A PR Primer for Ontario (2026) Drafted by Réal Lavergne; revised by Tom Monto
Updated: 1 day ago
(for look at Real's original (in almost original form), see
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Executive Summary
If you are reading this, you are probably well aware of the general case for proportional representation (PR). However, you might be curious about details of how such a system would work, some of the risks and benefits involved, and how to bring about a sufficient level of consensus for change.
If so, this paper is for you. The issue addressed here is how to build a better electoral system with a broad level of support from voters and political actors alike across party lines.
The paper starts by making the basic case for PR and briefly considers the use of ranked ballots in single-winner contests as an alternative, before turning to the political challenges of securing electoral reform and some of the possibilities of overcoming those challenges.
It provides the basics of what we need to know and do to achieve the sort of multi-party consensus on electoral reform that we are going to need to make progress on this issue between now and the next Ontario election. The paper discusses what a basic PR model might look like for Ontario on an illustrative basis.
Electoral systems in the rest of the world
From our vantage point in Canada, it’s easy to think that our first-past-the-post system (FPTP) is the natural and most common way of holding elections. However, FPTP is still used in just three OECD countries: the UK, Canada and the US. (And of these three, only Canada uses FPTP in all its legislative elections.)
To these can be added France, which uses a two-round majoritarian system, and Australia, which uses a majoritarian system with ranked ballots (AV) for parliamentary elections and PR for senate elections.
The norm elsewhere is some form of PR. PR of one form or another is currently used in 80% of OECD countries, most of which transitioned to PR over 100 years ago.
PR has had plenty of time to prove its worth. Comparative research has shown PR countries to outperform FPTP countries on pretty much any criterion one might want to study, as summarized in Fair Vote Canada’s A Look at the Evidence.
The Case for Proportional Representation
The basic case for PR is principally made in two ways. The first approach focuses on voters’ rights and voter equality. The second shines a spotlight on the more egregious mismatches that one observes between votes cast and electoral results under FPTP.
The first approach teaches us that voters are not equally treated under FPTP. Every citizen has a vote and every vote is counted, to be sure, but not every vote helps to elect someone of one’s choice. When only a single member is elected in a district, only votes cast for that candidate are used; all others are wasted. This unbalance self-reinforces and the pattern is repeated year after year. Soon many of those on the losing side stop voting.
As the one-handed results deepen, some districts become known as safe seats for one or other of the parties, the party that wins them time after time. The party that feels secure that it will win the seat has confidence to ignore the voters in the district; the other parties that feel they have no chance to win it also ignore it. Parties put their energies in and pay attention to voters in swing districts.
Those who live in safe seats legitimately feel disempowered.
Voters who live in swing ridings have a greater chance to make a difference, but even there about half of them will not see their vote used to elect anyone. Voters there may feel the need to vote strategically - vote for the least detested of the two that are thought to have the best chance - to make their votes count.
Wasted votes under FPTP; almost all votes count under PR
Under FPTP, if your vote fails to elect someone of your choice in your riding, there is no place for those votes to go. Hence the expression “wasted votes.” The wasted votes in every district combine to create dis-proportionality in the results overall.
With PR—using multi-member districts of one sort or another and a fair method of voting— almost all votes do have a place to go.
Consider the example of a five-seat district used later in this paper. A district like this will in all likelihood elect a combination of candidates from different parties, and because of this, almost every vote—usually about 85% of votes or more— typically helps to elect a candidate from the party of one’s choice in a proportional way. Under FPTP, the comparable share of voters who can make their voice count is usually less than 60%, often less than 50%, some times as few as 30 percent.
The other way to make the case is to point to the distortions that appear under FPTP. Such distortions are legion in Ontario. We are currently in our third consecutive Progressive Conservative Party (PCP) majority government in Ontario, in which the governing party has won a large majority of the seats without winning a majority of the popular vote.
What explains this is that FPTP typically produces a “winner’s bonus” favouring the largest party. FPTP typically over-represents the winning party, and it generally under-represents smaller parties. Here in Ontario, the Ontario NDP (ONDP) and the Green Party of Ontario (GPO) typically win a smaller proportion of seats than their share of the votes. But even a large party can suffer. In the last three elections Liberals were the biggest loser. In 2025, the Ontario Liberal Party (OLP) took 30% of the popular vote but won only 11% of the seats.
