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The following is excerpted from The Gazette article Canada’s voting system has the potential to distort electoral outcomes, expert says
In Quebec, the distortions caused by the current winner-take-all voting system have sometime resulted in a government taking power with fewer votes than its nearest rival, said Matthew Hayday, an associate professor of history at the University of Guelph.
“Quebec is one of the worst provinces in how the first-past-the-post system distorts the popular vote,” he said.
One reason for that is that anglophones and allophones overwhelmingly support the Liberals. Because those groups are concentrated in the Montreal area, their overwhelmingly pro-Liberal vote is under-represented in the overall outcome.
“I think that the fact there is the concentration of linguistic minorities in Quebec in certain regions accentuates and drives home the inequalities and the flaws in our current electoral system, which has an impact on democracy,” Hayday said.
“I think Quebec is the case that really shows just how inequitable it can be because you see just how wide the gap can be between the popular vote and seats in the legislature,” he added.
The big loser in this week’s election was the CAQ, which won only 19 seats even though it was not far behind the other two parties in the popular vote, with 27.06 per cent, Hayday noted. In past elections, the first-past-the post system has put the Liberals at a disadvantage.
In 1994, the PQ swept to power with a 77-seat majority government under Jacques Parizeau, with one-third of a percentage point more votes than the Liberals, Hayday noted.
Further Reading
Contemporary Quebec
Selected Readings and Commentaries
Edited by Michael D. Behiels and Matthew Hayday
In the last seventy years, Quebec has changed from a society dominated by the social edicts of the Catholic Church and the economic interests of anglophone business leaders to a more secular culture that frequently elects separatist political parties and has developed the most comprehensive welfare state in North America. In Contemporary Quebec, leading scholars raise provocative questions about the ways in which Quebec has been transformed since the Second World War and offer competing interpretations of the reasons for the province's quiet and radical revolutions.
To learn more about Contemporary Quebec, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.
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