Quebec members of the National Assembly have regained control of the electoral map at the expense of a longstanding independent and rational process.
by Louis Massicotte. Originally published on Policy Options
September 25, 2024
(Version française disponible ici)
In March 2024, all parties represented in the Quebec legislature agreed to cancel the redrawing of the provincial electoral map, which was supposed to take place after two general elections. A new map will not come into force until 2030. This will allow the delimitation criteria set out in the Elections Act to be amended in the meantime. The move is unfortunate.
It is well known that the best way to prevent growing inequality in democratic representation is to update boundaries at regular intervals. The map was to be reviewed after two elections on a timetable that has been respected until recently (the 2001 map is the only exception, due to the early election held in 2008).
Except for Prince Edward Island, provinces all require electoral boundaries to be readjusted either every ten years or after two elections. No province has done anything as serious as cancelling a review mandated by its own legislation in more than 30 years. At the federal level, the electoral map has been reviewed every decade.
The decision taken by the members of Quebec’s National Assembly therefore contravenes not only Quebec’s own practices, but those in force across the country. The current map, which is already six years old, will be used for at least three successive elections expected in the regular timeframe, including the next one, scheduled for 2026.
The MNAs did not even give the electoral representation commission a chance to consider their criticism and make adjustments. Experience shows that once their initial conclusions have been tabled, bodies of this kind tend to take feedback into account and adjust their stance (which is legitimate).
High levels of inequality are set to increase
In Quebec, no fewer than 14 electoral districts are currently outside the limits for the minimum or maximum number of potential voters set by law. According to the commission, the number of such ridings will rise from 14 to 17 in the next election. Quebec’s current electoral map does rather poorly when it comes to voter equality, ranking seventh among provinces.
Parties in the National Assembly had set the tone by agreeing unanimously and without debate – twice – that ‟any loss of political weight suffered by our Quebec regions jeopardizes the democratic health of our nation.”
Dozens of times in Quebec, as elsewhere, regions with declining relative demographic weight have suffered the misfortune of losing seats. The Bas-Saint-Laurent and Gaspé Peninsula regions had 10 seats out of 95 in the early 1960s compared with seven out of 125 today. No one has seriously suggested that Quebec’s ‟democratic health” has suffered as a result, whatever that vague formulation might mean.
Rather, it is MNAs deciding that electoral boundaries should be immutable that very clearly undermines a democratic principle by entrenching the privilege of declining regions in defiance of actual demographics.
When MNAs fight for ‟les régions”
By deciding long ago to cap their numbers at 125, MNAs created a zero-sum game that increases the possibility of a declining region losing a constituency, a scenario that increasing the size of the National Assembly could help avoid.
Redistributions now have little effect on the respective strengths of the various parties, hence the temptation among them to make cheap political capital by rushing to defend ‟les regions,” where elections are said to be decided.
In the late 1960s, René Lévesque himself emphasized that ‟democracy is based on the equality of voters.” He denounced the manoeuvres of conservatives to ‟maintain the old electoral maps that allow them to dominate legislatures.” He denounced demagogues and those who benefit from patronage who maintained the ‟illusion” that the interests of rural populations were better served in this way.
The outcries of Lévesque – born and raised in the Gaspé Peninsula – against the iniquities of the electoral slicing and dicing of yesteryear have been forgotten by his political heirs in the Parti Québécois. They have become the most eloquent defenders of an electoral map that favours declining regions now that they are having their best polling results in years in those regions.
The same evolution has occurred with another opposition party, Québec Solidaire. In 2010, while deploring ‟the seriousness of the slump affecting the very survival of certain regions,” the party argued that ‟the solution does not lie in over-representing them in the National Assembly in defiance of fundamental democratic rules.” The party described such over-representation as a false solution providing a “false sense of security.”
The Liberals, driven by existential fear of being confined to the west of Montreal and keen to appease the outlying regions, delayed the 2011 reform under the premiership of Jean Charest as long as they could. They have still ended up confined to the west of Montreal.
The unanimity of the three opposition parties forced the CAQ, who initially intended to let the process pursue its course, to introduce a bill cancelling the redistribution. After all, the Gaspesie ridings proposed for amalgamation are both represented by CAQ MNAs, one of whom is a minister. On the other hand, cancelling the redistribution will make it possible to avoid an immediate increase in the number of seats in the National Assembly, a prospect that seems to horrify Quebec Premier François Legault.
The mayors and prefects of the declining regions now dominate the debate on electoral boundaries. They came close to torpedoing the 2011 reform, and subsequently obtained numerous exemptions in their favour. One of them went so far as to say last autumn that they had ‟the knife between their teeth” – a French expression for being prepared for battle.
Meanwhile, the dynamic regions with growing populations are generally watching the train go by. The council representing prefects and mayors in the Laurentides region nevertheless noted that the cancellation of the reorganisation deprived its territory of an additional seat in the assembly, which would have been justified by demographic growth.
Postponing the inevitable
By postponing the imposition of new delimitation criteria, the MNAs have only delayed the inevitable. The touching unanimity they displayed in sparing themselves the agony of redistribution may well crumble when alternatives are carefully examined.
For example, dividing electoral districts by population rather than the number of electors runs directly counter to the objective of preserving the political weight of remote regions. The Gaspé Peninsula has 3.2 per cent of MNAs, but 1.9 per cent of voters and an even smaller portion (1.7 per cent) of the population.
Another solution often floated is to increase the total number of seats. This would be a lesser evil, but the political weight of declining regions would still be slightly diluted. This path was explored by the Charest government, which painstakingly produced two bills along these lines. Neither was able to achieve consensus and the government had to throw in the towel.
Quebec’s political class seems to have remained in tune with what author Louis Hémon once called ‟the elegiac ways of Quebec,” according to which “nothing must die, and nothing must change.” When it comes to reforming the voting system, even the firmest commitments have been reneged upon. As if to illustrate that respect for vested interests is more important to them than anything else, MNAs are blocking change even on the less far-reaching issue of the electoral map.
They are happy to leave the details of the electoral map to a commission whose independence they emphasize to impress the public, but the disenchanted observation made in 2010 by former chief electoral officer Marcel Blanchet, on the eve of his retirement, remains valid: ‟If the result does not satisfy the political authorities, they reserve the right to set it aside (…) I understand that the new criterion is satisfaction.”
Otherwise, one might add, the reform will go to waste.
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This article first appeared on Policy Options and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.