Canadian Politics 101: Elections

Welcome to Longform North -- a longform interview podcast featuring Canadian voices and stories about Canada.

In Canada, we pick our leaders through elections, where the person who gets the most votes wins.

But it's actually a little bit more complicated than that. And some people think that the way we do elections should actually be changed.

So what are the rules for how someone wins an election?

What does it mean to represent, or act on behalf of, the people that voted you in?

And what do you do when the voter participation rate gets as low as 45%? Less than half of the total amount of people who are eligible to vote.

Dr. Tom Bateman is back to help us out with these questions and more. He is a professor of political science at St Thomas University, and he is one of the co-authors of a book called The Canadian Regime: An Introduction to Canada's Parliamentary Democracy.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• How we think about the role of a political representative in Canada
• Representation and diversity - the idea that the government should be representative of certain identity groups, as well as some of the problems that can arise from that
• How the country gets divided up into different voting districts
• How and when elections are called (and why fixed election dates don’t work in our system)
• Campaign spending limits and limits on 3rd party advertising during elections
• Should we lower the voting age?
• The reasons why the voter turnout rate among younger people is low
• What does the low voter turnout rate indicate more broadly about the voting public?
• Should we bring in online voting?
• How do we pick the “right” electoral system?
• How the First-Past-the-Post system works, and how it impacts the way our elections work?
• How would a Proportional Representation system work? What are its advantages and disadvantages compared with our current system?
• What happened with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s promise to bring in electoral reform back in 2015?
• Is there any hope of changing our electoral system, or are we stuck with what we have?

Links:

• The Canadian Regime: An Introduction to Canada's Parliamentary Democracy
• Dr. Tom MJ Bateman

*Note: This episode was recorded on January 25th, 2025, a day after Premier Doug Ford called a snap election in Ontario, and a few weeks before Mark Carney won the leadership race for the Liberal Party of Canada.

For more about the podcast, check out the website: longformnorth.com

Music by Aaron Barth

Hosted and produced by Ian Van Harten