There's Something Rotten in the Province of Quebec

This week was a remarkable week. On two levels, I witnessed now badly the situation has unfortunately deteriorated in la belle province.

I am of the opinion that under the guidance of Premier Jean Charest, Quebec has devolved into a kleptocracy and Charest has become a modern day despot exercising his control over the entire state including the judiciary.

Early in week, the report leaked to the press from the Quebec Government's anti collusion squad was damming. It went as far as to say that some functions of the state had been overtaken by a consortium of public servants working for the Ministry of Transportation, engineering firms, and the criminal element, supported by a clandestine financing of Quebec's major political parties in the way of kickbacks which arise from charging overinflated prices for construction projects and a portion of which eventually reach their way to the political party in power.

In other words, everybody in the consortium is taking a cut while the taxpayer is being ripped off for the replacement of the crumbling infrastructure at a cost that is 40% higher than the rest of Canada and is of lower quality. It goes as far as having the Ministry of Transport contracting out to the private sector to do the required inspection and supervision of the construction performed by the private sector firms. The report details how the consortium will arrange to charge the government for 1000 truckloads of contaminated earth to be removed when in reality it takes only 100 truckloads to perform the task.

No wonder the Quebec Government announced in the same week a 800 million reduction in budget expenditures, including funding for Health and Education. Faced with a mountain of debt, the Quebec Government has to find some way to keep the infernal money machine operating.

Incredibly, when Premier Charest faced the media, had the audacity to say that it was thanks to the determined efforts of his government that we have become aware at how corrupt it has become. He went as far as too say that he hadn't even read the report. Imagine going in front of the nation without having read the document leaked to the press and is available on the Internet that asserts that your government is the most corrupt in living memory.

Yet, Charest has something up his sleeve that most Quebecers are only vaguely aware of despite the recent public hearings of the Bastarache Commission that investigated irregularities in appointing judges to the bench.

During his press conference, Charest would keep coming back to the point that we live by the rule of law, evidence must be obtained, and that the government is determined to prosecute those who have engaged in illegal activities.

What is left unsaid is that Charest and his Liberal cronies effectively control the legal system. They decide where and how legal resources will be deployed concerning who is targeted for investigation and who will be charged. Moreover, they have put in place many of the judges who preside over the trials and more importantly the judges that decide which of their peers will hear which cases. In short, the fix is on as we should expect when candidates applying for positions on the bench have their resumes forwarded to Premier Charest with post-it notes that indicate whether they have supported the Quebec Liberal Party in the past.

At a personal level, I have first hand experience with how political power controls the judiciary. As any reader of my Taking On The System blog would know, we have filed a motion to have the first-past-the-post electoral system declared unconstitutional.

This week we received the decision from Quebec's Court of Appeal that I would liken to the insult to their intelligence that Quebecers felt when their Premier appeared before them to defend himself from the accusations from a report that he commissioned but couldn't be bothered to read.

Not surprisingly, the decision did not support our motion to have the electoral system declared unconstitutional. After all, for better or for worse, the first-past-the-post voting system distorts the popular vote to give dictatorial control of the government to the leader of the party that wins the most seats. The political power that the Premier enjoys results from a manipulation in the manner the votes cast are transformed into seats in the legislature and that power is used to appoint judges. Simply put, judges are human and they are not going to bite the hand that feeds them.

Intellectually, I understand the systemic bias that protects the status quo, but what I didn't expect is a decision that would make Kafka laugh in the way it was rendered.

In rendering his decision, Judge Dufresne did toss us a crumb in asserting that the lower court judge had erred when saying our case wasn't judicable. Wow! This question had already been addressed when Quebec's Attorney General tried and failed to have our case declared inadmissible at an earlier instance in the proceedings. Moreover, even a cursory reading of the jurisprudence would indicate that the Court is obliged to hear a case when reasonable doubt on the constitutionality of electoral practices has been produced.

However, when it came to the real question that was put forward, it was as if the three judges put their hands over their ears and started singing and uttering the phrase, "we can't hear you".

In our case, the judge accepted what was obvious, the first-past-the-post voting system distorts the popular vote, but declared that this in itself wasn't sufficient to grant our motion since all voting systems produce distortions.

