Basking in the immediate glow of his victory on May 2, 2011, Stephen Harper promised he would lead “the government of all Canadians, including those who did not vote for us.”

That was an extremely generous promise. Though nearly six million people cast ballots for Harper’s party, almost nine million voters went with other political choices.

Add to that about 10 million people who didn’t vote at all, and you can truly appreciate what a magnanimous mood Harper was in that night. After gathering only 24 per cent of support from eligible voters, he was offering to lead for the other 76 per cent of Canadians, too.

Such is the math of our creaky old “first-past-the-post” voting system and, it should be said, Harper is hardly the first leader to have profited from it. Very rarely have federal governments been elected with more than 50 per cent support of the Canadian public in the past century.

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Still, if Harper had kept that promise, chances are we wouldn’t be talking today, four years later, about the need for a total overhaul of how we elect our federal government.

The main motivation for fixing our voting system — an issue reignited this week with Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s substantial democratic reform announcement — can be summed up in just two words: “politicization” and “microtargeting.”

Start with microtargeting. Ironically, Conservatives didn’t begin winning elections in Canada in recent decades until they scaled back their ambitions.

Rather than try to assemble a mass-market base of support when the old right-wing parties merged, the new Conservative party went looking for pockets of voters in selected regions, where a few votes here and there could shift a seat in their party’s direction.

That’s microtargeting. It works really well in a first-past-the-post, winner-take-all system. It would not work if governments were elected based on their proportion of the popular vote.

If all you need is a “minimum winning coalition,” as Harper’s old campaign chief, Tom Flanagan, described it, it’s a waste of time and energy to look for the support of more than 50 per cent of the population. Or, as Harper’s old campaign strategist Patrick Muttart colourfully explained it, Conservatives had to focus their sights on “Dougies” in the suburbs, and forget about “Zoes,” the yoga-practising condo dwellers who would never vote for Harper.

We still like to pretend that political parties are looking for a big, pan-Canadian victory, but the reality is that political success in this country has been built in recent years by finding the tools and tactics to do microtargeting effectively. Technology and big data have turned this strategy into a much more precise science for all parties.

In short, we all know now that rewards don’t go to the political players with the big picture; they go to the ones who think small. An election that required a 50-per-cent-plus victory in the popular vote, on the other hand, would force parties to seek broad, pan-Canadian appeal.

Here’s where the hard-headed pragmatists will say: So what? It doesn’t matter how you win. The point is winning. Elections and politics aren’t for the faint of heart, and “losers” don’t get to form governments, as Harper once said.

But if politics is about thinking small, government should be about thinking big. This is where Harper was on the right track on May 2, 2011 — promising to take an approach to government that he did not take to political campaigning, mindful of the needs and concerns of people who didn’t vote for the Conservatives.

It proved to be an over-ambitious promise, though. The past four years have been littered with examples of the politicized opposite: selective audits of charities seen as unfriendly to Conservatives, PMO press releases that sound an awful lot like party fundraising letters, cabinet ministers trotted out to slam court rulings or scientific findings that rile up the Conservative “base.” Pages and pages of tax provisions have been created to give “boutique” favours to microtargeted segments of the population — budgets for Dougies. Measures for Zoes? Not so much.

It’s being said this week that Trudeau’s proposal to end the first-past-the-post system is not a vote-getter. (And this is how everything gets measured in an election year.) Canadians don’t care much about how governments are elected; they only care for how they’re governed.

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The problem with that proposition is that campaigning and governing are not two separate things anymore — how parties get elected is how they govern, even if that means having more enemies than friends among the citizenry.

If Canada is more than a nation of microtargets — which I happen to think it is — shouldn’t we have a voting system that sees the country that way, too?

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