Voter recall—known in political science as a citizens’ initiative—is best known for taking place in the basketcase democracy that is California.

In 2003 the “Dump Davis” campaign was launched a year into Gray Davis’ second term in office. Davis, who described the initiative as a “right-wing power grab,” was voted out after an electricity crisis, an ongoing financial crisis, and a public image crisis.

The $66 million recall — the second state-level initiative in US history (most are mayoral) — resulted in a snap election with many candidates including Arianna Huffington, Gary Coleman, and ultimate determinator Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Last year, Illinoisans did some legal fidgeting allowing them to do likewise after facing gubernatorial scumbag Rod Blagojevich. Angry Wisconsinites might follow suit.

Last week, in the run-up to Ontario’s election this October, one Progressive Conservative MPP floated the idea of implementing recall legislation. Although the proposal’s likely just a distraction in a campaign that’s had little substance, the idea has been gaining some traction. One candidate in Toronto’s recent mayoral campaign proposed a similar initiative.

While some commentators have shown interest, others have decried the proposal as an extra apparatus for the Tea Party’s populist toolkit. NDP MPP Peter Kormos dismissed the initiative as being among “interesting things that come from the right.”

Ballot recalls aren’t too popular in Canada. The Albertan government passed the Recall Act in April 1936 but rescinded it 19 months later after public support dropped. A bill to reintroduce the act had its first reading last year.

British Columbia is the only province where voter recall is an option. It was implemented in 1995 by the provincial NDP after a 1991 referendum, but it’s much more stringent than American legislation.

In California, a successful recall petition requires an number of signatories equal to a percentage of those who voted in the last election for the office in question: 12 percent for statewide offices and 20 percent for local senators. Because only half of registered voters actually voted in the 2003 election, only six percent of registered Californians were needed to oust Davis.

Luckily, a voter recall is much harder to stage in BC, where the required levee is 40 percent of all of registered voters — regardless of whether they even voted. Not that an actual recall is necessary. The threat alone can shake things up.

Last summer, anti-HST activists mounted a recall campaign in an attempt to oust Liberal MLAs in ridings with shaky support. What resulted was a premier’s resignation and a related NDP coup, described by one voter as an “internal recall.”

If it is implemented in Ontario, Alberta, or elsewhere, let’s hope voter recall produces better results for democracy than its antithesis.

Emma Woolley at Shameless has provided a comprehensive overview of why International Women’s Day still matters. The upshot is that while the last century has seen improvements for women—especially white, economically privileged, heterosexual, cisgendered ones—that oppression is still the norm around the world and around the corner.

Recently Wendy Glauser wrote on the This blog about the uses of “girl power” imagery in the marketing of Plan Canada’s “Because I Am A Girl” campaign. Keshet Bachan yesterday responded with an interesting post at GirlsReport, about the tensions and harmonies of radical and liberal feminisms. One of Canada’s most radical feminist actions was the 1970 Abortion Caravan, which travelled across the country demonstrating for reproductive justice and ended up shutting down parliament in a spectacular protest that played an important role in securing reproductive sovereignty for Canadian women. Nick Taylor-Vaisey interviewed Barbara Freeman last spring about the caravan and the agressive media strategy its activists used.

I’ll also direct your attention to Katie Addleman’s cover story from our July-August 2010 issue on why voting reform is a feminist issue. It’s worth remembering that Canada ranks shockingly poorly for women’s representation in elected office — below rich European countries like Norway and Sweden, but also below troubled, impoverished states like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Burundi.

Not all change comes at the ballot box, of course, through capital-P Politics. Arts and culture play a huge part in changing social mores. In November 2008 we published Alison Lee’s popular cover story on feminist pornography, and the ways in which women are reclaiming porn, both as consumers and producers (that essay appears in the 2009 edition of Best Canadian Essays, by the way). Last summer, Natalie Samson interviewed Canadian rapper Eternia about the gender dynamics of hip hop, a world in which macho swagger is the norm and female MCs struggle to break through with audiences. Finally, I’ll slip in a link to my own post about the crazy masculinity-panic that seems to periodically afflict the media, and serves to obscure hard truths about the actual gender dynamics of our society.

I highlight these examples of our reporting on issues of feminism and women’s rights because I think it’s important to say that while we’ll mark International Women’s Day, gender justice—for This as a media outlet and an organization—is not now, and will never be, a “special occasion,” relegated to one day of the year. The struggle for gender equality is one in which This has participated for 45 years, and we intend to continue—today, tomorrow, all year, every year.

That's a turnout: Election Night, June 8, 1908, on Bay Street, Toronto.

From the Second World War until the end of the 20th century, roughly 75 percent of eligible voters consistently cast ballots in federal elections. During the Jean Chrétien era, however, that number began to drop and has been declining ever since.

There are many theories as to why this is the case: the increased frequency of elections, less civic obligation, increased skepticism about government’s efficiency, proliferation of negative campaign advertisements, decline in socialization, and administrative changes, like the move from voter enumeration to a permanent electors list. Each exhibits empirical validity, but none entirely explains the downward trend.

It’s not just Canada—voter turnout has declined around the world, and it has been declining steadily by generation. This is particularly troubling because we know that voting is a life skill which needs to be learned early. Disengaged youth today become disenchanted taxpayers tomorrow.

Changing voting rules to allow multiple ballots, transferable ballots, or proportional representation are frequently advanced as improvements Canada should consider. Each has merits and each would improve voter turnout, but only modestly.

