Why Canada’s undemocratic democracies work

Photo: Voting in Ontario, Canada.

There was a provincial election in Ontario, Canada last week. After a thirty-day drama-free campaign, Ontario’s electoral map did not change much. Douglas Robert Ford Jr, 60, was re-elected Provincial Premier, handing him the job for a third consecutive term. With the election done, journalists and other news addicts turned to other things. For most of Ontario’s 16 million residents, the election hardly changed their lives. For me, the day after the election was an opportunity to reflect on what had just happened.

First, the inattentive citizen missed the election altogether. As in most of Canada, elections in Ontario are very sedate affairs. Most of the attentive citizens did not waste their time and energy attending campaign gatherings. They probably knew that the politicians would do what they do best – sing their own praises, declare their opponents to be incompetent, and assure us that they have the solutions to nearly every problem. A few partisans attended their candidates’ rallies, but it is very unlikely that anybody sane skipped work to listen to a politician.

Second, the business of the province and people’s lives were not disrupted by the campaigns. I did not see any politicians in my neighbourhood. However, we were inundated with radio, television, newspaper, social media and other online advertisements. They provided me with further evidence about human gullibility.

To be sure, there is very good evidence that political ads, especially the nasty ones, work. If you do not believe it, please think again. The current ruler of the United States has perfected the art of appealing to the darkness within. A lot of the stuff he said during last year’s election was complete fiction. The facts did not matter. The fiction resonated with the voters in the swing states that determined the winner. They believed Donald Trump. Many are now waking up to the truth, but it is too late to change the impact of the false ads.

Likewise, the pro-Brexit Campaign team in the United Kingdom effectively used ads loaded with falsehoods to take their country out of the European Union. They have since confessed their mischief, too late to reverse the grave mistake that the gullible voters committed when they voted “yes.”

Uganda’s National Resistance Movement (NRM) effectively used images of human skulls in Luwero during the 1996 presidential election to persuade voters that candidate Paul Kawanga Semmogerere, who had teamed up with the Uganda People’s Congress to challenge Yoweri Museveni Kaguta, would restore the dreaded Obote II folks to power. The deception worked, as did the temporary adoption of “Kaguta” as the president’s last name. (They wanted the president’s name to come before Kawanga on the ballot.) Interestingly, it is the NRM that consummated its marriage to the official remnants of Obote’s Uganda People’s Congress.

This stuff works way better here than I thought in my early years in Canada. I was very dismissive of the obviously false or patronizing stuff that political ads repeatedly claimed on behalf of candidate X or against candidate Y. I was disabused of my ignorance when I started reading very good studies on political advertising. There is a whole science to the exploitation of human feelings and thoughts. The most exploited human emotion is fear. And we saw plenty of this here in Ontario last month.

The fear induced by Donald Trump’s plan to impose 25 percent tariffs on Canadian goods, and his lustful musings about annexing Canada as the fifty first state of the USA, was milked by the party leaders in Ontario. Premier Ford seized the moment and called last week’s snap election, presenting himself as the lead fighter against Trump. Ford informed Ontarians that he just needed their mandate to defend their province against Trump.

Never mind that Ford was a self-declared strong Trump supporter. While changing his mind was normal and good, he did it so smoothly and so quickly that the Ontarian voters hardly had time to ask what it was that he had liked about Trump’s policies before the American stabbed Canada, so to speak. Fear of Trump and his new America was enough to numb Ontarians from asking questions.

Third, once again we re-elected a government that does not represent most of the voters. Ford’s right-wing Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario won 80 of the Provincial Parliament’s 124 seats. This was a clear parliamentary majority, achieved with the support of only 42.97 percent of the voters. The centrist Liberal Party of Ontario came second in voter popularity, receiving the support of 29.95 percent of voters, but only 14 seats. This was enough to regain official parliamentary party status, but they did not qualify to become His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in Parliament. That honour went to a less popular party, the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP), which won 27 seats with the support of only 18.55 percent of the voters. The environmentalist Green Party of Ontario won 2 seats with the support of 4.83 percent of the voters. One independent candidate won his seat with 1.08 percent of the popular vote.

It is weird mathematics, and I do not like it. However, it is perfectly logical in this version of “democracy” where a less popular party forms the government or becomes the official opposition at the expense of a more popular one. It is the agreed system in this country and many other “democracies” where they have a thing called “first-past-the-post” (FPTP) electoral tradition. Parties and leaders gain power based on the results in each constituency, not the popular vote in the entire jurisdiction that the “winner” will govern. The elected MPs do not have to win the majority (more than fifty percent) of the votes in their constituency. They just need the plurality (the highest number of votes compared to their competitors) to be declared democratically elected.

There has been a recurring debate about this undemocratic democracy that has governed Canada and its provinces and territories for well over a century. Defective as it is, it generally works very well because it is not imposed on the society. Furthermore, the incumbent leaders and their political opponents are equally subjected to the uncertainties of elections, with no guarantee of re-election.

Therein lies the secret of these undemocratic democracies. The citizens have agreed to do it that way. They retain the power to hire and fire their representatives and leaders. They make mistakes sometimes, but they have a just, predictable and fair system through which they correct their errors. That system is answerable to the citizens. Not the other way round.