Article content continued

But explicitly regional parties aren’t the issue. The truth is that the two old “national” parties are regional parties in all but name. In 35 elections since 1896, the Conservatives have only carried Quebec three times: most elections they have struggled to win more than a few seats. That record of futility is mirrored by the Liberals in the West, where they last won a majority of the seats in 1949: again, as often as not they have been held to single digits.

To look at the electoral map, you’d think there were no Tories in Quebec, and no Liberals in the West. In fact, the Tories have averaged more than 25 per cent of the vote in Quebec, the Liberals the same in the West, throughout their respective droughts. It’s the electoral system, rather, that produces this funhouse image, since it rewards parties, not for “building the broadest possible coalitions,” but for clumping their support geographically.

Not just a distortion, this has consequences. Ed Broadbent has lately pointed out that, had the Liberals elected more than two MPs in the West in 1980, they might not have proceeded with the disastrous National Energy Program. But the damage is even greater in the longer view. One of the abiding ills of Canadian politics has been its tendency to one-party rule. From 1896 to 2006 the Liberals governed the country nearly three years out of every four.

Was that 110-year period of dominance a reflection of a broadly-shared national preference for Liberal government? Not so much: on average, their share of the popular vote exceeded that of the Tories by just two percentage points, 41 to 39. Rather, it was their ability to scoop up nearly all the seats in one province — Quebec until 1984, Ontario after that. That, too, is a legacy of FPTP.