Democracies are arithmetic before they are anything else, and the arithmetic of Monday night in Quebec produces a strange number: 28. Twenty-eight per cent of the popular vote was enough, in the end, to make the Parti Québécois the government. Never in the province’s history had a governing party taken power on so thin a slice of the electorate, and the outcome, CBC reported, has revived a debate over how Quebec elects its leaders that has been smouldering for years without ever quite catching fire.
The seats tell the rest of the story. The PQ won 59 of the 127 ridings in the National Assembly — enough for a minority government, and a fragile one, as rews noted when the sovereignists returned to power on less than a third of the vote. All five of Quebec’s major parties finished above 10 per cent on Monday; the seat count pretended otherwise. François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec, the governing party itself until the ballots were counted, captured 13 per cent of the vote and was wiped off the electoral map entirely. Québec Solidaire converted 12 per cent into just nine seats. One party in seven-ish of the voters, then, simply vanishes from the benches of the legislature.
The men who count the wrongs
Ted Cragg, a spokesman for the national advocacy group Fair Vote Canada, which campaigns for some form of proportional representation, argues that the first-past-the-post model has outlived the era of two-party contests it was built for. “We have elections to choose representatives that reflect our wishes, but the system is not reflecting those wishes,” he said in an interview. “It’s set up in such a skewed way that people win seats with less than 30 per cent of the vote. Governments now are formed with 30 per cent of the popular vote.”
Jean-Pierre Charbonneau, president of the Quebec organization Mouvement démocratie nouvelle, hears the disillusion directly. “People saw the result. We have a National Assembly that doesn’t reflect the votes that were cast,” he told Radio-Canada. Many voters, he said, feel disenfranchised by the way their ballots translate — or fail to translate — into seats.
Promises, promises
Here the story grows ironic, and the irony is Canadian and Québécois at once. During the campaign, the PQ’s leader, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, said he was committed to electoral reform. Québec Solidaire has backed reform, and so has the Conservative Party of Quebec. On paper, then, the new assembly contains majorities in favour of changing the very system that produced its odd geometry.