Proportional Representation - The Numbers

Representation in the House of Commons is roughly proportional to population. This is typical of most representative democracies. The introduction of bill C-12 by the federal government last week continues that important tradition by adjusting federal ridings to reflect the rapidly-growing Canadian population.

There is some controversy regarding the additional seats for Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia, which there ought not to be since objections can only be coming from those who would wish to move to disproprotional representation. I will therefore ignore the controversy and move on to what I believe is a more important question, one that is well and humourously put forward by the very first commenter on this National Post article:

broke: "Lord thundering Jesus, now we're going to have to listen to 30 more sources of hot air. We have way too many politicians. Soon they'll outnumber the voters. The least they could do is reduce the Senate by 30."

How many MPs do we really need? There is no reason to increase the number of seats to make the adjustment to population; we could just as easily keep the same total and change the geographical allocation. For example, in the United States, their House of Representatives is fixed at 435 seats, which they periodically reallocated in response to the census.

It is a good question to ask, apart from having "30 more sources of hot air", what is the value of increasing the number of MPs? The politics of instead reducing the number of seats for some provinces might annoy some, but a reduction is no loss since either way the proportion would be the same. Yet with 30 more MPs we, the taxpayers, carry the added costs of their salaries, office staff and expenses, and, perhaps most irritating, their gold-plated pensions. We should demand that there be value commensurate with the increased cost to us.

First, let's compare the formulas for the House of Commons and the US House of Representatives. For our House, there is a long-standing fixed electoral ratio that C-12 leaves as is:

3. In these rules, “electoral divisor” means
(a) 108,000, in relation to the readjustment following the first decennial census completed after the coming into force of the Democratic Representation Act; ...

By fixing the number of seats, the House of Representatives has seen its electoral ratio climb over the country's history, and now stands above 650,000. In other words, each member of the US House represents more than 6 times the population that an MP does. One of the important tasks our politicians performs is to advocate on behalf of their constituents (typically, when one of us runs afoul of poor governance), and another is to advocate for the broader interests of their constituency, such as getting federal funding for local projects. It can be argued that the former task is better accomplished with Canada's lower representation ratio. However, this is compensated for in the US by funding larger staffs for members' offices, who in both countries do most of the listening and follow-up on issues raised by constituents; the staff only involve the member when political action is required. The House of Commons could do the same and preserve the level of service at less cost to taxpayers; on an individual basis, office staff is less expensive than MPs.

With regard to defending and promoting constituency matters, there is an argument to be made for a lower ratio. Despite the best efforts of the staffers, the real political work must be done by the representative. I suspect that the higher ratio in the US (this also impacts their elected Senators) makes it easier for special interest lobbyists to drown out the voices of the more numerous, but fragmented, constituents. Lobbyists also work hard to get the staffers on side, who then use their position of trust to influence their boss.

When it comes to voting there is no advantage of a lower electoral ratio. Unfortunately, all votes of any importance are whipped: MPs are required to vote according to their party's position, regardless of what their constituents prefer. I would rather there were less of this, but recognizing that it does exist and is unlikely to change soon, the extra members have no value to constituents on House votes; the voting percentages are the same either way.

My conclusion is that it is time to transition to a formula similar to one in the US. Otherwise we are about to end up with more than 2/3 of the number of House members for 1/9 the population, and with diminished value.