In April 2001, electoral reform activists gathered in Ottawa to launch Fair Vote Canada, a citizens’ campaign to bring fair voting and fair democratic representation to Canada. Many veteran political observers greeted the development with amusement. Great idea, folks, but Canada’s political leaders will never let it happen.
Many of the cynics didn’t disagree with the need for reform. Canada’s first-past-the-post voting system is notoriously unfair. The system is based on the winner-take-all principle, which means votes and voters are not treated equally. The only voters who win political representation are those who share the most popular partisan viewpoint in their riding, as expressed at the ballot box. The other voters lose their right to political representation.
Because the voting system disregards so many votes, the overall results are distorted. In most federal and provincial elections, the system produces phony majority governments, where a party wins a majority of seats without winning a majority of the votes cast. Canadians have only enjoyed true majority governments, elected by a majority of voters, four times since World War I.
The first-past-the-post system is so bad, most major democracies scrapped it between fifty and one hundred years ago. Not one of the new Eastern European democracies chose a first-past-the-post system. Today, seventy-five nations, including most of Europe and almost all major industrial democracies, use voting systems based on the principle of proportional representation.
Be Sure to Continue to Page 2 of "It’s Time for Fair Voting in Canada"
