Thibault Camus

With the House of Commons off for one of their ghastly holidays, I’ve found myself in a bit of a withdrawal. Laying on the kitchen floor at 4am, covered in a cold sweat,  flipping through Harperland and trying to formulate my own robotic Tory minister talking points, I realized that I need a fix.

The impending French election is doing quite nicely.

Qu'est-ce qui se passe?

In short, the French public will be going through the first round of voting next week, looking to decide between the most hated president in French history and that socialist guy who isn’t Dominique Strauss Kahn. But both the far-right Front National and leftist Front de Gauche are making advances in the polls (16% apiece.) Rounding out the list are a marginal liberal party, a smattering of Communist parties, the Greens, a Euro-skeptic party and some complete nutjobs. 

French elections work as such; candidates require 500 signatures from the county’s thousands of regional politicians. Once they get those, they qualify for the first ballot, which determines which two candidates will go head-to-head on the final ballot. This is unless a candidate can get over 50% on the first ballot. Not likely, in a country where the president often gets 16% on the first ballot.

That last ballot is almost always whoever is running in whatever incarnation of Charles de Galle’s old party is around (currently Sarkozy's Union pour un Mouvement Populaire) and the Socialist(y) Party. The only exceptions since 1958 was in 2002, when right-wing Jean-Marie Le Pen edges out in front of the Socialists by less than a percentage point (only to get crushed by Jacques Chirac by over 60%) and in 1969, when one center-right Christian party faced off in a heated election against another center-right Christian party.

But this time around, it’s not impossible that either the Front National (now led by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter) or the Front de Gauche (a “unity” party created via a fracturing with the now-centrist Socialist Party) could leapfrog over the tired old Sarkozy. It would only require about a 5% swing. (Apparently there is a poll coming out saying that this is exactly what’s going on.)

As a side note, Mélenchon’s Front de Gauche is a very interesting campaign; from his use of Jay Z and Kanye West’s Niggas in Paris (seriously cool) to an Obama Girl-esque video that he swears he’s not behind (a little creepy,) it’s a campaign that appears to be engaging youth behind a 60-year old radical leftist. That’s pretty cool.

Okay, so that’s the short-and-skinny of it, but the better question is; who cares?

And I say unto you:

All of fucking France.

This is a country that consistently maintains a voter turnout of over 70%, even in two-party system. Look at America, where 60% is considered high.

Or hell, look at Canada.

Or hell, let’s look at Canada.

Too often, our francophile tendencies stop at the Gulf of Saint Lawrence - we should be looking right across the Atlantic.

It’s no secret that Harper is pining for a two-party system - the Tories and the Dippers, with the Grits eating hay in the barn of electoral defeat, located just outside of Moose Jaw.

In our system, there is a duality. Generally speaking, our politics transpires in one of two ways.

The first; over time, the (small-l) liberal party has withered away in favour of some configuration of the left-right divide. The resulting parties are some breed of Conservative/Progressive, with varying degrees of ideological rigor. Brad Wall in Saskatchewan is the staunch right-wing candidate, while the NDP in that provinces has, as of late, been the mushy left-of-center ether. Meanwhile, British Columbia has generally enjoy a decidedly leftist NDP fighting a conservative Liberal party that often waffles back and forth from centrist to right-wing.

The second; a pluralist system that has bred nearly identical political parties with practically indistinguishable platforms who swap places in government every few years. Sometimes this system can, in effect, be a two-party regime (PEI or Newfoundland) but the other parties are there and always have the potential to politely rise up and grab power (Nova Scotia.) This is essentially our federal system, though it is more polemical.

Then you have the others. The Northwest Territories operate on a party-less consensus-building hippyfest, while Quebec (and recently, Alberta) have created more robust pluralist systems that create a greater fracturing of the political sphere on more specific ideological grounds. We’re taught to believe that this is a bad thing. It’s not.

In many ways, a three-or-four party system (like what we have federally) isn’t so great. In reality, having a left/center/right paradigm lends itself to an overly-strategic voting process and an ill-defined governing principle. That is to say - people will vote Liberal (or now, NDP) to avoid getting a Conservative government, and then, whoever wins, they essentially have to contort themselves five different ways because their party is too diverse.

