Yesterday 60 per cent of Canadian voters cast their vote for either the New Democrat party, the centre-left Liberal party, the Greens or the separatist Bloc Quebecois. Yet, with just 39 per cent of the vote, the Conservative party of Stephen Harper contrived to win 167 of the 310 seats in the House of Commons – a working majority.

The result has shocked political pundits. Canada is rightly regarded as a ‘centre-left’ country with its Liberal party dominating 20th century politics, producing iconic politicians such as Pierre Trudeau, Lester Pearson and Jean Chrétien. However, after the defeat of Chretien’s successor, Paul Martin, in 2005 the party has been in a crisis that has got gradually worse. Despite squandering a budget surplus left to it by the Liberals, and his government having been found in contempt of parliament, the Conservative party of Stephen Harper, a dull but workmanlike politician, was always expected to poll between 35-40 per cent, with the Liberals down to a meagre 20 per cent.

However, while the Liberals and the Bloc Quebecois were routed, the Conservatives made no inroads into their vote share. Instead, the big beneficiary was the NDP who won 103 seats on 31 per cent – the party’s best ever result. It is a magnificent achievement for the NDP but will be tinged by disappointment at the overall result. In advance of the election, virtually all opinion polls correctly predicted that Harper’s Tories would thrash Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals and correctly predicted that the Liberals would suffer their worst ever defeat. But with the NDP projected to win up to 100 seats, and the Liberals around 60, it was felt that there was a good chance that Canada would get its first NDP-led government in coalition with the Liberals. Despite the opinion polls being largely accurate, the results in individual constituencies confounded everybody.

The main battleground where the election was decided was in Ontario, Canada’s most populated province, which elects 106 MPs. A whopping 73 seats were won by the Conservatives who polled 44 per cent whereas the NDP won 22 and the Liberals 11, with both parties winning 25 per cent of the vote. But if you look at the constituency results, particularly in Southern Ontario, there is a clear trend: Conservative candidates defeating Liberals by margins of 5 per cent or less with the NDP candidate polling a strong third. Having worked for the NDP back when they were Canada’s fourth largest party, I can confidently say that NDP voters would always prefer a Liberal candidate over a Conservative. In other provinces such as British Columbia, New Brunswick and Yukon, there are also cases where this pattern is repeated. There are numerous examples where the NDP candidate ran the Conservative a very close second, and where the Liberal or Bloc vote effectively decided the result in allowing the Conservative to win with less than 40 per cent.

So the truth is that the Conservatives did not make a big breakthrough in this election. From winning 143 seats on 37.5 per cent in 2008 they have managed to win 167 seats on 39 per cent purely because of a fragmentation of the leftwing vote. The only reason they have won a majority is because of the nature of First Past the Post. Had just a small proportion of NDP voters in Liberal-Conservative marginals lent their votes to the Liberals, and vice versa, they would have kept out an unpopular Conservative government.

Already media commentators and politicians have talked about the need for electoral reform to prevent a situation where a government is elected even though it is clearly not supported by most of the electorate. There is little doubt that a preferential voting system would have delivered an NDP-Liberal coalition with a workable majority – a result that would have better reflected the votes.

Our sister party the NDP has made a spectacular breakthrough, jumping from 36 seats to 103, becoming the official opposition and a viable party of government. But its triumph is bittersweet because the Canadian people will get another term of a Conservative government that most of them did not want and, besides, being the official opposition is no substitute for being in government. Having both campaigned on policies that would have increased corporation tax for big companies while cutting tax for small businesses, and a controlled deficit reduction plan, the NDP and the Liberals will be unable to stop the swingeing spending cuts planned by the Conservatives.

The result in Canada should be a warning to Labour voters unsure about AV. Before people vote on the AV referendum this Thursday they have to ask themselves the following question: do they want to keep an unfair system that means that elections continue to be decided by a few thousand people in a minority of seats or do they want something fairer and more representative of what voters want? Canada’s experience this week has shown that voting ‘yes’ to AV is the only answer. 

Photo: meddygarnet