It’s time to consider a more drastic move: making voting mandatory.

During the 2000 election, when turnout dipped to 61.2 percent, the chief electoral officer was asked if he would consider proposing to Parliament that voting be made compulsory, as it is in several jurisdictions around the world. He said at the time that he did not support the idea, but if voting dropped below 60 percent he would reconsider his position. In the last federal election the turnout was 58.8 percent. It’s time for a public debate on the idea.

Voting is compulsory in a number of countries, including Australia, which shares our basic political system, constitutional framework, and colonial history. We already make a large number of civic duties obligatory, such as jury duty. So why not voting? There is no reasonable argument that a few minutes out of a citizen’s day every four years or so to make them visit a local polling station is an unfair burden for living in a democracy.

It needs to be clear that what is compulsory is not voting; only spending a few minutes at a polling station. Voters are free to destroy their ballot. In fact, in most countries with compulsory voting, there is a box one can check to state “none of the above”.

With the introduction of compulsory voting in Australia, the turnout went from less than 60 percent to over 91 percent overnight.

Public opinion polls suggest Canadians do not currently support the idea of making voting compulsory (though there is evidence that resistance to the idea is lessening), but the majority of Australians also said they were opposed prior to its introduction. Now, a majority of Australians say they strongly support the law.

Nevertheless, Canadian politicians may be reluctant to lead public opinion. That is why, in 2002, I suggested an alternative: offering a tax credit for voting. Use a carrot instead of the stick.

This is a very Canadian approach, as we have a long history of using taxation to encourage behaviour, including the funding of political parties. A tax credit would provide an incentive to vote. More importantly, it would offset some of the costs associated with voting that disproportionately affect lower-income Canadians. It could be means-tested, and thus paid only to those whose income level is likely to be a barrier to civic participation.

Working people used to be paid to vote by their employers, who were obligated by law to give time off work on election day, but this obligation has been lessened due to the staggering of hours for polling stations. Even when it was provided, paid time off to vote never helped people whose employment was piecemeal, shift work, temporary, or casual—the least affluent members of our society.

There are tangible costs associated with voting, such as transportation, hiring a babysitter, and time spent collecting information and following the issues. These costs affect people differently based on their socio-economic circumstances. In the U.S. mid-term elections in November, for example, it was found that the economic situation had deterred a large number of low-income African-Americans from voting simply because of the administrative costs associated with registration.

To date, the Liberal party of Alberta is the only political party to adopt my idea of a voter tax credit, and no political party in Canada has endorsed compulsory voting.

It is probably a safe bet that the Conservative party of Canada will not introduce compulsory voting on its own, given its fear of all things compulsory (like the long-gun registry and the long-form census), or support a voter tax credit because it will be afraid it might benefit another political party. But there is no evidence that compulsory voting benefits either side of the ideological spectrum.

A higher turnout lends the elected political leaders legitimacy. Low turnout leads to divisive elections and a dissatisfied populace.

The turnout in U.S. mid-term elections is usually around 40 percent, one of the lowest for an industrialized democracy. The disproportionate impact of the right-wing Tea Party movement is only possible because of this low turnout.

In ancient Athens, voting was compulsory and people were financially compensated for taking time off to participate. This became the largest item in the government’s budget, but it was a new experiment in government in which they believed strongly—clearly more strongly than we do 2,000 years later.

Proportional representation comes in, well, not quite 31 flavours, but it’s a lot. There’s more than one way to elect an MP!

Party List System

In list systems, parties put forward a list of candidates, and voters cast a ballot for one party and its slate of individuals. Seats are allocated to parties based on percentage of the popular vote. However many seats the party gets, it fills them with candidates starting at the top of the list and working down. in “closed list” systems, parties supply the lists; in “open list” systems, voters can influence the party lists.

YAY: Simple to understand.

BOO: Voters may not have an MP directly answerable to them; entrenches powerful senior party officials.

IN USE BY: Austria, Denmark, Israel, Norway, Sweden.

Mixed Member Proportional

In MMP, each voter gets two votes: one for their local representative and one for a party. Parliamentary seats are allocated based on the proportional party votes, but are filled by local reps. Parties that get more of the popular vote than individual candidates elected are “topped up” from their own internal list of candidates.

YAY: MMP promotes proportionality in party representation, but voters are also ensured a local MP.

BOO: Party lists can mean reps who aren’t directly elected by the public.

IN USE BY: Germany, New Zealand.

Single Transferable Vote

In STV, each voter ranks the running candidates in order of preference. an equation based on the number of votes and number of seats determines a “quota” number of votes that candidates must receive to be elected. if they meet the quota, the candidate is elected, and voters’ second-choice candidates receive the remainder of the votes. Votes trickle down until the seats are filled.

YAY: individual voters’ ballots aren’t “wasted” if their first-choice candidate loses; their second choice still influences the result.

BOO: Complex behind-the-scenes counting systems can confuse.

IN USE BY: Australia, Ireland

Previously in our special week on electoral reform: Parliament needs women and proportional representation is the solution (to which this article was a sidebar); and our interview with Judy Rebick.

Electoral reform is on the agenda in the U.K. following the May election that saw the creation of the first British coalition government in more than 60 years. As his price for joining David Cameron’s Conservatives, Liberal Democrat party leader nick Clegg has demanded a referendum on voting practices.

