The Minority

We're likely to have our fourth federal election in six years, and it is highly unlikely to produce anything other than a minority government. Many people, as evidenced by this Globe and Mail poll, are asking themselves whether the system is broken.

The system is not broken, but it has one problem: the Bloc Quebecois.

It generally takes roughly 40% of the popular vote for a party to win a majority government. In 1997, the Liberals won a narrow majority with 38% of the popular vote, but they benefited from vote splitting between the Alliance and the PCs, each of whom took 19%.

Now that the right has been united, the Liberal Party can no longer win majorities by taking advantage of our first-past-the-post system.

This is where the Bloc comes in. Roughly 35% of Quebecers will vote Bloc no matter what because they are separatists, so 10% of votes cast in each general election can in effect be discarded. This means that the winning party needs to find the 40% of the popular vote it needs for a majority among the remaining 90% of voters, which is next to impossible. It would mean winning 45% of the non Bloc votes. To put things into perspective, the last party that was able to win more than 45% of the popular vote was the 1984 incarnation of the PCs led by Brian Mulroney.

In the last election, the Conservatives won 38% of the popular vote to the Liberals' 26%. If the 9.98% of Canadians who voted Bloc were divided evenly among the three main parties, this would tip the Conservatives over the 40% barrier and mean that we would probably have a majority Harper government. After all, Jean Chrétien's 1993 Liberals only needed 41% of the popular vote to take 60% of seats in the general election that saw the PCs take 2 seats and 16% of votes.

With the Bloc not likely to disappear, the only way out of minority government would be for one of the three major parties to implode. If the NDP were to return to single digits as in the 90s, this might make it possible for the Liberals to take a slim majority, but that's highly unlikely.

Whatever happens in the next election, we can brace ourselves for more minorities barring a dramatic change in public mood.