Well then what about the scale of the distortions and the manner in which they are produced? We have provided expert testimony that demonstrates that the level of distortion is beyond that of the distortions caused by other electoral practices and were subsequently declared unconstitutional and that the manner in which it is done is unclear violation of the equality guarantees of the Charter.

No matter. We won't give that evidence proper consideration. In the lower court decision not a word was devoted to our most compelling evidence in the analysis and the Appeal Court Judges decided that this slight of hand did not constitute a judicial error.

Excuse my language but "What the Fuck!"

Again, I would accept the decision if it were demonstrated that we had erred in claiming that the fact that first-past-the-post denied representation to as many as a million voters that voted for the Greens in the 2008 federal election was an infringement of their democratic rights guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

But this was not done. They simply dodged this inconvenient fact with dismissive silence concerning how such an electoral anomaly could be countenanced. To date, the contestable prejudice caused to those who have their votes discarded by an electoral system that is unique in that it doesn't possess a mechanism to aggregate votes or voting preferences has not been addressed and thus gives us grounds for an appeal.

Moreover, Judge Dufresne went on to make two outlandish statements that suggest that he doesn't understand or chooses not to understand the fundamental democratic principles upon which the case is founded.

The first was to suggest that the fact that the reversal of the democratic result of the Quebec 1966 and 1998 general elections (the party that won less votes than another went on to form a majority government) and the fact that almost a million voters who voted Green did not gain any representation in the 2008 federal election did not constitute a grave injustice. At the same time, Judge Dufresne uses a statistical outlier, a once-in-a-hundred year electoral result from the 2007 Quebec General Election (the three major parties gained more or less representation proportional to the popular vote) to demonstrate that the distortions inherent to first-past-the-post are not systemic yet ignored that two smaller parties that together garnered 7% of the vote were denied any representation at all.

He then suggests that the most recent federal election in which the Conservatives form a majority government with only 39% of the popular vote and in Quebec the Bloc is reduced only 4 out of 75 seats despite amassing 25% of the popular vote while the the NDP gains 70% of the seats with only approximately 40% of the vote is evidence to the contrary. In making such a claim, Judge Dufresne is suggesting that black is white for in no way do these electoral results conform to the principles of democracy, in particular that each and every vote carries equal weight.

One has to wonder what is the frame of reference being used to apply the concept of effective representation for each and every citizen. Do the egalitarian values inherent to democracy enter the equation? Apparently not in Quebec at this time.

Clearly, an appeal grounded on democratic principles would go nowhere in Charest's Quebec because to grant our appeal would upset the very power base that political parties rely upon to gain absolute control of the state and their subsequent ability to redirect a large portion of the collective wealth into private hands. Too many people profit handsomely from this dysfunctional form of governance to let it be replaced with a democratic electoral system.

In order to seek justice, we will need to have our case heard in a different political context, which we hope to find in having our appeal heard at the Supreme Court of Canada.

No News Is Good News

It's been more five months since our appeal was heard and the decision has yet to be rendered. I take this to be good news since it means that our arguments weren't simply dismissed outright as was the case in our unfavorable decision at the Quebec Superior Court.

As a result, I expect a substantive decision that will either declare the present electoral system unconstitutional or square the use of first-past-the-post with democratic principles. In the latter case, this could turn out to a Herculean task since the right for each citizen to have an effective voice in the legislature runs contrary to the systemic elimination of voices that a winner-take-all, plurality voting system entails.

Of course, we would prefer that the Court upholds our appeal, but if not, I am quite confident that any attempt to square the circle will give us sufficient grounds to have our appeal heard at the Supreme Court.

Add Bill 19 as Another Reason Why the Court Should Intervene in the Quebec Charter Challenge of First-Past-The-Post

Last week, the Charest-led Liberal Government introduced Bill 19 in order to have an electoral map in place for the next Quebec general election, which is due to be held within the next two years.

The problem is that the proposed map does not address the fundamental flaw of the existing map that there are a number of rural tidings that do not respect the constitutional requirement with respect to the relative number of electors per riding, no more than a 25% deviation from the provincial average.