The published coalition agreement between Conservatives and Lib-dems reads: “The parties will bring forward a referendum bill on electoral reform, which includes provision for the introduction of the alternative vote in the event of a positive result in the referendum, as well as for the creation of fewer and more equal sized constituencies.”

Clegg has assumed personal responsibility for the push for electoral reform, and early signs are promising. There will certainly be compromises—probably more so than Clegg would like—but the Lib-dems now find themselves off the sidelines and in a position to make good on their rhetorical claims to the greatest British reform movement since 1832.

Illustration by Antony Hare

The recent U.K. election has raised the issue of electoral reform there, as the Liberal Democratic party made it a condition for propping up the Conservative government. This spoke to social activist Judy Rebick, who is a member of Fair Vote Canada, about her group’s campaign to bring some form of proportional representation to Canada.

This: What’s wrong with our current system?

Judy Rebick: Canada has one of the least democratic systems of election and governance in the democratic world. A party can win, and almost always does, a majority of seats with a minority of votes. Which means that a majority of our votes don’t count. Because it’s a winner-take-all system, if you vote for a person who comes in second, even if there are only 20 votes between them, your vote doesn’t matter. For example, we have a very radical right-wing government that only about 33 percent of the people voted for.

This: How would PR work?

Judy Rebick: There are several different forms of it, so it depends on which one you’re talking about.

This: Ontario had a referendum in 2007 that was defeated. It was on mixed member proportional reform (MMP). What’s that?

Judy Rebick: It can be confusing and there can be variations on how it works. To keep it simple let’s say you get two votes: one for your riding MP and one for the party you support. For argument’s sake let’s also say 50 percent would still be elected by first-past-the-post and 50 percent would be elected by PR.

This: How would the PR members be chosen?

Judy Rebick: You’d likely have to have fewer ridings, maybe double the size right now. And they’d be bigger. And the parties would choose who they appoint to the PR seats they have allotted to them.

This: So in the last federal election, for example, the Green party, which received 940,000 votes and didn’t get any seats, would have some members in Parliament.

Judy Rebick: That’s right.

This: And the Conservatives, who got a quarter million votes in Toronto but no seats would also get some there.

Judy Rebick: Likely. The Tories would have put their own list up and whether they had people in Toronto on the list would have been up to them.

This: Why was the referendum defeated?

Judy Rebick: The government in power is against change.

This: But the Liberals set up the Ontario Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform.

Judy Rebick: And then they sabotaged it. There’s no other way to describe it. It was an excellent assembly. But when the assembly decided to go for MMP they completely cut off its resources. They refused any government financing for the campaign, either for or against. And many of the policy wonks, who supported other purer forms of PR, fought against it because their system wasn’t on the ballot. They said, I’m for PR but against MMP because it gives too much power to the parties, so we should go with STV (single transferable vote), which it was in B.C. But in B.C. they said STV takes away too much power from the party.

This: There are a lot of acronyms. How does STV work?

Judy Rebick: Basically, voters rank candidates in their order of preference by numbering the candidates on the ballot. The candidates with the highest preferences are elected. The idea is to eliminate any wasted votes. It’s used in Australia, for example.

This: But it was defeated in B.C.

Judy Rebick: Barely. It received 57 percent of the vote but the government said it had to get 60 percent. It was insane to ask for 60 percent. Who does that? That was stupid and undemocratic.

This: What do you support?

Judy Rebick: I like MMP. I think our culture and traditions are such that we need to have an MP that we have elected. But what I really think should happen is that we have a referendum on PR and then work out the details after.

This: How do you assess the media’s coverage of this issue?

Judy Rebick: The media is notoriously against having any discussion of democracy. It’s really quite extraordinary. That I don’t understand. It does very little explaining of the different systems and what’s involved in each.

This: Do you think there will be electoral reform in the U.K.?

Judy Rebick: I hope so, but I wouldn’t hold my breath because it’s so hard to make these changes.

This: Will what’s happening in the U.K. help the electoral reform movement in Canada?

Judy Rebick: It’s been discouraging. The proponents of PR in Canada, with the exception of in B.C., have not done a good job of explaining it to the public. I first started supporting PR in 1992 and was one of the first people on a public level to argue for it. Certainly there’s a lot more awareness and support of it now. But it’s just not turned into a grassroots movement. I hope it will soon but I’m just not sure.

One Thursday last spring, an Angolan MP named Faustina Fernandes Inglês de Almeida Alves addressed an assembly at United Nations Headquarters in New York City. Those present—members of the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the UN Division for the Advancement of Women, professors, commissioners, Parliamentarians, and observers from more than 40 countries— had gathered to discuss the role of Parliaments in the advancement of women’s rights. It had been 15 years since the Beijing Declaration, adopted during the Fourth World Conference on Women, promised to achieve greater equality for women. It was time to take stock of how the world was progressing.

While the five women representing Canada sat nearby, Alves spoke of her government’s push to increase the number of women in the National Assembly. “This action allowed, from 1992 [the year of Angola’s first general election], the number of Parliamentarian women to rise [from] 26 to 86, in 2008” she announced. By 2008, women accounted for 38 percent of Angola’s main legislative body. This means that Angola—a country where securing basic human rights for women remains a major concern—elects far more women than we do.

