If you haven’t already heard, we had an election and ended up in pretty much the same spot. What is interesting is how poorly “first past the post” vote counts did in representing Canadians. Here’s an excerpt of a newsletter sent out by Fair Vote Canada this morning…
The chief victims of the October 14 federal election were:
Green Party: 940,000 voters supporting the Green Party sent no one to Parliament, setting a new record for the most votes cast for any party that gained no parliamentary representation. By comparison, 813,000 Conservative voters in Alberta alone were able to elect 27 MPs.
Prairie Liberals and New Democrats: In the prairie provinces, Conservatives received roughly twice the vote of the Liberals and NDP, but took seven times as many seats.
Urban Conservatives: Similar to the last election, a quarter-million Conservative voters in Toronto elected no one and neither did Conservative voters in Montreal.
New Democrats: The NDP attracted 1.1 million more votes than the Bloc, but the voting system gave the Bloc 50 seats, the NDP 37.
Had the votes on October 14 been cast under a fair and proportional voting system, Fair Vote Canada projected that the seats allocation would have been approximately as follows:
Conservatives – 38% of the popular vote: 117 seats (not 143)
Liberals – 26% of the popular vote: 81 seats (not 76)
NDP – 18% of the popular vote: 57 seats (not 37)
Bloc – 10% of the popular vote: 28 seats (not 50)
Greens – 7% of the popular vote: 23 seats (not 0)
It’s really a shame that we don’t have instant run-off elections or some amount of proportional representation. I realize that Ontario tried and failed on the proportional representation referendum but I think that was more an issue of a poorly promoted idea than the rejection of the idea by the public.
Instant run-offs would be a big plus, and wouldn’t really require changing our parliamentary system that much. The problem here is that you still have problems with representation. If you are voting for the Tories, who do your run-off votes go to? If you are voting for the Greens, your vote will still probably never elect a Green candidate. Etc.
The proposal in Ontario was a bit complicated, and their were plenty of mother fuckers against the bill, so that pretty much doomed it.
I explained to mom how the voting system worked inA ustralia, NZ and Scotland and she thought it was brilliant. Then i asked her why she voted against proportional representation- she ‘that wasn’t what the ontario system was about’. I wasn’t there to see it, but if mom couldn’t understand the system they were promoting was exactly the one she believes is best, i would say someone didn’t want that campaign to win.