In September the Conservatives won the popular vote, getting more votes across Canada than the Liberals did, but failed to gain any seats and, in fact, lost two. The Bloc and NDP also claimed a large share of votes. All these MPs “across the aisle” – more than on the Liberal side of the Commons – will present suggestions and critiques both in the Commons and in parliamentary committees. A minority government, to continue in office, is compelled by political reality to hear them and factor their perspectives into collective decisions of the House of Commons. This was how the first Prime Minister Trudeau survived with his minority government, for example, heeding the ideas and policies of the New Democratic Party and receiving the votes of the NDP on crucial issues in the Commons. Canada has become familiar, for a century now, with informal coalitions of this nature. In most countries with multiple parties, formal coalitions are entered into and representative members of the smaller parties sworn in as cabinet ministers for the coalition government. Canadians keep up pretenses.

The Prevalence of “False Majority” Governments

Whatever meaning a “majority” may have for a power-wielding prime minister, it means something entirely different to most Canadians because the antique voting system delivers 100% of the power to a party having, in most elections, only minority electoral support. The result is handing a group with less than unanimous endorsement the keys to the family car and a credit card with no upper limit.

            This inequitable distortion was why Justin Trudeau repeatedly pledged to make 2015’s trip to the polls “Canada’s last unfair election.” At the time he was leading the third-place Liberals, who had only 34 MPs as a wonky result of the outdated voting system’s operation in 2011’s general election. On the strength of his promise plus a general desire for change of government itself, Liberals gained 150 additional seats. This gave the newly elected prime minister majority control of the Commons, with a total of 184 MPs in the 338-seat House. Even so, the popular vote for the Liberals was below 50% – not a majority. 

            In 2008, Peter H. Russell, one of Canada’s most perceptive political scientists and University of Toronto professor emeritus, confronted this conundrum in his book Two Cheers for Minority Government. By tracing the evolution of Canadian parliamentary democracy, Professor Russell documented the prevalence of “false majority” governments. What he termed a “true majority” government was one having “a double majority – being favoured by a majority of the electorate as well as by a majority of the members in the assembly the election produced.”

The Rarity of “True Majority” Governments

For example, in 1940’s wartime election, Prime Minister King won a majority of the popular vote and a majority of the Commons seats. In 1958, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s landslide Progressive Conservative win of 208 seats in a Commons of 265 members was a “true majority” because the PCs won 54% of the popular vote. In 1984, another double-majority election saw the Brian Mulroney-led Progressive Conservatives win 211 seats out of 262, with a popular vote over 50%.

            However, these were the only three “true majority governments” since the 1920s. That was when Canada advanced from the 1800s two-party system of Conservatives and Liberals into a multi-party era, a natural evolution in so regionally and socially diverse a country. The bleaker reality is that sustained efforts to convert the electoral system to fit this multi-party political system – through the Twentieth and now even into the Twenty-First Century – never were allowed to materialize. Justin Trudeau is only the most recent political leader in this bleak parade of many, of all partisan stripes and at both national and provincial levels, who promise this essential change – only to then renounce democratizing the electoral system upon winning and retaining the prime minister’s office without majority support.

Minority Governments Are the Canadian Norm

As a result, the normal election outcome is having minority governments based on false majorities – a majority of seats in the Commons won with less than 50% of the popular vote. Peter Russell uses the term “false majority governments” because their leaders, once in power, “have a tendency to act as if they have a popular mandate from the people when in fact they do not. The media often speak in these terms, strengthening the illusion.”

            For example, on October 26 when Prime Minister Trudeau introduced his choice of cabinet ministers for Canada’s 44^th Parliament, he asserted “The Canadian people have given us a very clear mandate.” In fact, the voters had not given the PM the majority he craved, and even fewer had voted for his party than in 2019. If he had any mandate, it was the same one on which he’d pulled the plug for a premature and unnecessary election.

            For their part, many television journalists spoke about the “mandate letters” which the Prime Minister’s Office writes for each minister of the Crown instructing him or her about what to do. They do not comment on how this is a remarkable further limitation on cabinet government in our parliamentary system, nor observe that it is another stage in the concentration of power in the hands of the PM and the PMO – the chief executive officer sending memos with directives to branch heads. Nor do they often pick up on how the “mandate” is manipulated – for instance, the 2015 mandate letter to Minister of Democratic Renewal Maryam Monsef did not address implementing the system, just to study it, which produced enough delay and confusion for Justin Trudeau to unapologetically renege on his clear electoral mandate to implement proportional representation for the electoral system.

            Quite apart from when, or whether, we achieve proportional representation in Canada, the existing electoral roulette will continue to produce minority governments most of the time and imbalanced extremes in representation – the big swing “landslides” that intermittently occur because of a relative slight change in the percentages of popular vote under the simple plurality or “first-past-the-post” electoral system – the rest of the time.

Embracing the Reality of Evolved Parliamentary Democracy

Russell’s view, and my own, is that it is preferrable to be governed by a minority government than by its most likely alternative – a false majority government.

            On balance, the record of minority governments in Canada, at both the provincial level and in Ottawa, is better: more attentive, less arrogant; more compromising, less autocratic; more interesting, less banal. This brief blog cannot review the full history, but Peter Russell does, in a warmly engaging way that cuts through Canadian political fog with clarity and realism. Two Cheers for Minority Government, well-written and highly accessible, is worth borrowing from the library or buying from a bookstore for anyone attentive to Canada’s democratic well-being. It is a fine antidote to political amnesia.

            We should remember to be wary of leaders who seek “a majority government” for “stability” and to fully implement their vision and act decisively, because in Canada that is seldom necessary, and mostly not even possible.

            A related lesson, connected to making Canada’s electoral system proportional – seats in the assembly in proportion to votes casts for the parties, as in most of the world’s thriving democracies – is being wary of those who argue against electoral modernization claiming that proportional representation will make minority governments almost inevitable and that should be avoided because the are unstable. “Compared with false majority government,” says Russell, “minority government is good for parliamentary democracy and good for you if, as I do, you want to be governed by parliamentary government – rather than prime-ministerial, CEO-style government, operating without meaningful parliamentary debate and regardless of popular support in the country.”

            The reality of Canada’s fully entrenched multi-party political system means minority governments are the most likely outcome of general parliamentary elections. Russell says he only gives “two cheers” for minority government. A wise man’s recognition that minority government is not flawless, he addresses their problems in his book. Yet he also documents from the historical record why “a minority government is, for most of us, the best possible outcome. I find it difficult to muster even one cheer for its main alternative – false majority government.”

            On balance, over time, Canadians have consistently been better served by minority rather than majority governments – because those wielding the powers of the Crown are kept more accountable to the elected representatives of the Sovereign People. Since the 1840s, this concept of “Responsible Government” has been the bedrock of our Constitution, although today we more readily understand the essential concept as “democratic accountability.”

Lesson 3, in my next blog, addresses the frustrating embarrassment of so-called “leadership debates” in Canadian general elections.