This same phenomenon also leads to whole regions within Ontario being represented by only one party. In Ontario each party has its geographic strongholds, with little or no representation of voters who vote for candidates of other parties running in those strongholds.
Finally, there are long-standing distortions caused by vote-splitting by the OLP, the ONDP and the GPO, parties that are aligned on many issues. In Ontario, this has been going on for over a century, if we look as well at the old CCF and Liberal party splitting the anti-Conservative vote. In the York South-Weston district, the Conservative candidate won with only 35 percent of the votes. The Liberal and NDP candidates combined got 19,000 votes while the Conservative candidate received just 11,000.
Such vote-splitting has been seen repeatedly since 1943. Due to the anti-Conservative votes being split in many districts, since 1943, the Progressive-Conservative Party has formed government 71% of the time, most often with the sort of unbridled power that comes with a majority of the seats. But time after time these majority Conservative governments were elected by less than half the voters. Overall, we have had false majority Conservative governments 58% of the time since 1943.
PR would eliminate or significantly moderate all of these problems. False majority governments would be a thing of the past; all parties would get a share of the seats matching how voters cast their ballots; and different parties would have representation in every region. We would no longer have one party winning at the expense of other parties who are splitting the vote.
What About Ranked Ballots?
Ranked ballots can be used in PR systems or as a simple tweak to FPTP.
As a simple tweak to FPTP, it’s formally called Alternative Vote (AV). While this approach is regularly and successfully used in single-winner contests such as leadership races, the only OECD country that uses AV is Australia for its parliamentary elections. AV might help to address the problems of vote-splitting and strategic voting. However, it does not give proportional results and could make seats-to-votes distortions even worse that thsoe produced by FPTP.
It’s possible that AV might further concentrate power in two parties. This is what has happened in Australia, which has very much remained a two-party system in which an outside party like the Greens can get 11% of the popular vote but end up with no seats at all.
That said, let us remember that ranked ballots could be used to good advantage as part of just about any proportional system, allowing voters to more fully express their preferences. Ranked ballots provide back-up alternatives to direct how the vote should be transferred if a vote is initially placed on an un-electable candidate or as a surplus vote received by a winning candidate.
The best-known use of ranked ballots as part of a PR system is called Single Transferable Vote (STV). This model uses multi-member districts and allows voters to rank their preferences (as backup alternatives) across party lines if they wish. This may prevent waste of a vote when a voter initially casts a vote for a candidate running alone on a party slate if he or she is un-electable.
The Politics of Electoral Reform
In light of all that we know about the problems of FPTP and the lead taken by European, African and Asian countries and Australia that have adopted PR, one would expect Canada and the UK to have adopted some form of PR for national elections by now. However, tradition weighs heavily in these countries.
Also politics gets in the way of change. A major source of resistance to change is our elected politicians. It’s intuitively easy to understand that politicians once elected might be loath to change the system that brought them to power.
This also seen at the provincial level. When FPTP is producing a predominantly two-party system as it currently does in most Canadian provinces, both major parties may decide that they are “OK” with FPTP, provided they each have a fair chance of forming government from time to time. Voters for these parties may feel the same way.
Canada has had numerous referendums on PR and all have failed in one way or another. Sometimes it was due to obstacles put in place by the government itself, such as 60 percent support being required for change or a certain level of voter turnout. Sometimes is was due to a certain hesitation on many voters’ part.
A typical pattern is for up to 60% of voters to opt for the status quo, and around 40% for change. We might call those 60% of voters for the status quo the “comfortable majority.” This comfortable majority may understand that FPTP is failing them in important ways, but they have never known anything else. In the hockey-loving country that we are, many of us are “OK” with a win-some, lose-some electoral system.
This does not make it right that a referendum should allow this comfortable majority to impose its will on an aggrieved minority. Nor does it mean FPTP is a better system even for this comfortable majority. Most Canadians do not have the time nor the interest to investigate electoral systems in depth.
A more reliable source of legitimacy would be a multi-party agreement based on a recommendation from a citizens’ assembly or a consensus of non-partisan experts.
Those holding majority power inevitably feel that their majority enables them to get things done, ignoring the value of minority voices in the chamber, and the dangers of policy lurch when the other main party takes over (on climate change or municipal reform, for examples).
