Voting: The Percentage Of Political Parties In Canada

Words often associated with democracy are freedom, choice, representation, voice and opinion. However, what happens when there is an excessive number of representatives and too many politicians voicing their opinions? The choice of who to vote for becomes harder due to the barrage of opinions. The influx of political parties has greatly affected the elections, as poll results show that minority parties are receiving votes from Canadians which diminishes the amount of votes going to the main parties.

In the 2015 Canadian federal election, the main parties that people focused on were the Liberals, the Progressive Conservatives, the New Democratic Party, the Green Party and the Bloc Quebecois. However there were several other registered parties

This party appeals to a very narrow segment of the population, who would end up voting for them, which causes the votes going to the other parties to decline. Another example of a party with a very limited appeal is the Communist party of Canada. The Communist party fielded candidates in twenty six ridings across Canada. They received a small percentage of the votes cast in each of these ridings. While they did not come close to winning, by siphoning away votes from other so-called legitimate parties, they made the race much closer than necessary. The whole start of the inflation of parties was in 1961, when Tommy Douglas formed the federal New Democratic Party. Before then, Canada followed the two- party-system that the United States of America has, ith individual candidates able to run on their own. However, by adding another major party, voters were forced to choose between the two similar ideologies of the Liberals and New Democrats against the Conservatives. This caused vote splitting which leads to the Conservatives getting more votes simply due to the fact that people are not able to decide between the two parties with coinciding

Looking at Canada’s federal election means that in each riding, the candidate who receives the most votes - wins that riding. They do not necessarily need to win 50% of the votes. For example, if there were three candidates, the vote split could be 25 %, 35 % and 40 %. On top of that, the more parties that are running, the more fragmented the vote can get. For example, in each Quebec riding, there are at least 5 candidates vying for election. This means that the party vote split in these ridings could be 25%, 21%, 19%, 18.5% and 16.5%. To demonstrate how too many political parties vying for power skews election results, one needs to look no further than the most recent election. The Liberals received 39.5 % of the votes cast across Canada. The Progressive Conservatives were not that far behind with 31.9 % of the popular vote. A difference of only 7.6 %. However, in the House of Commons the Liberals hold almost twice as many seats as the Conservatives with 184 versus 99. Not only are the Conservatives misrepresented but this could have been prevented had there been less parties vying for the position of Prime