We’re Consociational and We Hate it
What makes the majoritarian impulse so strong in Canada when the consociational elements keep the country together?
During the summer months, Canadian political commentary comes close to shutting down. While American political talk shows continued through the summer “break” interrupted–and seem to have no trouble finding new material–Canada’s talking heads signed off on St. Jean Baptiste Day and told us to set our alarms for Labor Day. Commentary, like many other things, abhors a vacuum, and discussion of recent federal opinion polls has leapt into the void, particularly the common finding that the Conservative Party would win a plurality (but not a majority) of seats in a new House of Commons if a fresh election happened this summer.
In British or Australian parlance, this election result would be described as “hung parliament, Conservatives largest party.” But in Canada, it is called a “Conservative minority government” or simply “the Conservatives win.” Among the scope of parliamentary systems in Europe and elsewhere, the Canadian one is not particularly creative. Like the British system that inspired it, Canada’s system is very majoritarian, winner take all. Members of Parliament win their constituencies on a first-past-the-post basis, and the party winning a majority of parliamentary seats forms the government. That is necessarily the case in a two-party system, and Duverger’s Law tells us that first-past-the-post creates strong incentives to have a two-party system. Unless it doesn’t. There has been a tendency throughout the democratic world toward fragmentation of party systems, and new parties have been emerging and finding success even in majoritarian systems. Twelve parties currently have at least one sitting member at Westminster, and five parties have seats in the Canadian House of Commons. Despite this, the norm in Canada is that the largest party in the House of Commons forms a single-party government, majority or minority. In the case of a minority, this government is vulnerable to losing the confidence of the House, in which case a new general election takes place.
However, the confidence principle in a parliamentary system simply states that the government must have the confidence of the legislature, defined by a simple majority. Any government that maintains confidence and gets its legislation through the House has confidence. In 2010, David Cameron had to wait five days after the U.K. general election to become prime minister, as it took that long to demonstrate that he had a majority of the House behind him via a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. And in New Zealand, National Prime Minister Bill English resigned in favor of Labour’s Jacinda Ardern even though National had ten more seats in Parliament when all the smaller parties refused to back National. In Sweden, the Moderate Party forms the government from third place, with the largest group, the Social Democrats, leading the opposition, and the right-wing Sweden Democrats supporting the government from outside. In Australia, the Liberal Party often leads a Coalition government from second place, and in Canada, second-place parties have governed in the provinces, most famously in Ontario after the 1985 election.
Yet “In the minds of Canadians, the party with the most seats wins the election,” and that arguing otherwise is “merely technical.” In other words, Canadians only accept the logic of the parliamentary system to a degree, and follow a strictly majoritarian logic, rejecting the idea that power could somehow be shared, even when the election of a hung parliament dictates it. The political scientist Arend Lijphart wrote at length about the distinction between “majoritarian” (winner take all, the British system the clearest example) and “consensual” or “consociational” systems, where power is shared among members of a coalition that is usually assembled after an election. As democracies have become more acutely aware of their pluralism in the decades since the Second World War, there has been a tendency toward an increase in the number of political parties and a shift toward proportional electoral systems. This debate has taken place in Canada as well.
Canada’s plural and consociational nature is obvious. It was the justification for creating a federal system in 1867, and is also apparent in the Canadian political system’s imperative to reconcile English and French, and deal with the First Nations and the multicultural nature of the country. Yet many Canadians chafe at all the conciliation that needs to take place, and criticize negotiations among elites as undemocratic.
What makes the majoritarian impulse so strong in Canada when it is the consociational elements that keep the country together? Canadians, especially in the nine majority English-speaking provinces, are liberals and individualistic, and continue to believe in the Anglo-Saxon liberal tradition, which elevates individuals who aggregate into temporary majorities rather than groups based on a permanent identity. Canadians see the American example of individuals being elected to offices directly, and some surely see that as more democratic and producing more accountability than the parliamentary system’s methods of government formation, which can take place in private negotiation (“we didn’t vote for this! The Laurentian Elites are blinding us with political science!”). There is also the authoritarian populist impulse, which subscribes to Rousseau’s notion of an undifferentiated general will defined by the majority of the moment.
In a minority parliament, the Liberal Party more naturally turns to the New Democratic Party and the Green Party for support, while the Conservatives must look to the regional nationalist Bloc Quebecois, a party not necessarily committed to a stable government. Thus, consociationalism takes on left-wing tones while majoritarianism seems to belong to the right (and to the populists).
The challenge for Canadian politics in the next election may well be that a broadly consociational result (that is, a minority parliament) may not be compatible with the convention of the largest party forming a government alone, especially if a Conservative plurality happens alongside the center-left bloc (Liberal, New Democratic, Green) combining for a majority. The only recent relevant example is the 1979 federal election (my first memory of Canadian politics), where the Progressive Conservatives won a plurality of 136 seats, the Liberals and New Democrats combined for 140, and the Quebec-based Créditistes (similar enough to the Bloc for this narrow comparison) won 6. The Conservatives formed the government and there had to be a second election nine months later. Current polling suggests that we could be headed for a repeat of this scenario. If deep inside Canadians dislike the parliamentary system, they may dislike it even more after the election.
References:
https://twitter.com/Sean_Speer/status/1677643049806057472
https://twitter.com/Anthony__Koch/status/1680940448938852354
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/liberal-ndp-agreement-wherry-analysis-1.6804401
https://worldcat.org/title/1014226741
https://worldcat.org/title/1088014209
https://www.worldcat.org/title/778332870
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2009820
https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/sppp/article/view/69884