Yet change usually came about through co-operation across political lines, usually in times of social unrest and sometimes even violence, with worse expected without a fair election system. Indeed, it’s this sort of co-operation that allowed most European countries to bring in PR in the first place. Seldom did one party win power and decide to just vote in PR. It is uncommon for a party to hold majority government and to bring in PR. That’s not how it generally works in the real world.
(An exception is Australia's Labor government of 1946-1949. Prime Minister Ben Chifley brought in STV for Senate elections, because he knew his government was unpopular and under FPTP he expected a wipe-out. The use of PR did allow him to hold a majority in the Senate two years longer.)
Another exception is the United Farmers of Alberta government elected in 1921. it was elected on a promise of electoral reform and three years later established STV in Alberta's largest cities and Instant-Runoff voting everywhere else.
Another exception is Manitoba Liberals under Norris held a large majority in the Legislature. But after that province's major city had undergone turbulent general strike in 1919, the Liberal government realized that an unfair election result may just set off civil unrest and violence once again. STV was brought in to elect Winnipeg's MLAs.)
The basics
To understand how our FPTP system gives us the distorted results that it does requires a closer look at our use of single-member districts as the fundamental source of these problems. The problem with having single-member districts is that this breaks the link between the popular vote and the way seats are allocated.
Imagine if party X won 40% of the vote in every riding and other parties won 30%, 20% and 10%. The result would be an election in which party X won 100% of the seats with 40% of the vote.
Or the case where party A gets 40% of the votes in 70 percent of the districts, where other parties individually get 30%, 20%, and 10%. The result would be an election in which party X won 70% of the seats with just 28% of the vote.
Of course, this never happens quite like that, but we do get false majorities quite often, and we have had provincial elections in which one party won 97% of the seats, or even all of the seats, with less than 3/5ths of the votes.
Single-member districts wastes many, many votes and opens the door to the winner’s bonus.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Imagine if you picked a city with several single-member ridings dividing the city and you merged the single-member districts into one multi-member district (MMD), with the aim of electing a slate of district representatives in proportion to each party’s vote share in the city. Each voter could then be able to vote for a candidate from the party of your choice, from among the wider offering of all candidates across the city and could help elect someone from that party in a proportional way. In a 5-member district, a party with 40% of the vote would win 2 seats. Any candidate with 20% of the vote would win a seat.
Multi-member districts are what makes PR systems proportional. Indeed, one of the best indicators of proportionality is the district magnitude of a country’s voting system, expressed as the average number of seats in each of a country’s voting districts. District magnitude (DM) can be as low as 1 in FPTP countries and as high as the total number of seats in the country in the pure PR systems used in Israel.
Not all PR systems are equally proportional. The larger the district, the more proportional the result, because the share of district votes for a party to win a seat would be smaller. However, anything larger than single-member districts would considerably enhance the proportionality of the voting system.
Some basic criteria
This raises questions about what sort of PR systems might be best in Ontario.
A first step might be to enquire which features of FPTP voters and politicians might like to keep. If we are looking for a broad consensus for change, we need to respect traditions and habits that are ingrained in our voters' minds.
If we are looking to accommodate a wide swath of the electorate and of the political elite, we might consider three criteria, in addition to a higher level of proportionality:
some form of local representation;
direct accountability of elected representatives to the voter; and
a simple system that is easy to use and easy to implement.
Of these three criteria, the notion of local representation needs some elaboration. Most people would associate this criterion with the status quo involving single-member districts. Such districts are certainly “local” in the most basic way, but can single-member districts truly provide meaningful representation for all or even most voters? Keeping in mind that the main function of our representatives is the crafting and adoption of legislation in parliament, it is not possible for a member to simultaneously represent all voters in a single-member riding. And note that many politicians elected in single member districts used today, were not elected by a majority of votes cast in the district.
So, what would it take for local representatives to represent all voters in a riding? It seems clear we need multi-member districts. If we want “meaningful local representation,” in which a local district elects representatives who represent as large a share of constituents as possible, the only meaningful option is some form of multi-member representation in which representatives of different political leanings are elected, altogether representing the vast majority of voters. These multi-member districts may be more or less “local” depending on how large they are and how the boundary lines are set. Their size determines the proportionality of the election result in the district.
