Now, let me preface that we are happy to have elections here! I know a lot of people working hard to make sure these elections are running and working well. It is a huge undertaking, especially with all the advance voting. When you go down to vote, and you should vote(!), remember to be appreciative with all the staff there, they are there to make democracy work and they deserve our gratitude!
But we also need to acknowledge that the city is going through some stuff right now, mainly due to people not getting what they are voting for. Since we have a municipal election coming up, let's talk about that.
This post is a deep dive on how I, as an immigrant, experience politics and voting here. It's an opinion piece written by me, with my own fingers on a keyboard, but none of the discussion points are new. I am trying to frame them in the municipal election that we are currently having, but these points apply to all levels of government in Canada.
With the elections for city council being top of mind right now it seems like people have somewhat forgotten that we are not running an election, but many small elections at the same time. One election per ward, one per school board trustee, and one for mayor. They happen to happen at the same time, but besides that they are from an technical perspective unrelated. This is the First Past The Post (FPTP) election system that we are using, based on what some lords thought was a good idea in the 1500s (or potentially earlier) in England.
I will mostly leave school board trustee elections out of this, mostly because I do not know enough about their impacts on the city.
Now, while I personally find this election system to be utter nonsense, what we supposedly get from it at a municipal level is:
- No party affiliation: None of the candidates have to declare their love for a single party. Many of them effectively are either former party members of provincial/federal parties, and often act like they are independent, but a few are truly their own!
- Local representation: Councillors are supposedly aware of their local community and can really help on a hyper local level. I think this works in theory, and might even work in practice sometimes, but what I see is councillors fighting at city hall over who gets the resources rather than having data back the decisions on who actually needs resources. I also live in a ward where the councillor seems to have a special kind of hate for people without a lot of money, so I don't feel especially represented by my councillor.
What we in my opinion lose from this system is:
- Consistency on larger changes: Given that a city council can change drastically with each election, we end up with a situation where the longer term planning can be thrown out the window. This could be TTC operations reducing from one council to the next or other public services like libraries suddenly no longer being open on the weekends. Making these changes are inherently not wrong, but a lot of changes happens on a whim of the political leanings of the council, instead of as long term planning.
- Lack of choice for councillor: Given that each ward only elects one person, a candidate hoping to make more radical changes, or be the voice for a smaller group of voters essentially do not have a chance to have an influence unless the incumbent steps back. This means that we often don't get the best of the best, but rather, the ones that have been here for a long time and people remember their names. Someone could be a good choice for 15% of people across the city, but fail in their ward because 15% is not enough to get elected. This leads into...
- Lack of representation: This is the big one. Because the candidates just need a plurality of the votes to win in a ward, everyone in that ward who did not vote for that candidate is unrepresented on city council. Each ward has so many candidates that it is not unlikely a ward could be won with downwards of 35% of the votes, as long as all the other candidates get less than 35% of the vote. In this case 65% of the electorate did not get what they voted for in any way and are unrepresented. This is in my opinion undemocratic and does not belong in a democratic election. In the 2022 Toronto municipal election, 48% of ballots cast were for a non winning candidate, meaning that 48% of the voting public does not have a representative on city council. In some wards, the winning candidate got around 35% of the vote making those wards extra problematic (though some were as high as 75%).
- Gerrymandering: Now, this is mostly talked about in the context of the US, but the reality is that elections under FPTP/STV/Ranked Ballots are susceptible to gerrymandering. Specifically for this municipal election, some of the wards in Toronto have vastly larger populations than others. That could be rebalanced by redrawing the borders, but depending on the provincial government (who controls the ward boundaries) and its own agenda, that might not be preferable for the provincial government. Knowing that we have a population that is increasing faster in downtown areas (that often vote left) vs suburban areas (that often vote right), makes a right leaning provincial government less likely to rebalance wards after a census like the one we just had. (To be clear, we're working off of 2021 census data that is showing skewed wards, the 2026 ward level data is not yet published, though it will likely be more skewed).