That diversity is nice, but it’s not really a good thing. If you’re a right-wing party, why do you need left-leaning people in it? (i.e. What’s Peter MacKay doing in Vic Toews’ party?) The job of opposition is better left to the opposition.

But now, seemingly, it’s boiling down to a two-party game, where those problems just get worse.

Any better ideas?

There’s something novel about the French system. Currently, the Canadian cries of “THE SILENT 60%!” or whatever foolishness people brandish to convey that Harper’s prime ministership somehow isn’t legitimate would not be terribly happy in a French system. That’s okay, they’re going to be grumpy no matter what.

However, there’s something to be said for a two-ballot system to improve voter engagement. On one hand, it encourages people to vote out of conviction, rather than fear. If a French voter doesn’t like Sarkozy, they know that, on the first ballot, they don’t have to vote for the Socialist Party to beat him. They can vote for the radical Communists, and then just hold their nose and vote Socialist on the next ballot.

In Canada, conventional pre-2011 wisdom was that you vote Liberal to defeat Harper. The near-compulsiveness to the act was a big turn-off for people. That lack of choice is not a good way to spur engagement.

Furthermore, a splintering of the political parties can speak to individual classes and communities much more effectively. Look at the Reform Party - irrespective of their policies, their politics were rooted in church halls in rural Alberta. That’s a great way to run a democracy. The Conservative Party of today doesn’t have that - it can’t, it’s too big.

Even the more diverse democracies in Alberta and Quebec aren’t quite right. Alberta has left-leaning (the NDP,) centrist (Liberal,) not-the-liberals-centrist (Alberta Party,) right-leaning (PCs,) and right-wing (Wildrose.) 

More parties, sure, but it really doesn’t represent much diversity. It gives more choices to centrists and right-leaning people, but it doesn’t really do that much more.

Quebec is a little harder to peg down, but generally; left/sovereigntist (Quebec Solidaire,) center-left/sovereigntist (Option Nationale,) sometimes-left/sovereigntist (Parti Quebecois,) currently-right-leaning/federalist (Liberals,) and right-leaning/federalist-ish (Coalition Avenir Québec.) 

So, basically, you have a very general fracturing, coupled with a specific issue pairing with the parties. The Quebec Liberal party doesn’t know what it stands for, other than being federalist and centrist. Because it has to occupy the broad federalist center, it has a mix of federal Tories, Dippers and Grits and together, they all bang their heads together and churn out some mediocre policy.

Smash the party system! (In favour of a better party system.)

What if, tomorrow, the New Democratic, Liberal, Conservative, Bloc, Green parties ceased to exist? The bewildered MPs in the house would have form their own parties as distraught political strategists ran around with fists full of press releases, presumably on fire.

I think, if someone were clever enough to pipe up and note that parliament can be run by a coalition of smaller parties, it just might happen. You’ll see a revival of the Reform party. You’d see a pan-Canadian center-right party featuring Bloquists, Liberals and Tories. You could see a centrist Green party with members from all the former parties. Then you could see an East Coast pan-ideology party. You’d likely see a Northern party. There’d be a center-left liberal party. Maybe a labour party made up of the union-oriented NDPers. Then there’d probably be a more firmly left-wing faction. Maybe a federalist Quebec-issues party, a law-and-order party, a non-ideological caucus, etc.

The idea is that, when the big-party structures go away, the smaller, representative groups can pop up. Currently, most candidates wouldn’t run for one of the three big parties if that wasn’t the only channel to get elected.

Our parties are unwieldy. A 143-member caucus is absurd - 80% of those MPs are essentially just asses-in-chairs. If that 143-member majority was, instead, a working coalition of four or five parties, you would have increased debate, discussion, work, collaboration, and dissent.

France isn’t quite there yet. The dynasties of the Socialist and Union parties is a serious barrier to an effectively diverse field of political parties.

What is interesting, however, is that the Front Gauche has carved out a very strange and unholy alliance with the Socialist Party where, in some regions, they share lists on the first or second ballots. If the Front were capable of expanding and solidifying its membership and caucus bases (they currently have some waverers who have feet in many camps) they could potentially exert enough influence over the Socialist Party to effective make a diversified-yet-unified collection of parties on the left that could govern as a party without sacrificing the regional, ideological and issue-specific factions within them.

Canada should watch closely. One need only look at the rallies that these parties hold to realize that there is something wrong with our political culture.