Previously, the Director General Elections had drawn up a new map that would respect this constitutional requirement by adding three new electoral districts to the more populous regions outside of Montreal and by removing three electoral districts in the sparsely populated outlying regions.

Unhappy with the fact that the Director of Elections would not comply with Charest's wishes to ignore the constitutionality of a new electoral map, the Premier decided to suspend the powers of the Director even before getting the necessary legislation adopted in the National Assembly.

He then introduced Bill 19, which essentially adds the three new ridings without removing the three targeted ridings. The problem of the inequality of voting power between rural and urban ridings remains: there are a number of urban ridings that have twice the number of electors than their rural counterparts. Consequently, the vote of a citizen in a riding that was targeted to be removed is worth twice the vote of a citizen who casts his vote in a more populated riding.

At the heart of the issue is the inability of the first-past-the-past voting system to accommodate demographic trends in Quebec. People are leaving the outlying regions to live in the more populated urban centers. As well, immigrants also choose overwhelming to do the same. Inevitably, if single member districts are to be used something has to give, and if a change to multimember electoral changes is not implemented, the outlying regions will bear the brunt of the redistribution.

Given the choice of respecting the fundamental democratic principle of the equality of vote or keeping in place an institutional practice that does not have the capacity to adapt to Quebec's demographic reality, Charest is clearly clinging to the outdated voting system that allows him to form a majority government with the support of only a minority of the electorate. Clearly, Charest's desire for political power overrides his responsibility to put and keep in place a democratic electoral system.

Although the question now before the Quebec Appeal Court is larger, the constitutionality of using single member electoral districts in conjunction with a plurality method to determine representation, by striking down the first-past-the-post system the Court would prevent the Charest government from adopting what is without question the most discriminatory electoral map in North America.

Electoral and Referendum Results Demonstrate the Need for the Courts to Intervene

Last week's results for the Canadian federal election and the crushing defeat of the alternative vote option in the United Kingdom's referendum on the voting system clearly demonstrates why the courts need to intervene in order to change the voting system.

Looking at the electoral results, first-past-the-post's propensity to produce significant distortions of the popular vote held true to form. Essentially, the election was decided by the huge winner's bonus that the system awarded the NDP in Quebec, which was more than offset by the vote splitting in Ontario that created the conditions for the Conservatives to form a majority government despite the fact that that had received slightly less than 40% of the popular vote. In a tell tale sign on the inadequacy of first-past-the-post, the Greens were able to concentrate their efforts into a single riding and elect their first Member of Parliament, but this came at a cost of loosing one third of their share of the popular vote as compared to the previous federal election.

Clearly, the systemic distortions inherent to the system were manifest and this time it was in Quebec where both the Liberals and the Bloc Quebecois received the greatest reductions of seats as compared with the popular vote: a first for both parties during the last twenty years, which should catch the attention of the judges at the Quebec Court of Appeal.

In a similar vein, the massive refusal to change the voting system in the UK follows similar results on voting system referendums in British Columbia and Ontario. It appears that the populations in all three jurisdictions do not find the discrimination perpetuated by first-past-the-post to be sufficient to warrant changing the system.

Since the right to vote is protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the political process has failed to change the voting system in a manner so that these rights are protected for all citizens, the Court is indeed obliged to intervene.

Only by striking down the electoral law that brings about first-past-the-post can the legislative branch be forced to bring its electoral practices in line with the equality guarantees of the Charter.

In doing so, the Quebec Court of Appeal would be following the example of the American Supreme Court that struck down state electoral laws that were extremely discriminatory towards African Americans and led the way to the adoption of the Voting Rights Act.

The Federal Court of Appeal Should Grant a Interlocutory Injunction Against the Exclusion of Elizabeth May from the Televised Leaders Debate

I think that it should be obvious by now that the Greens are subject to some very serious discrimination against their fundamental democratic rights. I also believe that the exclusion of Elizabeth May from the televised leaders debate illustrates the systemic nature of this discrimination.

Keep in mind that during the 2008 federal election, the Greens received almost one million votes and were not awarded a single seat in Parliament. To put that in perspective, the Bloc Quebecois received 1.3 million votes and received 49 seats.

