westmount-St. Louis in the last provincial election, says "the fact that the anglo vote is ghettoized and concentrated into a small number of ridings means that they're underrepresented at the National Assembly just because of the way the system is set up …

"As things stand now, when people feel that they know the outcome in advance, irrespective of the party they support, they don't bother to vote," Daoust adds. He says the proposed reform "would give them back the ability to participate meaningfully in the electoral process, which they have lost now."

Allen Nutik, a Kensington Avenue resident who founded Affiliation Quebec, a pro-federalist provincial party he hopes will be certified for the next election, says the APDR's proposal corresponds to an element in the AQ agenda involving fairer representation of voters.

"For us as an alternate party, where there are pockets of federalists, there's absolutely the possibility of winning seats," says Nutik. "So we're absolutely for electoral reform."