Canada ranks 50th on the IPU’s annual list of women’s representation in world Parliaments. Iraq—a place not renowned for its achievements in gender equity—ranks higher. This isn’t because the women’s rights movement in Iraq is particularly advanced; it’s because of the Iraqi electoral system. The first-past-the-post system—used in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and virtually nowhere else— does not help women get into power. In fact, it impedes their chances. Doris Anderson, always ahead of her time, knew this 50 years ago. As editor-in-chief of Chatelaine from 1957 to 1977, she introduced a generation of Canadians to women’s rights issues many hadn’t known existed: abortion, pay equity, female sexuality. But one of her greatest passions was equality in government. Anderson believed that women lawmakers made women-friendly laws. You need only look to Denmark, Germany, Sweden or Spain, each one a top-20 country on the IPU’s list, to know that this still holds today.

Anderson was a fierce proponent of proportional representation, the electoral system used by nearly every Western country and emerging democracy. Under PR, if one party receives 60 percent of the public’s support and another receives 40 percent, those two parties get 60 and 40 percent of the legislative seats, a close approximation of voter sentiment. In addition to being a more accurate reflection of the electorate’s will, PR has also proven to open up legislative bodies to women and minorities. In other words, it produces governments that look more like the populations they serve.

Ten years ago, Larry Gordon, a political activist who had lately become concerned about the future of democracy, approached Doris Anderson and asked if she would join Fair Vote Canada, his new campaign for electoral reform. “At the time she was, like, 80 years old,” Gordon remembers. “She was amazing. She was writing in the mid-50s on things that were considered controversial in the U.S. women’s movement in the mid-60s, and getting death threats.” Anderson quickly agreed to become a founding director of Fair Vote Canada, the final endorsement Gordon had been seeking.

His citizens’ campaign has since become the strongest voice advocating for electoral reform in Canada. It operates 21 chapters in eight provinces, has thousands of members across the country, and its advisory board includes such luminaries as Maude Barlow, Ed Broadbent, and David Suzuki. In May, the group held its 10th annual conference at the University of Ottawa. The lecture hall was packed with people: old, young, veterans of 60s activism, and fans of Bill Maher’s page on Facebook. Most of them had paid $35 to be there, thrilled at the chance to spend nine hours pondering a favourite subject, one usually shunted to the spidery back corners of political debate.

The speakers program progressed from Judy Rebick (“Grassroots Mobilization”) to Walter Robinson (“Reaching Conservatives on Electoral Reform”), and on to Mercédez Roberge after lunch (“Electoral Reform Developments in Quebec”). One by one, they were greeted by applause and rapt attention—the left-wing journalist, the Conservative tax consultant, the Québecoise activist—though it was unclear what, at the end of the day, the crowd would be putting its energy into, aside from remaining optimistic. In the past ten years, Fair Vote Canada has seen the failure of three provincial referendums on voting reform, and there’s nothing on the horizon to indicate another shot. A decade in, the group is no closer to its goal.

Gordon insists that “things are happening,” but his unabated zeal for the project has an air of the religious—he believes so strongly in the mission that its actual feasibility is unimportant. Because it is right, its success is assured, the team cheer seems to go. Someday, we shall overcome.

Larry Gordon has no hair to speak of and wears thin wire-frame glasses that nearly disappear into his ruddy face. He is the kind of person you wish could always come to family dinner— a fantastic storyteller, with the permanent grin and the quick, unfaltering speech of a seasoned professor (or salesman). At 60 years old, he has worked in the nonprofit sector his entire adult life, beginning his career at the Grindstone Island peace and justice centre, a nowdefunct co-operative in the Rideau Lakes. (“It was fabulous,” he says. “A 12-acre island overrun by hippies.”) It was the 1970s, and Gordon had shed the vestiges of his conservative, pro-Reagan Cincinnati upbringing with great success. He worked at Grindstone every summer before moving to Toronto permanently.

Around 1999, he says, after peddling the idea of economic democracy (e.g., worker-controlled production) for 20 years, it occurred to him that he’d never read a single book on democracy and wasn’t really sure what it meant. He picked up On Democracy, by Yale political scientist Robert Dahl. “I had gone into reading that book thinking, well, we’ve got democracy in the Western world, we’ve done that.” But Dahl turned out to be more concerned about reforming democracy in the U.S., Britain, and Canada than exporting it elsewhere, and believed proportional representation was critical to democracy’s survival in the 21st century. “All of a sudden it was like a big light bulb going off,” Gordon says. Canada’s population was not properly represented in Parliament. Democracy in this country was manifestly sick. (Everyone I spoke with from Fair Vote used the same light bulb analogy. Scrutinizing our electoral system, it seems, is good for producing epiphanies.)

Between 1970 and 1993, Western countries using proportional representation saw the proportion of women MPs rise by 14 percent; in first-past-the-post countries, it increased by 7 percent. Germany uses first-past-the-post to populate half of the Bundestag and proportional representation to populate the other; the latter contributes twice as many women. New Zealand’s parliament used to be 21 percent female; in 1993 they switched to proportional representation, and by 2008 it was 33 female. PR was finally ushering women into legislative roles and improving the representation of other minorities, too.

It’s delightfully simple. So why are governments ignoring it?

The Canadian government would say they’re not. There have been three provincial referendums on voting reform since 2005. None of them passed.

