Ep. 452: Wrestling with Democracy
Guest: Dennis Pilon, York University
Justin Trudeau had promised that the 2015 federal election would be the last time a government would be chosen in Canada using the first-past-the-post voting system.
That promise promptly evaporated and morphed into support for a proportional representation voting system. In the following months, the Prime Minister directed the Minister of Democratic Institutions to drop the idea.
In 2021, the Liberals set a record for the lowest vote share of a party that would go on to form government, winning 32.6 percent of the popular vote, while losing the popular vote. According to the federal Elections Canada, voter turnout numbers were just less than half of the population of the country. Only 17 million of Canada’s 35 million people voted. The Liberals only received 5.6 million votes, yet went on to form a minority government in a coalition with the NDP, which received only 2.3 percent of the popular vote.
Despite those numbers, the Liberals and the NDP signed a pact to support one another and govern as though they have a majority mandate. The results suggest that democracy is not being served and needs to be reformed. Dennis Pilon, a York University Professor in the Department of Politics, urges caution in making such an assertion. He argues, “Voting system reform has been a part of larger struggles over defining democracy itself.”
We invited Professor Dennis Pilon to join us for a Conversation That Matters about the way in which we choose our government and whether the system needs to be reformed.
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Check out their profile on our partnered program, Careers That Matter!
