Brian Pallister has been premier of Manitoba going on 12 hours now and as far as I can tell the world hasn’t ended, although Humpty Dumpty no doubt did take a big fall off the wall here in Northern Manitoba in last month’s 41st general election.
There has been a change in government in Manitoba today for the first time since Oct. 5, 1999. That’s how Parliamentary government works. We change governments every now and then. Truth be told, most elections are far more a referendum on the governing party than they are a vote for the imaginative new ideas the opposition parties put forward in any given campaign.
The April 19 election was a referendum on former Premier Greg Selinger, more than anything, and to a somewhat lesser extent, the rest of the long-governing NDP. Given how our Parliamentary system of government works, voters (at least outside his Winnipeg constituency of St. Boniface) couldn’t vote “yea” or “nay” to Selinger directly, so they did what Canadian voters have done since before Confederation: They threw the bums out, the lot of them, as the old saying, which probably started in the United States in the 1920s, as a chant by spectators at boxing and wrestling matches, before moving in due course to baseball, and finally politics, goes.
This year the bums happened to be the NDP. Other years it has been the Progressive Conservatives or Liberals. And as grand a day as this is for the Pallister Progressive Conservatives, who won 40 of the 57 seats in the Manitoba Legislative Assembly April 19 – tying a record for most seats set way back in 1915 when Premier Tobias Crawford Norris’ Liberals also won 40 seats in the Aug. 6 election in a legislature with 47 seats – they will in due course find a time when the people throw them out, and they are the bums again. That’s how government and elections work in Canada.
One good thing about a landslide win, which this was for the Manitoba PCs, is we’re spared the interminable debates that inevitably follow many closer election results in Canada, where the usual suspects argue in favour of either the current first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system we use in Canada, or more likely in recent years, argue for some form of proportional representation (PR), which is the most common system among well-established democracies.
It’s not that I haven’t taken enough political science courses in university to understand how much fairer PR would be, in theory anyway, compared to FPTP. No, it’s more a case of me being something of a self-admitted contrarian and pot-stirrer. Something like the federal election campaign of 1872 might appeal to me.
During the federal election campaign of 1872 – the country’s second after Confederation in 1867 – voting began on July 20, just five days after the writ was issued, and finished on Oct. 12, which was 89 days after the writ had been dropped – making it the longest in Canadian history, still surpassing last year’s 78-day federal election campaign. In fairness, it is something of an apples and oranges comparison because 1872 was still part of the fading era of multiple day voting, whereas 2015 was a single day contest last Oct. 19. The longest single day contest before last year was the 74-day campaign leading up to the Sept. 14, 1926 federal election.
Back in 1872, in all provinces except Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, elections were held on different dates in different ridings. The system allowed the party in power to hold elections in a safe riding first, hoping in this way to influence the vote in constituencies less favourable to them. The system even enabled a candidate who lost in one riding to run again in another. Steve Ashton might still be our NDP MLA in such a scenario applied provincially, although I’m not sure which constituency we might have him run in, if not Thompson.
The 1872 federal election was in fact the first time Manitobans, who joined Confederation as the fifth province – appropriately enough smack in the middle of 10, time-wise, as well as geographically – on July 15, 1870, got to participate in a federal election – and the last before the secret ballot was widely introduced (except for New Brunswick, which had adopted the secret ballot in 1855) , replacing oral voting – which really put a damper on politicians “treating” voters approaching their voting place with offers of cash, alcohol, pork, flour and other foodstuffs. In the 21st century, politics is a bit more opaque and nuanced then it was in the 19th century when it comes to those sort of enticements. The transparency was to be found back in 1872.
Let’s face it. When it comes to politics, elections (first-past-the-post or proportional representation or some other form of voting) and democracy, all rolled together, is a bit like sausage-making; the finished product tastes pretty good at the ballpark with a cold beer, or on the grill in the back yard, but you don’t necessarily want to see how the sausage is made. Same with governments. Unless you want to go back to 1872.
My old reporter friend Johnny Driscoll at the Peterborough Examiner used to say that sausage adage applied equally well to newspapering, and he was right.
As former Conservative Prime Minister Winston Churchill said in the British House of Commons on Nov. 11, 1947: “Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time….”
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