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Spoiler alert for political geeks: This column is going to talk about the disproportionality index and the flaws it exposes in the Canadian political system.

If you aren’t a political geek — if, for example, you stumbled on iPolitics looking for the online Ippolita Jewelry store — stick around. You’ll learn how Canadian political geeks pass the time when a January snowstorm keeps us in lockdown.

The disproportionality index is also known as the Gallagher index, designed by Michael Gallagher, a political scientist from Ireland. (You political geeks already knew that, didn’t you?) It compares the voting systems of the world’s democracies to see which ones produce outcomes that most closely reflect a fair distribution of all ballots cast.

I’ll spare you the math and tell you straight away that Gallagher’s formula shows the voting systems in four of the world’s biggest democracies consistently fail the fairness test: the U.S., Britain, India and Canada.

The consequences can be dire. Take the 2000 U.S. presidential election. Purely on the basis of the number of ballots cast, Al Gore should have won that election by more than a half-million votes, hanging chads and all. Instead, Americans got George W. Bush — one of the worst presidents in U.S. history.

That’s because the U.S. presidential election system is far more complex than a simple vote count. Technically, Americans don’t elect their presidents directly. They vote on a state-by-state basis for representatives to the electoral college. These representatives are duty bound to cast their ballots for the presidential candidate who got the most votes in their particular state.

It’s winner-take-all in 48 of the 50 states. (Real geeks know Maine and Nebraska are the outliers.) The presidential candidate with the most electoral college votes — even if the margin is a single vote — gets all the college votes from that state.

Sound familiar? Here in Canada, as you know, we don’t really elect our prime ministers. We elect 338 members of Parliament from 338 separate geographic ridings. And it’s winner-take-all in each one of those ridings. The party with the most MPs gets to make its leader prime minister.

So we often see gross distortions of the public will in the makeup of our Parliament. We get phoney “majority” governments that fall far short of a majority of the ballots cast.

Justin Trudeau’s phoney majority made him PM, even though his Sunny Ways Liberals scored only 39 per cent of the popular vote. The Green Party got hundreds of thousands of votes, but only one seat in Parliament. It hardly seems fair.

Critics don’t even try to argue that our current system is fairer than PR. Instead, they warn that minority governments are ‘unstable’ and lead to more frequent elections — as if election campaigns are worse than flu season. Critics don’t even try to argue that our current system is fairer than PR. Instead, they warn that minority governments are ‘unstable’ and lead to more frequent elections — as if election campaigns are worse than flu season.

Trudeau, to his credit, knows the system is unfair and has promised some kind of reform, details to follow.

Who has a better system? The Gallagher index shows us that Austria, Belgium, Spain, South Africa, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Germany, Japan and other countries with forms of proportional representation end up with legislatures that more closely reflect the views of their citizens.

In New Zealand, for example, if a party wins 40 per cent of the votes, the system gives it about 40 per cent of the seats. A party with three per cent of the votes gets about three per cent of the seats.

So how is this unfair? Critics of voting reform in Canada don’t even try to argue that our current system is fairer than proportional representation. Instead, they warn that minority governments are “unstable” and lead to more frequent elections — as if election campaigns are worse than flu season.

Moreover, our system has given us plenty of minority governments — a dozen since Confederation. Apparently, we survived them all. Some of them were actually quite productive and progressive, like the minority Liberal government of 1972 to 1974 under Pierre Trudeau.

No, it isn’t fear of instability that has so many of the professional pols, pundits and editorialists bad-mouthing proportional representation. It’s inertia. It’s fear of change.

A PR system would force political parties to re-examine their core values and adjust their strategies. We’d likely see informal alliances or even formal coalition governments — the kind of compromises that wise politicians can make work at least as well as “stable” governments with phoney majorities. We’d see the parties engage in more negotiation and compromise, instead of treating politics as a blood sport.

In the short term, a PR system could give birth to new regional and one-issue parties that win seats. But in the longer term, I think, the two major parties would be forced to change.

The Liberals, who campaigned to the left of the NDP in the October election, and the Conservatives, who owned the hard right, would have to do a better job of straddling the broad middle if they hope to govern. Red Tories would come out of hiding. We’d be spared the sort of uncompromising, ideologically-driven, tone-deaf government we had under Stephen Harper. A melding of the Liberals, NDP and the Greens might take place.

Scores of democracies have adopted major reforms in their voting systems since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The general trend has been to make their lawmaking assemblies more closely representative of the broad political spectrum found among their citizens.

In Canada, meawhile, the basic design of our electoral system looks pretty much the way it looked at the time of Confederation. The only two major reforms since 1867 were recognition of voting rights for women (1919) and for indigenous people (1960). We can do better.

More frequent elections would be a small price to pay for giving voters a better sense that their views are being heard in Ottawa — and that they have a tangible stake in the governing process.

Jeff Sallot is one of Canada’s most experienced and respected political writers. A graduate of the Kent State University journalism school, he shared a Pulitzer Prize with colleagues at The Akron Beacon-Journal for his eyewitness coverage of the massacre of four Kent State students by the Ohio National Guard during an anti-war demonstration. He worked for The Globe and Mail for more than three decades, much of the time as a political journalist based in Ottawa. He started his career in political journalism at The Toronto Star when Pierre Trudeau was prime minister. He taught journalism at Carleton University for seven years until he retired in 2014.

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