Blog

It’s out with the old, in with the new, atop the Canadian government. Mark Carney will become the new prime minister after winning the election with 86 percent of the vote. Wait, hold on… 86 percent? Is he really that popular? No, not at all. In a nation of 40 million people (slightly more residents than California), Carney won with just 131,674 votes.

In Canada, as in other parliamentary systems, when a prime minister resigns, only members of the party in power get to vote on a replacement. This is not unusual—it happened several times recently in the UK. In fact, parliamentary systems never use a national popular vote. Periodic elections are held for members of parliament, who then vote for a prime minister. When a prime minister resigns, it is either the party rank-and-file or just the party’s members of parliament who get to choose the replacement.

In the U.S., critics of our Electoral College often claim that “no other country” uses anything like our system. That’s only true in the sense that no other state has a constitution exactly like any other. Of course, no political systems are identical, but many nations use a multi-step election process at the national level. Every parliamentary system works that way, while India and Germany actually have their own versions of an electoral college. France used to have one, but now holds a two-round direct national election (although the French Senate is still chosen by an electoral college system).

 It's also important to note that in most of these systems – it’s entirely possible for a candidate to win despite another candidate having more popular support. This is most obvious when a prime minister is replaced without any kind of public election at all. But it remains true even with a parliamentary election, as Sean Parnell described here after the last Canadian election.

Like the United States, Canada has a two-step process for determining its chief executive – the people vote for members of the House of Commons, who then vote for a prime minister, typically the leader of the party with the most members in parliament.

Following the 2019 elections that was the Liberal Party, even though the Conservative Party had received 34.34 percent of the popular vote compared to the Liberals 33.12 percent. The Conservatives had the misfortune of racking up overwhelming wins in a number of districts in the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan but being less competitive in the rest of the country. The Liberals didn’t do well in those two provinces but had a broader appeal, doing well in Ontario, Quebec, the Atlantic and Northern regions, and British Columbia in the West. The Liberals wound up with 157 seats (out of 338 total) compared to the Conservatives’ 121.

Canada in 2019 is hardly alone among the world’s democracies (besides the U.S.) in having a head of government that received fewer popular votes than their rival. In recent decades it has also happened in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom.

The title of Sean’s article is, “Democracy is more than adding up popular votes,” and that truth is what all these systems recognize. Important values can be served by structuring an election system to promote coalition building, protect minorities, or discourage regionalism. There are tradeoffs, of course. But when advocates claim that the U.S. “is the only democracy in the world where a presidential candidate can get the most popular votes and still lose the election,” they are either exposing their ignorance or intentionally misleading readers.