As you know, if you follow this blog, we have contested the constitutionality of the voting system that could bring about such a democratic anomaly. Both Elizabeth May and Fair Vote Canada were granted intervenor status. Our appeal was heard on Feb. 8, 2011 and a decision is pending.

The reason given by the television consortium for excluding Ms. May was that the Greens had not won a seat in Parliament. Hey, wait a minute isn't the constitutionality of the very said voting system that makes it such that a million electors forgo effective representation despite their numbers presently before the Quebec Court of Appeal?

Given that the decision hasn't been rendered but is expected shortly and it is entirely possible that the grounds put forward to justify the exclusion of Ms. May would also be rendered untenable if the Court strikes down the use of the very same voting system, the Federal Court should grant an interlocutory injunction that maintains the status quo, which means as was the case in 2008, Ms. May would participate in the leaders debate.

After the Quebec Court of Appeal has rendered its decision, then the question put before the Federal Court can be examined and decided upon. To rule beforehand could expose the plaintiff to irreparable harm since her exclusion from the debate could prevent voters who might be otherwise inclined to vote for the Greens from doing so if they had had the opportunity to witness her participation during the leaders debate. Moreover, her inclusion in the debate would not be prejudicial to the other leaders since they opted to participate in such a debate in 2008.

Clearly, the Federal Court of Appeal has the opportunity to uphold the values of a free and democratic society and we would hope that it would do its part in bringing the systemic discrimination against the Greens to an end.

Quebec's Major Political Parties Collude to Maintain the Worst Electoral System in North America

Quebec's two major political parties refuse to uphold one of the most fundamental principles of democracy: one person, one vote.

Stuck with an outdated electoral system and having refused to change the voting system both parties voted to suspend the powers of the Director General of Elections who had the audacity of proposing an electoral map that respected that constitutional requirements of the relative parity of the vote.

Presently, 27 of the 125 ridings do not conform to the Quebec Electoral Law's stipulation that the number of electors per riding can be no more or no less than a 25% deviation from the average number of electors per riding province wide. The proposed map would have rectified this anomaly.

This week the PQ recommended that there be two different provincial quotients, one for rural ridings and one for urban ridings, which means that the inequality of the vote would become institutionalized. Furthermore, this move would be in the national interest. Remember this is the party that claims to be socially democratic. I guess some social democrats are more equal than others depending where you live.

Not to be outdone, the Quebec Liberals then proposed that they would add three additional electoral districts to the map. Too bad it would take at least 26 additional seats to lower the provincial average for the number of electors per riding so that all of the ridings would conform to Quebec's own electoral law.

I hope the judges who are now rendering their decision in our motion to have Quebec's voting system declared unconstitutional take notice that at the moment Quebec does not have the institutional capacity to bring its electoral system within the democratic norms of a developed country.

Declaring First-Past-The-Post to be unconstitutional would help break the impasse.

Referendum in the UK on the Voting System Aids Our Cause

Well, it's official. There will be a referendum on the voting system in the UK on May 5, 2011. From a legal standpoint, this is very good news. In short, the holding of the referendum and the choices given to the electorate torpedo two of the principle arguments put forward by Quebec's Attorney General.

The first argument is that the first-past-the-post system could not be unconstitutional since it is part of our constitutional legacy to be found in the B.N.A. Act. However, by putting the question to a vote, this demonstrates that choice of a voting system is not frozen in time. It is something that evolves over time much like the extension of the franchise. Just as the refusal to not extend the vote to women in 1867 could not pass constitutional muster in a today's post-Charter Canada, the same can be said of the voting system, especially when we take in consideration that holding a referendum on the question bespeaks of its fundamental problems. Essentially, the referendum in the UK gives legitimacy that the question that we are putting before the courts is indeed subject to judicial review.

The second argument that falls by the way side is the claim that we are attempting to have the courts impose a particular voting system on the Quebec legislature. On the contrary, the choice of a second majoritarian voting system on the ballot demonstrates without question that the legislature can opt for an alternative method other than a proportional voting system.

If we were at the lower court, I'm not sure if the judge would grasp the significance of this development, but now that we are at Quebec's highest court and given the type of interventions made by the judges during the appeal, I am confident that they will give this development the consideration it deserves.