The challenge is to find the right balance when agreeing on the size of multi-member ridings we are looking for.
The most basic PR model that might be considered with due regard for the above criteria would be to replace single-member districts with relatively small multi-member districts (MMDs).
One can get quite large improvements in proportionality even with small MMDs.
Already, with a two-member district, you would most often elect representatives from two different parties, the two largest parties in the district.
A three-member district might elect two members from one party (the most-popular party) and one from another party, or one member each from three different parties.
Ireland uses multi-member districts with district magnitudes of 3 to 5 and ranked ballots and the Single Transferable Vote system. Even with its moderate-sized MMDs, its elections are considered very proportional.
However, most countries use somewhat larger districts than this and often add what are called “adjustment seats” as top-ups to compensate parties earning less than their proportional share of seats at the district level. Sweden and Denmark are examples of this approach.
An illustrative model
Below is an illustrative example of how a 5-member district might work, using voting numbers from the 2025 Ontario provincial election in the communities of Etobicoke and York. The five old provincial electoral districts involved are Etobicoke Centre, Etobicoke-Lakeshore, Etobicoke North, York Centre and York-Simcoe.
Let’s begin with what the ballot might look like, as illustrated below. The only difference compared to FPTP, in this basic example, is that there are more candidates to choose from. All the candidates who ran in the five districts would be on the one ballot. Voters would still get a single vote and put an X next to the candidate of their choice. The X would count for the candidate they prefer from the party of their choice.
When tabulating the results, the first step would be to determine how many seats each party deserves. The vote tallies of the candidates of each party would be pooled, (to prevent the problem of vote splitting) and their total compared to the total number of votes cast in the 5-seat district. The number of seats each party is due would be determined. The candidates elected to fill those seats would be the ones with the most votes.
Below is a chart showing
how citizens in this district voted in 2025,
what they got under FPTP and
what the result would have been in a 5-seat MMD.
Votes FPTP Seats MMD seats
Conservative 43% 3 (60%) 2 (40%)
Liberal 39% 1 (20%) 2 (40%)
NDP 14% 1 (20%) 1 (20%)
A particularity of this example is that the Conservatives and Liberals won approximately the same share of the vote, but under FPTP the Liberals won just one seat to the Conservatives’ three seats .
The chart shows what the result would have been had seats been awarded in a fair way in the larger district instead. The MMD outcome is a significant improvement over FPTP, and we now have the PCP and the OLP each winning two seats.
Under FPTP in the five separate smaller districts, only 46 percent of voters elected the five members.
In the five-seat MMD, 96 percent of votes were used to fairly fill the five seats.
Transitioning to Fair elections
A welcome feature of this sort of model is how easy it is to make the transition from FPTP to PR, since the only redistricting that is needed is to group existing ridings together covering a whole city or a group of adjoining areas, using existing boundaries to form a multi-member district. Under this approach, all incumbents could still run again and would still have a chance of winning, although some would have more chance and others less.
Further improvements on a basic model of this sort could be achieved in four different ways:
better ballots - instead of voting with just an X, the voter might be invited to rank their preferences, to mark an ordered list of their preferences, to allow the vote to be transferred. In this instance it would have allowed votes for Green Party candidates, candidates of the New Blue Party and other parties to move to where they might do some good, potentially giving an additional seat to one or more of the larger parties. Vote transfers from un-electable candidates would decrease the number of wasted votes.
larger districts (higher DM) - They would give more proportional results, allowing parties with perhaps ten percent of the votes in a place to get a seat, which could make the transition easier for some incumbents; and
top-up seats at a regional or provincial level to compensate parties that did not win their proportional share of seats due to limited district size.
Features such as these could be built in from the start, or added at a latter stage. Whatever works best. What matters most is to get this train out of the station.
Better than FPTP in every respect
A system like this, using relatively small multi-member districts, would be better than FPTP in every respect, so should not be particularly controversial.
Moderately-sized multi-member districts would provide a much improved form of local representation, because voters in the district would have a range of representatives to speak for them, with each member having to represent just those voters who share the member's point of view.
Similarly, politicians would be made more accountable to voters, because voters would now have more than one candidate from each party to speak for them and to choose among in the next election.
Most voters could help elect a representative of their choice.
Knowing that their votes would count even if they vote according to their true beliefs (and not worry about electabilities), the vast majority of voters would no longer feel the need to vote strategically.
