‘The west really doesn’t count’: Election called just as B.C. polls closed — again

Once again, a federal election call was made well before western votes had a chance to be considered, leaving some voters feeling disenfranchised, as if their votes don’t matter. 

On Monday night, at about 7:15 p.m. PT, media outlets, including CBC News, projected the Liberals would form the next government. 

That was 15 minutes after polls had closed in B.C., and not long after they closed in Alberta. The election call was made knowing only the early results of the more Eastern provinces. 

This is not unusual for British Columbians — it’s certainly happened before — but for some, it is frustrating. 

Two hundred of the country’s ridings are in Ontario and Quebec, because that’s where a high percentage of the Canadian population lives. Another 32 are situated in Atlantic Canada, so it’s really no wonder federal elections are called before western provinces are counted. 

But those early election declarations still hurt, said Sherry Boschman of Fort St. James, located about 113 kilometres northwest of Prince George. 

“It just disappoints me.”

Boschman has voted in B.C. for decades and said she’s grown used to this and worries that other western voters are feeling left behind; she said her relatives in Saskatchewan feel the same way.

“It seems to me like the West really doesn’t count.”

Electoral reform, something Boschman has tried to push for, could be a possible solution to the B.C.-doesn’t-count conundrum, she said. 

Sharon Sommerville, a spokesperson for the national campaign for electoral reform, Fair Vote, said the problem comes from the fact that election winners are determined by the number of seats a party wins, not by the overall number of votes it receives. 

If Canada were to consider proportional representation as opposed to the first-past-the-post electoral system we have now, the percentage of seats a party has in the legislature would reflect the percentage of people who voted for that party. 

“If we were to count votes, and parties would get the seats they deserved based on the votes they received, it would mean all the ridings would be in play across the country,” Sommerville said. 

Former prime minister Justin Trudeau had promised to move ahead with electoral reform in 2015, but abandoned the idea two years later. After Trudeau announced he would be stepping down as prime minister, he said that was his biggest regret from his time in office. 

Changing the times polls are open to be aligned nationwide would allow votes to be counted at the same time, rather than starting with the east and having the election decided before the west even starts counting. 

In an email to CBC News, a spokesperson for Elections Canada said legislation around elections, such as staggered voting hours across the country, is up to Parliament. 

“Just anecdotally, having worked during elections under the previous system, the current approach ‘levels’ the flow of results to a very large degree,” they said. 

They said the chief electoral officer will put together a report on the election and will answer questions before Parliament.

Political scientist Stewart Prest agreed that, in some ways, getting the results of the election so quickly in the West is irksome, but he hopes British Columbians don’t feel their votes don’t matter. 

For example, he said, once the Liberals were projected winners, B.C. could be the deciding factor as to whether it became a minority or majority government. 

“The full election is the expression of the country as a whole, and B.C. is an important part of that,” he said. “But it would take a very specific confluence of circumstances for us actually to tip the scales at one moment or another, even though our votes do count.”