While parties in Australia and Britain are working together to make Parliament work after citizens there elected 'hung' Parliaments recently, Canada's minority government is stuck in a hyper-partisan adversarial environment, say some political scientists. And they think the country's antiquated first-past-the-post voting system is at least partly to blame.

"The old, simple two-party polarity just doesn't exist in any country in the world, except the U.S.A.," says London School of Economics political scientist Patrick Dunleavy.

The number of parties vying for seats in many western Parliaments tends to be growing, says Prof. Dunleavy. New parties are gaining ground over traditional players. In the last 20 years, Canada has seen the emergence of the Green Party and regional movements such as the Bloc Québécois and Reform Party in the West. Australia's own Green Party is rising.

In dealing with the changing nature of politics, "The other countries in the Westminster model group have adapted to coalition politics," says Prof. Dunleavy. "But Canadians seem to have more of a difficulty than the British and the Australians."

The three, along with India and New Zealand, all stem from the British democratic Parliamentary system of government that is seen to have traditionally produced strong single-party majority governments. But the latest crop of elections appear to shatter that trend.

After Britain's Conservatives won the most seats in the country's May general election, but fell short of forming a majority government, the party formed a coalition with the Liberal Democrats to make up the difference. It's the country's first coalition government since the Second World War.

Australia's neck-and-neck finish Aug. 21 was equally rare. It's the country's first hung Parliament since 1940. As of late last week, Prime Minister Julia Gillard's Labor Party and the opposition Liberal-National coalition leader Tony Abbott were both courting the four independents and one Green MP who held the balance of power in the country's lower house.

If one of the parties succeeds in forming a majority coalition government, it would be the fourth of those five big Westminster model countries to have one. Canada is the only one without.

British and Australian party leaders immediately started negotiating power sharing deals after their recent elections.

"It is interesting that once they do find themselves confronted with minorities, they turn naturally towards coalitions, especially the British, in ways we've not expected," says Henry Milner, a political science professor and associate with a team of electoral researchers at the Université de Montréal.

Canada's last three elections have resulted in minority governments without the same level of coalition talk or action. After the Conservatives threatened to take away political party subsidies in the fall of 2008, the NDP and Liberals signed a deal to bring down the Tories and install themselves as the new government, with the support of the Bloc Québécois. But after the Governor General granted the prime minister's prorogation wish and the tension toned down, the pact died. But the Conservatives have not let anyone forget the "separatist-socialist-Liberal" coalition.

The thought of sharing power with a separatist party is likely one of the main reasons Canadian parties have been cooler to a coalition than their Commonwealth cousins, says Prof. Dunleavy.

But Britain and Australia are also more familiar with proportional representation voting systems, which are more apt to produce coalitions, says Prof. Milner.

In proportional representation, seat counts more closely match the percentage of votes received per party. While Britain as a whole still uses the winner-takes-all first-past-the-post system, Scotland, Wales and the city of London use forms of proportional representation. It's also used to elect Australia's upper house.

Because seat counts mimic vote distribution in proportional representation, smaller parties, who would gain votes but not enough to win seats in the first-past-the-post system, would gain seats. That would likely mean more players in Parliament and more chance for minority governments in which parties are forced to work together to make Parliament work.

Whereas Britain has recent examples of successful coalitions forged out of proportional representation voting systems, Canada doesn't, says Prof. Milner.

"So, here we are a laggard by far in this."

That's too bad, says Prof. Dunleavy, because "Canada is the classic case of a country that would be much better off with a PR system."

As it stands, he says, politicians under first-past-the-post only have to try to win one more vote than their nearest competitor to win a seat in Parliament.

"You tend to want your party to be popular, but you don't look outside your party for support," he says.

"I think the argument of reformers is very much that the current Harper government is maintaining very strongly that traditional way of behaving and it hasn't been a very consensus-building approach. It's been a divisive approach and that's been a bit of a lost opportunity."

Politicians used to a proportional representation system have experience reaching out to other parties, he says.

But critics of proportional representation point out that Canadians aren't interested in that kind of electoral reform, even in a minority government era in which it may seem to be more suited.

Steven Fletcher (Charleswood-St. James-Assiniboia, Man.), minister of state for democratic reform, notes that Ontarians, British Columbians and Prince Edward Islanders all rejected proportional voting systems when they had the chance in recent referenda and a plebiscite. But proponents of it argue that the provincial governments, happy with the system that elected them and typically works in their favour, set unusually steep conditions in which to bring about the change.

In any case, consensus building through proportional representation may not be the answer to our minority government woes, says André Blais, Université de Montréal political scientist and Canada Research Chair in electoral studies.

"It is possible to adapt within the existing system," says Prof. Blais.

Parties are learning to do that, he says, noting that the Conservative minority has lasted four years, more than twice the historical 18-month average.

The government is committed to working with other parties to pass its legislation, says Mr. Fletcher. He spouts a list of government campaign promises accomplished such as the Accountability Act, GST reduction and childcare allowance.

"While the other parties were in a lot of cases difficult to deal with, at the end of the day we got legislation through and that's undisputable," he says.

Mr. Fletcher says his party favours the first-past-the-post system "with enhancements," such as more seats for the growing provinces of Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario, as outlined in Bill C-12, which received first reading in the House April 1.

Marlene Jennings (Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, Que.), the Liberals' democratic reform critic, is also not quick to jump to proportional representation as a way to breed greater inter-party cooperation. There is a need for electoral reform in Canada, but "we're discussing all possibilities," she says.

She notes that Italy and Israel both use proportional representation, and rather than it nudging them toward cooperation, "It's the wild, wild West."

University of Toronto political scientist Nelson Wiseman agrees it's not the electoral system that determines wether there will be a cooperative Parliament. "It has to do with the underlying political culture and Parliamentary culture," he says.

Indeed, says Prof. Blais, just because citizens of Westminster systems are voting in hung Parliaments doesn't mean they should necessarily change their voting systems to better fit the electoral reality and its consequences for Parliamentary cooperation. "I think an electoral system depends on one's values. It doesn't depend on the kind of situation that we have," he says. If the public places a high value on fair representation, it would lean toward proportional representation.

"I think Canadians are really ambivalent. They haven't thought through the arguments on different sides. They haven't been exposed to debate, so it's not clear," he says.

But electoral reform groups such as Fair Vote Canada, see grassroots support for cooperative politics emerging and are optimistic it will soon grow upward.

"I think political leaders are going to have to start adjusting to some of the attitudes that are coming up from the grassroots," says Fair Vote Canada executive director Larry Gordon. "I'm optimistic there's a new political environment emerging."

kshane@hilltimes.com

The Hill Times