Wendy Bergerud sat on the citizen’s assembly that preceded the first: a group of 160 randomly selected B.C. residents, most of whom had no deep political ties and very little knowledge of voting systems. They had been charged by Premier Gordon Campbell with investigating the current system and possible alternatives. For seven months, they heard experts and laymen speak on different voting systems; they learned what was used in different countries around the world, and the effects that various systems had on political bodies. Then, for one month, they deliberated on the recommendation they would make to the B.C. legislature. In October 2004, they submitted their final report. They had decided, almost unanimously, to propose a change from first-past-the-post to a form of proportional representation called single transferable vote. Bergerud, a recently retired Ministry of Forests employee, had no previous interest in voting systems; she is now a member of Fair Vote’s national council, the president of its Victoria chapter, and a member of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. The experience turned her into an activist.

“I think a lot of people were really surprised that the assembly worked together and came up with such a high consensus on the recommendation,” she tells me over the phone from her home in Victoria. Her voice is gruff, though she laughs easily. She answers my questions without pausing to think. “I’ve come across people who expected us to fight like our political parties. But most of us in the assembly were committed to the common good, the public good. We were very serious about communicating on what would work for most people. It seemed, as we learned more about voting systems, that a PR system was going to give parties a number of seats in the House that closely matched their support and that that would change quite a bit how the parties behaved. Another thing we learned is that an awful lot of countries use PR. Here in North America we live in this little hole that doesn’t know much about the rest of the world. We don’t realize that most countries in Europe use one form or another of PR.

“No new country chooses first-past-thepost,” she continues. “Whenever anyone sits down and says, ‘We’re forming a country here, what should we use?’ They always choose some form of PR.”

After their recommendation, Bergerud and other assembly members grew concerned: the government was going to include a referendum on electoral reform with its provincial election in May, but it didn’t look like they were going to do anything to educate the public about the choices that would be placed before them. If voters didn’t understand their options, surely they’d vote to stick with the status quo. Impassioned by everything they had learned, assembly alumni began a massive educational campaign. Bergerud estimates that between them, they gave 800 presentations leading up to the referendum, and on May 17, 2005, the “Yes” side won almost 58 percent of the vote. But it wasn’t enough—the threshold had been set at 60 percent.

“Fundamentally, we won that one,” Bergerud says. “Something that’s annoyed me for a long time is that the press will say, ‘It was rejected here in B.C.,’ and I go, ‘well, 57.8 percent isn’t rejection.’ New Zealand changed into the new voting system with something like 53 percent and Ireland didn’t change with something like 57 percent [against]—so everyone else in the world used 50 percent.” She wonders why the Liberal government would have initiated the assembly process if it was not going to follow through. I ask her if she thinks it was all for show. “Oh, I think it’s highly likely,” she says.

Electoral reform is not a partisan issue: Doris Anderson and Troy Lanigan, the president of the right-wing Canadian Taxpayers Federation, sat next to each other on Fair Vote’s founding board, agreeing on nothing except the need for voting reform. The problem with changing the electoral system is that parties in power—regardless of ideology—never want to do it. Larry Gordon learned this early on in his campaign, and has re-learned it repeatedly over the past decade. “I very naively thought that all left-ofcentre people, all left-of-centre parties would obviously support this, until I discovered that NDP governments, provincially, relate to this just the same way that Conservative governments or Liberal governments do: ‘If first-past-the-post puts us in power, we’re not going to reform anything. If we’ve been really badly screwed by first-past-thepost, we’re all in favour of reform.’ The NDP is 100 percent on board for proportional representation—because everybody should be equal, it’s atrocious that the voting system distorts results, we need democratic equality in this country—except in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, British Columbia or Nova Scotia when they’re in power.” Doesn’t that make him angry? I ask. “Oh, very angry, yeah,” he says, smiling.

In two later referendums, one in B.C. and another in Ontario, the governments in power again dragged their heels and did little to educate voters on the choice they were facing. Consequently, the 2007 referendum in Ontario lost with 36.9 percent of the vote; last year’s in British Columbia lost with 38.2 percent.

June Macdonald, chair of Fair Vote Canada’s Women for Fair Voting committee, echoes Gordon’s anger. “The major parties—the Conservatives and the Liberals—stand to win big under our system. They can parlay a minority popular vote into a majority of seats. They don’t want to give that up.”

Fair Vote’s inaugural conference, on March 30, 2001, took place in Ottawa. There were around a hundred attendees and a single reporter, who, Gordon says, had a single question: “You people don’t think this will ever really happen, do you?”

Ten years and several close calls later, the group remains convinced that it will. Gordon thinks that the current era of minority government, with all of its dramas and public dysfunction, may present Fair Vote with its moment. Proportional representation forces parties to work together; when no one can win an outright majority, the major concern shifts from gaining an edge over the opposition to determining allies and how best to cooperate.

Stephen Harper’s Conservatives would have us believe that coalitions don’t work: the governments of Israel and Italy, which suffer the strains of shifty and ill-advised allegiances and powerful extremist factions, are held up in terrifying example. But you could just as easily blame the dysfunctional politics of Zimbabwe on their firstpast-the-post electoral system, and it would be equally specious. The political culture of a country is not soley a product of the voting system it uses.

In Canada, meanwhile, it’s become very obvious that our parties would rather one-up each other than work together for the public good. The current system compels combative behaviour, a problem that, war-ravaged and corrupt countries aside, proportional representation naturally amends by encouraging cooperation. The prime minister has presented coalitions as undemocratic, says Bergerud, but what many people don’t understand is that “it is quite legitimate and proper for parties to work together to form a government, and that it happens on a regular basis in Europe.”