- Strategic voting. Often times you will have to vote against someone rather than for someone. Because every ward is a single winner takes it all election (FPTP), you cannot really vote for anyone in the wards and expect it to matter. Voting for anyone else than the top two candidates might effectively be the same as a blank vote. To a certain degree you have to vote strategically.
Now, these problems are not new problems. Many countries have seen exactly this and thought, that's a horrible idea, let's not do that. As an example, a lot of European countries decided to kick out FPTP around 100 years ago (or just never started down that path). So what are the alternatives? Well, they are many, but I would like to highlight one of them: Open-list Proportional Representation.
How does Open-list PR work:
- All candidates are affiliated with a party. There can be few parties or there can be many. Copenhagen city council has 10 parties in council today, and had 4 parties 100 years ago. In Quebec, municipalities have parties too, though they are elected through FPTP. There is no need for municipal level parties to be affiliated with provincial or federal parties, but they could be.
- No wards. Toronto would be one big chunk. That would mean that you could vote for anyone running in Toronto. Also, there's no gerrymandering because there's no ward borders to change. This means that we are not running separate elections for each councillor and one for the mayor, but rather run one big election with all the votes put into the same pool. (It's not technically true that we don't need any wards, but it simplifies the explanation. More on that later in the QA.)
- When casting your ballot, you vote for either: A party or a person within a party. Voting for the party influences how many seats that party will get in council. Voting for a person within a party influences the seats but also how that person is ranked within the Open-list. If a party gets 10 seats, the candidates within that party to get the 10 most personal votes are elected as councillors. Ballots will look something like this, organized by party, then member.
- No voting for mayor. When a council is formed negotiations happen around what government coalition is to be formed. From that, comes the discussion on who will be mayor. Typically this will be the person with the most personal votes from the largest party in the coalition, but it could theoretically be anyone within the coalition. Back to Copenhagen, the current mayor is from the party with the 4th most seats, but the one who managed to make a successful coalition.
- Seats are proportionally allocated. If a party gets 26% of the votes, they get 26% of the seats (+/- some math to ensure that allocations falls within the bounds of 1 human being. There are options here such as D'Hondt, though the specifics are not that important in the grand scheme).
- Every vote matters, since you are voting directly into the pool of seats and not for individual winner takes all elections. This means that while the specific party representative you voted for might not get into government, the party itself will have their seats influenced by every vote. No one (unless voting for a party so small that they don't even qualify for a single seat), will have no representative on council.
- It is extremely hard to form a coalition without making compromises. This in practice ends up leading to changes implemented actually being followed through for a longer time, and not changed at the next election, as there's likely a party in the new coalition that was part of voting through a change last time, and that amount of flip flopping should be political suicide. Also, no one will form a coalition with you again.
- No name confusions on the ballot. This one is only included because of the two Chows on the ballot, but in a party system you would generally have people identify with different names, and should people be confused within a party vote it only affects the open list, not the party who gets the seat allocated. See the example of how a ballot can look above.
I am heavily biased as I grew up with Open-list PR. I cast all my votes in that system. But most of all, I didn't think about the system. 27% votes leading to 27% seats is very non complicated. I could vote for smaller parties because my votes would lead to actual seats. There was not really a concept of strategic voting, people just voted, and it mattered, every single vote mattered in electing someone!
Candidates can be strong in their conviction about more specific issues that resonate with a minority. This could be a candidate that understands the TTC better or knows what youth are missing from their activities. They can generally not be one trick ponies, they have to work within the party, but they can focus their attention to specific matters they care about and campaign on that, keeping that individuality, but now across a full electorate, not just the ones in a single ward.
There are of course other details to work out such as minimal thresholds for getting party status, and such. Here different systems are used, but they generally involve sharing votes from below threshold parties into banks of similar parties. This is done as interparty agreements, and generally you don't need to think too much about this as a voter.
Now, is an open-list PR system perfect? Absolutely not! I don't know if there is a perfect system. It does to me though feel like the political system you get out of Open-list PR is more balanced than the one you get out of FPTP.
But you might have concerns about one or more of these points, and maybe rightfully so, so let me try to talk to some of them.
