Quebec may not care but it hits above its weight for the Liberal leadership

Last year, when New Democrats elected Thomas Mulcair their leader, every single paid-up member of the party was allowed to vote and every single vote counted. It was a one-member, one-vote system.

There was, at various points in the race, concern from the Montreal-based Mulcair camp that, since Quebec had never had — and still does not have — a provincial wing of the party and since members of provincial NDP parties in BC, Manitoba, Ontario and elsewhere are automatically voting members of the federal party, that the one-member, one-vote system would be a handicap to candidates, like Mulcair, from Quebec.

The one-member, one-vote system in the NDP leadership race turned out, after all, not to be a handicap for Mulcair because he won.

Still, though the province of Quebec has about 23 per cent of the Canadian population, just 9.6 per cent of the eligible voters in that NDP contest were from Quebec. By contrast, more than 30 per cent of the voters were from B.C., even though B.C. has only 13 per cent of the population. Those who were nervous about one-member, one-vote were worried that regional imbalances would either given an advantage to one candidate or another.

The Liberal Party of Canada is in the midst of its own leadership race and voting is underway this week. Again, Quebec is under-represented so far as voters go if one compares Quebec votersto the overall population. Just 11.6 per cent of the Liberal leadership voters are from Quebec.

This time next week, the leaders of the two leading opposition parties could be from Quebec and yet, judged on their participation in each party’s leadership contest, Quebecer’s seem not to care that much. That’s the starting point for my discussion with Le Journal de Montréal blogger Lisa Ravary, above.

Still, even if Quebecers seem bored by these leadership races by federal parties, the Liberals are giving La Belle Province influence which goes with its size. All 308 ridings in the country are afforded an equal number of points and all the candidates have to run 308 mini-races in each riding. Each riding is awarded a 100 points and a candidate is apportioned a certain number of votes based on how they did in that particular riding. That means that Quebec-based votes will have the same influence Quebec MPs have in the House of Commons — precisely 24.4 per cent of the vote. This, incidentally, is the same voting schema used by the Conservative Party of Canada in its one and only leadership race, the race in which Stephen Harper beat Tony Clement and Belinda Stronach.

How does this work? Well, if there is a riding with 200 voters and 50 of them vote for Deborah Coyne and 150 vote for Martin Cauchon, Coyne gets 1/4 of the points available in that riding and Cauchon gets 3/4 of the available points. With 100 points up for grabs  in each riding then, Coyne gets 25 points and Cauchon 75 points. This mini-race gets repeated 308 times and at the end of it, we add up all the points that all the candidates get and the first one to get 50 per cent plus one of all the available points wins. With 308 ridings at 100 points each, there are 30,800 points so the winner will be the first to get 15,401.

Now, clearly, some ridings will have more voters than others. And that means that not every voter is equal. For example, Nunavut, Yukon, and the Northwest Territories are not only territories, they are also ridings. And the party has disclosed that the total number of eligible voters in each riding is 58, 222, and 176 respectively. That’s total voters. As in fifty-eight people have ballots in Nunavut and the decisions of those 58 people will decide who gets what share of the 100 points assigned to the riding of Nunavut.

You can see the math we can now start doing. If there are 58 voters in Nunavut and the riding of Nunavut is woth 100 points, then each voter in Nunavut is worth 1.724 points towards the 15,401 required to win. You won’t be surprised to hear that this makes each Nunavut vote the most valuable in the country.

On the flipside, a Liberal leadership voter in Ontario is among the least valuable when it comes to points even though nearly half of all the voters in this contest come from Ontario. Ontario has 59,475 eligible voters or 46.8 per cent of the total of 127,122 eligible voters across the country. But Ontario has 106 ridings or 10,600 points up for grabs. Do the math and that means that each Ontario vote is worth, on average, 0.178 points. Remember,in Nunavut each vote is worth 1.724 votes; in Ontario, they’re worth one-tenth that or 0.178 votes.

Why is this important? Because there is no way anyone beats Justin Trudeau on the popular vote. If it was one-member, one-vote, Trudeau wins running away on the first ballot by a long shot.

But the campaigns of Joyce Murray, particulary, and Martha Hall Findlay to a degree believe that the “efficiency” of their vote can overcome Trudeau’s popular vote advantage. This is not wishful thinking. In the 1996 provincial election in British Columbia, Gordon Campbell’s Liberals edged out Glen Clark’s NDP on popular vote, 42% to 39% and yet — because the Liberal vote was more concentrated and the NDP vote more efficiently spread around the province — Clark ended up with a majority government — 39 seats to 33 for Campbell (and 3 for others).

Murray’s only hope is that her support is, like Glen Clark’s, more efficiently spread about all 308 ridings than Trudeau’s. Of course, neither Trudeau nor his advisors are dummies and have been aware of this for a while and, we are told, taken steps to spread their vote around. Trudeau’s people are telling reporters that they believe this race will be over on the first ballot with Trudeau notching around 55 per cent of the ballots cast.

And so we come back to Quebec.

Remember how, in the NDP race, there were worries that Quebec would be snubbed because it would not have the influence in the race its relative size in Canada gives it?

Well, as it turns out, Quebec votes are among the most highly valued votes in the Liberal leadership race. Though Quebecers make up just 11.5% of all eligible voters in the Liberal race, the points awarded Quebec ridings make up 24.4% of all available points. So if any single Ontario voter is worth 0.178 points in the final tally, any single Quebec voter is worth 0.515 points or three times the value of an Ontario voter.

Here, based on the data made available by the Liberal Party, I have calculated the average points-per-voter of each province’s voter, ranked from highest to lowest:

NU	1.724
NT	0.568
SK	0.519
QC	0.515
YT	0.450
MB	0.315
AB	0.301
BC	0.224
NL	0.222
ON	0.178
PE	0.153
NS	0.148
NB	0.145
CANADA	0.242

And now, we rank each province based on proportion of all eligible voters in the race.

ON	46.79%
BC	12.66%
QC	11.46%
AB	7.32%
NS	5.84%
NB	5.42%
MB	3.50%
NL	2.48%
SK	2.12%
PE	2.05%
YT	0.17%
NT	0.14%
NU	0.05%
CANADA	100.00%