In April, Environics released the results of a poll on public support for proportional representation, showing that 62 percent of Canadians are in favour of adopting the system for elections. “On the idea of fair voting, Canadians are there, always have been there, will be there,” says Gordon forcefully.

Fine—but getting the issue on the political agenda is another matter. I ask how he sees it happening. He lists several possibilities, but then slowly qualifies each one in turn: the NDP could demand it in exchange for supporting the Liberals in government (but that won’t happen with the current configuration of seats); Britain could reform, thus paving the way for Canada to do the same (but the movement there is very much up in the air); the Supreme Court of Canada could rule first-past-the-post unconstitutional—a Quebec court case to that effect is currently winding its way through the courts (but it’s a long shot).

Gordon pauses. His voice has grown progressively shakier. He knows how it sounds and what he’s up against. In the end, he speaks of serendipity. Large-scale social change, he says, is ultimately effected only when “unexpected events, completely outside of your control, come together at a particular moment in history and allow big change to happen.”

In other words, he’s waiting on a miracle. He acknowledges that it’s a hard thing to mobilize people around.

Whether or not electoral reform ever comes to this country, the fact is that democracy is a people’s concern. The government has proven its lack of interest. Canadians will have to demand it—and Gordon believes that they will, once they understand what they stand to gain. We are living with a system under which 900,000 people can vote for the Green Party and get no representation, but 800,000 Conservatives in Alberta alone can elect 27 Conservative MPs. That’s not a truly representative democracy, and Fair Vote wants to make sure we know that, at the very least.

“Fair Vote Canada is going to continue to do what it’s always done,” Gordon says, rallying: “outreach, trying to mobilize as many people as possible from all points on the political spectrum to appreciate how fundamentally important it is for the issues that you’re passionate about, and for your own quality of life, the community, the quality of environmental life, how fundamentally important it is to you to make sure that we have a democratically elected Parliament.”

He pauses, and then twists the knife. “Which you’ve probably never experienced.”

When Harper prorogued parliament in the closing days of 2009, Canadians took to the streets. Creative Commons photo by Fifth Business.

Britain’s five days of post-election limbo are over as David Cameron, Conservative Party leader and now Prime Minister, announced Britain’s first peacetime coalition government since the 1930s.  Ushering in an era of cross-bench unity, Cameron’s Conservatives will join forces with Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democratic Party.  Cameron has appointed six Liberal Democrats to the cabinet, including Clegg as his Deputy Prime Minister.  In a press conference held today, Cameron said: “We are not just announcing a new government and new ministers. We are announcing a new politics. A new politics where the national interest is more important than party interest, where co-operation wins out over confrontation, where compromise, give and take, reasonable, civilized, grown-up behaviour is not a sign of weakness but a sign of strength.”  Clegg added, “Until today, we have been rivals: now we are colleagues. That says a lot about the scale of the new politics which is now beginning to unfold.”

If reading this makes you wonder, as I did, what it would take to see a similar spirit of cooperation sweep Canada’s house of commons, it’s for a good reason. Canadian minority governments—i.e., the last three consecutive ones—are strangely reluctant to form coalitions. Instead of creating solid coalition governments in which the parties are forced to negotiate—in Cameron’s words, creating “a shared agenda and a shared resolve”—Canadian parties tend only to reach across the aisle on a case-by-case basis, leading to constant brinksmanship and partisan sniping.

The exception, of course, came just six weeks after the 2008 elections when an attempted coalition between Liberals and New Democrats, with support from the Bloc Quebecois, would have ousted Stephen Harper’s conservative minority government from power, creating a majority coalition on the Hill. Harper, in response, prorogued parliament to allow the Liberal Party to consume itself with infighting and ultimately scuttle the coalition.

While Canadian politics has been defined by six years of minority government—six years during which the NDP has not meaningfully advanced the cause of proportional representation, by the way—British politicians have realized the power of broad support, and look set to overhaul their electoral system, too. It’s enough to give a Canadian a serious case of coalition envy.

“Working people did not cause this crisis … and we won’t pay for it!”

These words were printed in bright red letters on a flyer recently published by the Communist Party of Canada as part of its effort to raise public awareness about the root causes of the global economic crisis. The flyer sat atop a pile of documents at the entrance to the Communist Party’s central office in Toronto, where, for 17 years, Miguel Figueroa has been busily engaged in resisting mass capitalism. The room isn’t big, but it is filled with desks, documents, books and other mementoes. The walls are lined with pictures of Lenin and other legendary communist leaders.

Not far from the CPC’s headquarters, I met a gregarious Figueroa at a Greek restaurant on Danforth Avenue in Greektown, just east of Toronto’s downtown. He’s stepped out for a few seconds when the waitress approaches me and asks if I want something. “No thanks, I’m just waiting for someone,” I reply.

She knows who I’m waiting for: “I think it’s Miguel, yes?” When he returns inside and sits down, another woman coming around to clean the tables recognizes him. “Hi Miguel! How are you?” she asks cheerfully. He’s a regular.

It’s not just his neighbourhood restaurant: Figueroa is also a regular in Canadian left-wing politics. He has been leader of the Communist party for 17 years. Since 1992, in fact—which makes him the longest-standing active federal party leader in Canada. None of the leaders for the four parties represented in Parliament even come close to that; Michael Ignatieff has been leading the Liberals since 2008, Stephen Harper the Conservatives since 2004, Jack Layton the NDP since 2003. Even Gilles Duceppe, who seems to have been at the helm of the Bloc Québécois for an eternity, has only been in charge since 1997. To put things in perspective, the Conservative party has had eight different leaders since 1992, and the Liberal party five.

