The French just united against the right. Here’s how Canadians could, too

Facing a high-stakes parliamentary election, politicians from across the spectrum came together this month to gang up against France’s far-right proto-fascists. Could Canada’s rival progressive parties ever come together in the same way for a similar purpose?

Don’t discount the idea of a better way of counting ballots.

After the first round of voting in France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally — an anti-immigrant, nakedly Islamophobic movement cloaked in antisemitism — emerged with a stunning lead that put her on a path to power. But in the runoff voting that followed this week, rival parties of the centre and left co-ordinated their campaigns in an unprecedented common front.

Competing parties bowed out of the tightest races to avoid splitting the centre-left vote, rallying around the candidate best-placed to overtake the far-right leader in key ridings. Even if far from ideal, the muddled outcome is far better than the alternative of unravelling French domestic and foreign policy.

What lessons can be applied to Canadian politics? Under our existing system, known as first past the post (FPTP), the victor needs only a plurality of the ballots cast to edge out everyone else — typically without a majority of more than 50 per cent.

Many will pine, predictably, for proportional representation (PR) to choose a government that is more mathematically representative of the popular vote — with smaller one-issue parties winning a bigger share of seats on the fringe, further splintering Parliament. All that said and argued, Canada’s political reality reminds us of the elusiveness of electoral reform.

PR isn’t coming anytime soon — it keeps failing in one provincial referendum after another. It fizzled out federally because the rival parties were too suffused by self-interest to reach a compromise.

Conservatives prefer the thumping majorities of FPTP; Greens and New Democrats dream of holding the balance of power in perpetuity with their PR vote share assured; Liberals, as ever, are somewhere in the middle. But the French experience offers an example of how to practise politics differently, in two different ways.

First, I’ve long argued (and fantasized) that Liberals and New Democrats might unite against a united right, rather than dragging each other down while the Tories rise to the top. More recently, the two parties have worked (and voted) together in the current minority Parliament to bring forward historic legislation on pharmacare and dental care.

Why work at cross-purposes at campaign time? Short of formal unification, why not informal collaboration to avoid splitting the progressive vote in ridings where the Conservatives can come up the middle? Instead of praying for people to vote strategically, why don’t the progressive parties campaign strategically by agreeing not to run against each other in winnable ridings?

There is a second way to apply the French result, by adopting the ranked ballot system already used in Australia. The virtue of this voting system is that it allows for true majority rule, riding by riding.

The conventional ranked ballot is part of our history, we just don’t recognize its traditional use in political conventions: Remember that none of our mainstream political parties relies on just a single ballot to choose its chief in a leadership race (or they’d win with only a paltry plurality); leadership conventions typically hold several ballots, with the last-place candidate eliminated in each round and their votes reallocated, until the winner achieves a majority of more than 50 per cent.

Think of the ranked ballot as an electronic runoff, where your second and third choices are reallocated if your candidate trails the pack. The outcome better reflects the electoral consensus — not just who you like most, but who you dislike least.

That’s essentially what happened in the French elections. Under the French legislative system, votes are conducted in two stages: after the first round, any candidate with less than 12.5 per cent support is eliminated and voters cast their second ballot a week later, choosing from among the remaining rivals; in France, party strategists looked at the results of the first round and pared the pack to avoid splitting the vote among too many progressives.

Uniting the left isn’t a perfect solution, but as the French like to say, the perfect is the enemy of the good. The ranked ballot isn’t without fault, but as the British say of democracy itself, it’s better than the alternatives.