Joyce Murray, MP for Vancouver Quadra, calls for party and voting reform. – Photo by Dirk Brinkman, Flickr

The Liberal Party of Canada’s leadership race, now in its final leg, has forced the party to face the harsh reality of a fragmented Canadian electorate. This is thanks to candidate Joyce Murray, MP for Vancouver Quadra, who has used her leadership campaign to insist that it is necessary for opposition parties to cooperate in order to block the Conservative Party.

Ms. Murray’s proposal has been at the center of many discussions within the party and among its supporters. Many believe that strategic voting and interparty cooperation is the only way to break the stranglehold the Conservatives have in many ridings where a vote split on the left has enabled the current government to prevail. This is, in any case, the basis for Murray’s hypothesis. She is convinced that simply combining the votes for opposition parties in the many ridings where the Conservatives won by a thin margin would ensure the defeat of the Conservative team.

She proposes to allow members of the Liberal Party to choose their own riding’s candidate as custom warrants but she, as leader, would reserve the right to decide whether cooperation with either the NDP or the Green Party would be the best strategy for defeating the Conservative candidate. I doubt that a Liberal candidate would easily accept offering his or her place to a candidate chosen by another party. Even if Murray were to be elected Liberal leader she would have to work very hard to convince her party to accept her ways.

Her proposals in matters of democratic reform don’t end there. In fact, the proposed strategic voting cooperation would only be in effect for the 2015 elections. If, following the next elections, the “progressive forces,” as she calls them, should win, a rethinking of our electoral system would be in order. Murray hopes to move Canadian elections to the preferential ballot system. True, at first glance, the idea is alluring. Yet this system has demonstrated many times over that it tends to create parliaments in which a majority is harder to win, resulting in backroom deals to create coalitions. This produces weaker and less transparent governments. Take Italy, for example. Although not exclusively a preferential system, its current situation reveals the downside of preferential ballot voting.

Nevertheless, Murray proposes an ambitious program that could seriously change the way we elect MPs and, by extension, our democracy as a whole. Though the debate is largely academic, since her chances to win are slim, the proposal has clearly created two camps within the Liberal Party:

Justin Trudeau in one corner and Murray in another. This proposal is at the core of Murray’s campaign. It’s the challenge that most clearly separates her from her adversaries, especially the favorite, Trudeau.

Trudeau completely rejects Murray’s prized strategy, convinced that the Liberals will gain power in good time without having to deal with the diluting effects of coalitions. There is some truth to this belief. The electorate routinely gets bored of any government, whichever it may be; voters will eventually feel that it’s time for a new government in Ottawa. Trudeau believes that if it is not in 2015, then it will be the next time around. He is ready to wait it out. If he becomes leader, he’ll have lots of room to maneuver and will not have to face the ire of his partisans should he lose one election.

Translation Monique Kroeger