Figueroa says he’s held on for all this time mostly because the hectic job requires it, and because, well, somebody has to do it. “We have many people in our party who are much more capable than I am, but who aren’t in a position to work for the party full-time,” he says.

His term as leader only represents the second half of Figueroa’s career as a member of the CPC. Before being elected head of the party, he spent some 15 years working for the Communists in various capacities at both ends of the country. He became a party organizer in Vancouver in 1978 and moved to Halifax in 1986, where he led the Atlantic branch of the party. In total, the 57-year-old Figueroa has devoted more than 30 years of his life to further build a party in which— despite public support for communism and socialism that is weak at the best of times—he still believes.

And he might have reason to. After all of the hardships his party has endured through the years, the Communist Party of Canada is still alive, which is an achievement in itself. It was formed in 1921 in a barn near Guelph, Ontario. It didn’t take long for the RCMP to target the party and start harassing it, even arresting its leaders in 1931. Nonetheless, several members of the CPC were elected to municipal and provincial offices in the following years. But in 1940, the party was banned because it opposed the country’s participation in the Second World War, and hundreds of its members were imprisoned.

Ironically, the subsequent years were those during which the Communists’ popularity peaked. The party resurfaced as the “Labour-Progressive Party” and, according to former party leader George Hewison, had about 25,000 members after the war. One of them, Fred Rose, was even elected to the House of Commons when he represented the party in the Montreal riding of Cartier in the 1943 federal by-election. But after Soviet Communist leader Nikita Khrushchev exposed the cruelty of Joseph Stalin and his regime in 1956 in the USSR, disenchanted communists around the world left their respective parties. The Communist party was no different, and its membership dwindled until the fall of communism in Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991.

Then all hell broke loose.

It was December, 1992. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the CPC held a watershed convention. The year before, the party had split along ideological lines: one group, led by General Secretary George Hewison, sought to shift the party’s philosophy from Marxism-Leninism to social democracy, while a faction led by Figueroa opposed the change. Eleven opponents were expelled from the party with Figueroa resigning in sympathy. Figueroa and his group subsequently threatened court action against Hewison and his colleagues to challenge the dismissal. The two sides reached an out-of-court settlement, and at the 1992 convention, a new central committee was elected, with Figueroa at the head of a fractured party in need of serious repair.

Figueroa’s political ascent was unlikely: The Montrealborn Figueroa was not a part of a political family such as the Trudeaus or Martins. He spent a few years in the United States as a child and, after his parents separated, he and his mother moved back to Quebec when he was beginning Grade 9. “We were on welfare,” he says. “The bailiffs actually came to our apartment. They broke down the door with a sledgehammer, came in and confiscated all of our belongings because my mother couldn’t pay some of the bills. They left us with our clothes, our books, and our beds. It was very humiliating for my mother, devastating for her.” This was in 1969 or 1970, he says, an era when an officer could simply show up at a nonpayer’s home and “clean up the house.” “It wasn’t as if it was a decision of the court or she was called to court and didn’t show up. It was draconian.” It was his political awakening.

The incident drove him to get involved in Montreal’s antipoverty movement, where he met lefties, went to meetings, and read the classics of Marxist literature and theory. After leaving Quebec, he joined the National Union of Students (now known as the Canadian Federation of Students) and became interested in the Communist Party. He liked its approach, the fact that it was trying to build unity, working with unions and community organizations, rather than just shouting slogans. But the CPC was also pro-Soviet at the time, a position that placed it in the political wilderness as American rhetoric about the “Evil Empire” was in the ascent. In American schools, says Figueroa, pupils were taught “in Russia, the KGB can come in at three in the morning and take your toys! And there’s nothing scarier to a kid than having their toys taken. It’s dramatic!” But he agreed with most of the party’s program and, defying the anti-communist fog, decided to take out a membership. He hasn’t looked back since.

Even those who once disagreed with Figueroa acknowledge he is an impressive organizer. George Hewison—once Figueroa’s courtroom opponent over the party split— tells me that Figueroa is “very talented, very intelligent.” Johan Boyden, General Secretary of the Young Communist League of Canada, says that Figueroa is “very dedicated.” I started to understand why Figueroa commands such respect when he elaborated on socialist theories and history. To most people, and even by its very nature, communism is associated with working-class struggle and the uprising of the proletariat. Although Figueroa was never an aristocrat, his political education didn’t exactly happen at the bottom of a coal mine: After completing his pre-university studies in arts and science at Dawson College in Montreal and taking courses in urban studies and economics at McGill and Concordia universities, he spent six months studying political economy at the Lenin Institute in Moscow in 1985-86, where Hewison was one of his classmates. Figueroa then returned to the classroom in the early 1990s to start his graduate studies in international development at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax. He never completed his thesis though, because, among other things, he was elected Communist Party Leader.

The first order of business was whipping the party into shape for an election, and, in the process, Figueroa ended up reshaping Canadian elections themselves. The Communists were struggling to register the minimum of 50 candidates required under the Canada Elections Act to get official party status and participate in the 1993 federal election. This meant that the Communist Party would not be on the ballots, and that Elections Canada would also deregister the party and seize its assets. Figueroa challenged the provision on the basis it discriminated against smaller political parties. He pursued the suit for six years, and in 1999, Justice Anne Molloy of the Ontario Court ruled that the 50-candidate threshold was, according to official documents, “inconsistent with the right of each citizen to run for office” and ordered that it be reduced to two candidates.

