Canada’s Liberal Party Lost the ‘Popular Vote’ Again, but Still Won — and That’s Fine

Herewith, your regularly scheduled reminder that when progressives complain about mismatches between the “popular vote” and the overall electoral outcome, they are really complaining about a core principle of Anglo-American democracy: localism.

Back in 2020, I noted that, despite having won fewer votes than the Conservative party overall, the Canadian Liberal party had won 36 more seats in parliament:

Take Canada, which is without question an “advanced democracy.” In 2019 — that’s last year — Justin Trudeau was elected as prime minister despite his party losing the “popular vote,” and despite not a single Canadian voter asking for him to fill the role. Wegman writes that:

The presidency is the only office whose occupant must represent all Americans equally, no matter where they live. The person who holds that office should have to win the most votes from all Americans, everywhere.

Is this different for the prime minister of Canada? We’d better hope not! In 2019, Trudeau’s party received 6,018,728 votes in total. This represented 33.1 percent of all ballots cast. As a result, it won 157 seats, more than any other party, and Trudeau, as its leader, became PM. The Conservatives, meanwhile, received 6,239,227 votes. This represented 34.3 percent of all ballots cast. As a result, it won 121 seats — thirty-six fewer than Trudeau’s.

Last night, this happened again. At the current count, the Conservatives have won nearly 300,000 more votes than the Liberals, but, once again, they are set to end up with around 30 fewer seats. (We will, of course, hear almost nothing about this from the usual suspects, even though the details — the Conservatives have won the “popular vote” in five of the last six elections, but won only three of those six — are a perfect mirror-image of the American complaint.)

Is this a problem? No, it’s not. It’s a choice. And it’s a good one, too. Yes, Canada could set up a centralized system that allocated seats based on aggregated, per-party vote totals. But if it did, it would be depriving people of the chance to choose their MP. And in the Anglosphere, we tend not to like that.

As I observed last time around:

As is the case in a considerable number of advanced democracies — especially those that based themselves in some way on English notions of representation — America’s system prioritizes local building blocks over a national glob. American citizens exchange the chance to select their local representatives for the chance that the party that receives more votes overall will not command a majority in the legislature. And so do the British, Canadians, Australians, and so on. In America, citizens willingly utilize a system in which the national leader is selected via an aggregated process while accepting the risks that accompany it. And so do the British, Canadians, Australians, and so on.

America simply isn’t an outlier here — a fact that progressives will no doubt rediscover next time the Republican party wins the “popular vote,” but loses the presidency, or control of Congress, or both.