Canada’s winner-take-all voting system has significantly distorted the will of Canada’s electors, handing an un-earned majority to one party. Today, we do not have the government that we voted for!
Nationally, Liberals earned the votes of 39.5 per cent of Canadian voters, yet the voting system handed them over 54.4 per cent of the seats in the House of Commons as a result. This is a majority government – on only a minority of the vote. The desire for change was clearly evident in the results, but our winner-take-all system granted the Liberal Party many more seats than their vote merits and shut out other voices.
A proportional voting system would have granted 134 seats to the Liberals (less than a majority), 108 seats to the Conservatives, 67 to the NDP, 16 to the Bloc and 12 to the Greens. Today we should have a minority government in place in Canada.
Regional distortions are also evident. The Bloc, with its geographically concentrated 4.7 per cent of the vote, gained 10 seats, but the Greens with diffuse support and 3.4 per cent of the vote only achieved one seat.
It should no longer be acceptable to have a system that disenfranchises a third of the electorate, forces people to vote strategically, or distorts the will of voters. It’s time we modernized our dysfunctional democracy so that election results truly reflect the way electors vote.
Timothy Jones, Fair Vote Langley