The Attorney General’s office appealed the decision, and the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that the threshold was indeed constitutional, although parties that could field at least 12 candidates for an election would be able to have their party’s name on the ballot next to the candidate’s name. Not content with the halfway measure, Figueroa appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, claiming the rule violated Section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The hearing started in November 2002, and in June 2003, the historic Figueroa v. Canada (Attorney General) decision determined that “the 50-candidate threshold is inconsistent with the right of each citizen to play a meaningful role in the electoral process.” Ten years after his party was deregistered, Figueroa had successfully forced Elections Canada to overturn its rule and the Communist Party of Canada was back on the ballot.

Being on the ballot is one thing; winning is another, and the Communist Party remains a distant also-ran when it comes to actually delivering votes. During the CPC’s decade of oblivion, Figueroa remained active on the political scene by running twice as an independent candidate in the Canadian federal election. In 1993, in the riding of Parkdale-High Park, he finished ninth out of 11 candidates; in 1997 in Toronto’s Davenport riding, he finished seventh out of eight.

Though it still barely registers on the electoral scale, the Communist Party’s Supreme Court fight remains a historic win, and not just for Figueroa and the party.

“It established new grounds in evaluating election law,” says Peter Rosenthal, the CPC’s lawyer at the time. Rosenthal has worked on a number of cases related to electoral law, but believes this one spawned several others and had positive consequences for small parties. Nelson Wiseman, associate professor with the department of political science at the University of Toronto, had originally predicted there would be a proliferation of parties following the Supreme Court’s decision. “But the government has tightened up the requirements for registering a party,” he says, noting the number of registered federal parties is not much higher today than it was in 2003: among other things, the number of members required for party registration was increased from 100 to 250, and each party must have three other officers in addition to its leader.

But while new parties haven’t exactly mushroomed since Figueroa v. Canada, some existing ones have been able to survive. “My hero!” exclaims Blair T. Longley upon hearing Figueroa’s name. The Marijuana Party of Canada leader, whose party has been decimated in recent years due to several of its members joining more prominent parties, admits “We wouldn’t exist without Miguel Figueroa and Peter Rosenthal’s work. None of the small parties would exist.” Indeed, several of those parties rallied behind Figueroa during the court challenge, and the case made for strange bedfellows: in addition to the Marijuana Party, the right-wing Christian Heritage Party—which couldn’t meet the 50-candidate threshold for the 2000 election—joined in. Pastors associated with the party even asked their congregations at Sunday church services to pray for Figueroa while the case was being debated.

“This is a landmark case in the status of small parties,” says Boyden. “It’s a great advancement for democracy in Canada because it recognized that there was a role for those parties…. The Green Party, which is now much larger than it was back then, was right there at the table in the Figueroa case,” he says.

In addition to his work as party leader, Figueroa is an editorial board member of the People’s Voice, the nationally distributed bi-monthly newspaper published by the CPC. But in spite of the party’s rebirth, publications and political involvement, Figueroa is still leading a small party that only represents half of the Communist left in Canada, the other being the similarly (perhaps confusingly) named, but ideologically different, Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist). Moreover, the Communist Party currently has approximately 500 members coast to coast. Nevertheless, Figueroa’s party is a bit like one of those inflatable bop bags that always get back up after being knocked down; it simply refuses to give up and go away. No matter how hard the government, the RCMP or Elections Canada has tried to kick it off the political scene, the Communists have always found a way to return. Figueroa is simply the architect of the latest rebuilding, which, even after 17 years, hardly threatens to overturn the decades-long status quo of Liberal or Conservative rule. But like its leader, the Communist Party of Canada is a regular, a fixture on the scene, not the flashiest customer but a reliable one. And like Figueroa, it intends to stay that way.

So this past June, Finkel teamed up with some change-hungry Albertans and created the Democratic Renewal Project. Its goal is “to provide Albertans with a united progressive alternative government to the Conservative dynasty.” Here’s its plan:

1. Form a united alternative: Says Finkel, “We need to create the sense that there is a real contest in Alberta, and that can only happen if the centre-left parties, whose current policies are virtually indistinguishable even if their political cultures are different, form a united alternative.” But this doesn’t mean a new party. Instead, the DRP wants the existing Alberta Liberal Party and NDP to cooperate to get fed-up Albertans to the polls by promoting such common topics as greater social justice, diversifying the economy, and environmental sustainability, under a “United Alternative” banner.

2. Get proportional representation: The DRP believes that ditching the province’s current past-the-post electoral system is vital to ditching the Tories. But, says Finkel, since the Conservatives would never agree to a referendum on the topic, the switch would have to be pushed through the Legislature by the United Alternative, once it had enough seats.

3. Adopt a non-compete policy: To get those seats, the DRP is calling for the Liberals and the NDP to run only one centre-left candidate per riding. Had this been done in 2008, at least an additional 12 left-centre candidates would have been elected, more than doubling the progressive presence.

4. Get the Liberals & NDP on board: Of course, for any of this to happen, the provincial Liberals and NDP need to agree to it. Finkel says Liberal leader David Swann already supports the DRP and that “there are many individuals in both parties that recognize that we cannot go on like this, with two centre-left parties battling each other and allowing the Tories an automatic victory.”