Geographical misrepresentation would largely disappear - regional imbalance would be addressed by each district electing members of a range of parties.
false majority governments would largely disappear as the number of wasted votes would be minimized.
Simulated results for Ontario
It is possible to do simulations like the above for the areas of Etobicoke/York, for other MMDs across the whole of Ontario, the major challenge being how best to group existing ridings that share a geographical sense of identity. Doing my best in this regard, and seeking advice from others, I have come up with 28 MMDs ranging from 3 to eight seats in each, averaging 4.4 seats each, to see what the 2025 election results would have been under such a system.
[my computer could not read this spreadsheet, so I hope the reader has better luck]
As MMDs go, an average DM of 4.4 is quite small compared to what is used in other countries. For example, this is less than half the size of similar districts in Sweden and Denmark, and comparable to what they have in Ireland. The highest DM in this layout is an 8-seat district covering densely-populated Toronto Centre, a geographically small area.
The summary results under PR for the whole of the province are shown at the end of the sheet. As we can see in row 296, the big winner in 2025 would be the OLP, which would triple its seat count from 14 seats to 43. This makes sense, since the OLP suffered the most from the distortions of FPTP in 2025.
The summary table in the spreadsheet allows us to compare actual vs. perfectly proportional results. Rows 295-297 show the number of seats each party won under FPTP, the number corresponding to perfect proportionality and the number of seats they would have won with MMDs but no top-ups. It’s clear that the use of MMDs leads to a considerable improvement over FPTP, while over-representing the OLP somewhat, at the expense of the NDP and the Greens.
Top-up seats (Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) form of PR)
To this basic model could be added a small number of “top-up” seats as a way of further enhancing the proportionality of the system. Perhaps ten top-up seats could be used to address some of the dis-proportionality that was not addressed by the new larger districts.
These top-up seats could be added at the provincial level or in specially created regions.
Perhaps the 28 MMDs could be grouped into 10 regions, adding one top-up seat to each. This scheme was mapped out in the spreadsheet.
That top-up in each region goes to the largest remaining fraction of a seat that could not otherwise be accommodated as shown in yellow highlighting in the bottom row for each region. Taking Eastern Ontario as an example, one can see that the NDP would end up with the top-up seat in that region.
Adding 10 top-ups to the results in the MMDs helps to correct for residual disproportionalities. The end result is that all four of the parties currently represented in the Ontario legislature would enjoy seat shares approximately equal to their overall vote shares. Those that are under-represented are New Blue, the Ontario Party, and others who collectively win only 1 seat for an independent candidate. Small parties such as these would win seats if they increase their vote shares.
Conclusions
As noted, this simulation is intended to be illustrative of what might be politically acceptable for most voters and most parties while yielding more proportional results.
The overall results, achieved by forming moderately-sized MMDs with a modest number of top-ups, are highly proportional. An idea worth exploring as a next step would be the use of ranked ballots rather than a single X ballot as part of the MMD model. The best known version of ranked ballots in multi-member districts is the Single Transferable Vote (STV) recommended by the BC citizens’ assembly in 2004.
The main point here is to emphasize the central importance of multi-member districts as a central concept of proportional representation. And it should be remember that and each voter voting in an MMD should have just one vote. The old practice of giving each voter as many votes as the seats to fill in a district just is not proportional.
If there is agreement on having multi-member districts, enhancements of that basic framework can be discussed.
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Appendix A - Actual and Simulated Results for the 5-seat district of Etobicoke and York - 2025
This table calculates the number of seats that would have been awarded to each party in a 5-seat district covering Etobicoke and York.
The candidates elected for each party are the ones who received the most votes.
Each vote counts as a vote both for the party and for a particular candidate from that party.
Share of the Vote | Share of Seats with FPTP | Proportionate # of seats deserved | Seats awarded with rounding | Share of seats with PR in MMDs | |
PCP | 43% | 60% | 2.17 | 2 | 40% |
NDP | 14% | 20% | 0.69 | 1 | 20% |
LPC | 39% | 20% | 1.93 | 2 | 40% |
Green | 2% | 0% | 0.11 | 0 | 0% |
Other | 2% | 0% | 0.10 | 0 | 0% |
Total | 100% | 100% | 5 | 5 | 100% |
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