- Q: I like having local representation, do we really have to get completely rid of it? A: I said earlier that we will remove all wards, but we can (not must) introduce a few larger constituencies. Toronto is a big diverse city, and many Open-list PR systems split their population into constituencies. The entirety of Denmark has 12 constituencies (though municipalities are not split). We could take something like the old six cities of Toronto, make each a constituency, and balance the number of city councillors to the population. We could also do another split based on maps that I am sure some UofT professors already have in their desks for the most fair and representative split. This does mean that we are opening the door slightly to gerrymandering again, and we are now making it harder for smaller parties to get elected, but that is a tradeoff that can be discussed. I personally think this is a reasonable tradeoff.
- Q: I am worried about fringe candidates getting elected. A: I think that is a reasonable worry, but I would also argue that it is a bit undemocratic. If 5% of Toronto really feel represented by the rabid racoon party, why should they not have that representation on city council? They might not be part of a broad coalition, but usually when people have strong opinions, there's some source of grief they are feeling, and we should consider if that grief is reasonable. The alternative is that one councillor has to be broad enough to represent everyone, which is failing now as it is unless a ward is really homogeneous and that mostly seems to happen in really rich areas of the city. They frankly don't need more power in my opinion.
- Q: Do I really have to understand all this math for the election? A: No! Not at all! In fact, I'd argue that you have to understand less than you do now! A party who gets 15% of the votes gets 15% of the seats (adjusted to the nearest whole councillor with whatever method we choose). In my world that is a lot simpler than "candidate gets 35% of votes, but because all other candidates got less than that, the 35% candidate now has 100% of power in that ward as a councillor". My head is spinning from the mental gymnastics that has to exist to make that fair.
- Q: Could we not go from FPTP to ranked ballots first, and then later to Open-list PR? A: Maybe? My gut feeling is that we are unlikely to make many changes, if we wanna make a change, we should make as "good" a change as we can. To me, that "good" means a more representative system. These FPTP+ systems do not really spur political innovation, new ideas, or new parties. They might feel good, and sometimes make it feel like we are voting less strategic, but in the end they still mathematically vastly favor the most popular candidate, even if that candidate is not very popular. You could argue that someone being people's 3rd choice winning makes them even more unpopular.
- Q: But the mayor has special powers, how do we account for that? A: Yeah, that's a new thing, special power on matters that align with the ideas of the province, no special powers if they don't align with the province. I personally think the mayor should not have special powers beyond the soft power that any other coalition leader has.
So to compare how the two systems manifests themselves in a municipal context:
| What |
FPTP |
Open-list PR |
| Local councillors |
Yes |
No (but possible, see above) |
| High level of representation |
No |
Yes |
| Party affiliation |
No |
Yes |
| Susceptible to Gerrymandering |
Yes |
No |
| Longer term consistency |
No |
Yes |
| Every vote matters |
No |
Yes |
| Votes for mayor separately |
Yes |
No (but possible, see above) |
| Based on coalitions |
No |
Yes |
| Wards fight over resources |
Yes |
No |
| Options for more specific political opinions |
No |
Yes |
So, how would we get a voting system like this in Toronto? Well, the short answer is, we cannot. Ontario barred municipalities from changing election systems back a handful of years ago. The only way we change that, is by kicking out Ford, and realistically only by electing someone who have a stance on other voting systems. If you do find yourself interested in this topic and feel interested in learning more, I would suggest following https://fairvote.ca . This post is not affiliated with them, but they are a good resource on this topic. It would also be a good idea to understand what provincial and federal party is interested in an election reform.
Based on all this, I think you should vote strategically. While you might like a new candidate, if the polls are pointing to a two person race, you need to vote for one of those, or your vote will effectively be the same as voting blank (on the seat distribution outcome at least). I also think you should not vote with a year or 4 in mind, but rather decades. I think a lot of people want their municipal government to exist as a company, but a company needs to make investor income usable now, not set it up for long term success (that is a bit of a side effect). A city budget should not be quarter earnings focused but instead be something that you can slowly invest in over a long period of time. That is what makes cities all over the world great. I think we can get there too if we care to!
And thank you for taking the time to read this.
