The current voting system suits the CAQ government just fine. But it has built in a Plan B in case there is to be an overhaul.
“Gerrymandering” is a form of electoral fraud in which the boundaries of constituencies are drawn to advantage — or disadvantage — a particular party or group of voters. Two centuries after the practice was named after a Massachusetts governor named Gerry, it’s still used, notably in some Republican-controlled states to reduce the political influence of minorities.
To achieve a similar purpose here in Quebec, Smiling Frank Legault’s francophone-supremacist government proposes to use not only the electoral map but also the voting system. Let’s call this variation “Frankymandering.”
I’ve already written about how, in the Coalition Avenir Québec government’s proposed new system, what a former nationalist premier notoriously called “ethnic votes,” already underrepresented in the legislature, would control an even smaller proportion of the seats.
There would still be 125 members of the National Assembly, but only 80 would still be elected directly by their constituencies. The other 45 seats would be distributed according to the vote in each region on a second ballot for a party rather than an individual candidate. Those “regional” members would owe their seats more to their party than to the voters.
And since the 80 ridings would generally be larger, the minorities, which are concentrated in the Montreal area, would control proportionately fewer of the 125 total seats.
The government has been far from transparent about how the changes would affect representation, leaving it up to voters to try to figure that out for themselves.
Among other things, Montrealers would lose political clout, not only because they would have fewer MNAs directly accountable to them, but because the island would have fewer MNAs in all.
As reported by La Presse this week, a Université Laval expert on voting systems, Louis Massicotte, found that among other things, the CAQ’s Bill 39 would “substantially” reduce the influence of Montreal Island.
In a brief to an Assembly committee holding a public consultation on the voting legislation, Massicotte wrote that “without the slightest justification,” the island would lose three seats, or 11 per cent of its present representation.
He said that when the bill was presented last September, its drafters “hid” this. The governing CAQ was making a “victim” of a region where it holds only two of the present 27 seats, which he called “obscene.”
In an article published in Le Devoir last December, Massicotte had written that some of the bill’s provisions might be seen as punishing “a region that is demographically important, but ethno-linguistically atypical, for its lack of enthusiasm for the present government.” Montreal, with its minorities, is the stronghold of the Quebec Liberal Party.
The government could hardly dispute Massicotte’s analysis in his brief, since it had a similar one of its own, in a briefing note for the minister responsible for electoral reform, Sonia LeBel. It finally released the note this week, but only because it was forced to do so after Radio-Canada obtained it.
It confirmed that Montreal Island would lose three seats, leaving it underrepresented in the Assembly with 19.2 per cent of the seats for 21.5 per cent of the registered voters for the 2018 general election. It would be left with only 16 riding MNAs compared to the present 27, and eight regional ones.
If Bill 39 is adopted as is, there will be a referendum on the proposed new system at the same time as the next general election, due in 2022. Apparently, the government hopes its own proposal will be rejected.
The CAQ promised a new voting system before the last election, but discovered the advantages of the present one when the Coalition won 59 per cent of the seats with 37 per cent of the vote.
But accidents happen. And just in case the proposal is approved in the referendum, the CAQ has built in a Plan B to weaken the influence of the minorities who now form the core of the remaining electoral base of its Liberal opponents: the Frankymander.
