Andrew Coyne on CBC Sunday Magazine, May 2025 on need for multi-member districts

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-57-the-sunday-magazine/clip/16144040-andrew-coyne-dismantle-comforting-myths-canadian-democracy

at the 6:00 mark:

says change to single-winner ranked voting (Instant-Runoff Voting) would not do alot to ease the problems that Canadian elections face - disproportional results, high level of votes not used to actually elect anyone, artificial regional disparities.

"the problem is we have a winner-take-all system [single-member plurality/ First past the post]

"many people have idea that when we talk about PR we are talking about some kind of jiggery pokery where you redistribute seats or something.

But no just look at it at the riding level.

We elect one MP for each riding so a candidate with maybe 30 percent of the vote gets 100 percent of the representation in that riding.

and we take that as granted as normal

but in 90 odd countries around the world that is not how it works.

They have multiple members per riding.

it takes some getting used to, to get your head around it, but once you do, you say

but that is not written in stone if you have more MPs per riding, it means you can give representation not just to the largest group but to the other groups as well and why would we not want to do that ?

if the point of a parliament, of an election is not just to find out who won, but to represent people in parliament.

having a more representative parliament is the point of the whole exercise.

fundamentally that is what you need. [implied is each voter must have only one vote - Coyne is not calling for change to Block Voting]

You can have ranked votes as well.

If you have multi-member ridings and ranked ballots. you get the system that 58 percent of the people in BC voted for in 2005 -- Single transferable voting.

I don't want to get in the weeds of how it works but that is the essence of it.

once you get over the hump of not having to elect just one MP per riding, then you can have proportionality at the riding level.

and once you get proportionality at the riding level, you get proportionality system-wide.

Interviewer: Will that ever happen in our country?

Coyne: Yes, I think it will.

it is difficult because the people who are elected in the current system have a preference for keeping the present system including the parties who campaign on PR and then once they get into power they say I am keen on the system as it is.

But the logic of PR is too undeniable to hold back for long.

At some point somebody somewhere at some level of government is going to have a system other than First Past The Post.

we in Canada are almost unique in the world in that everything is done using FPTP

and once someone breaks the mould, then we will get over the idea that this is some strange, foreign, untried system.

and we will understand that this is actually the norm across most of the world."

Then the discussion turned to other topics.

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TODAY:

at city level many cities in Canada do use city-wide multi-member districts.

This includes Vancouver and most cities and towns in Alberta and perhaps elsewhere as well.

But they use Block Voting, where votes have as many votes as the number of seats to fill.

unfortunately in Canada today, all federal and all provincial members are elected using single-winner FPTP.

and at city level, either FPTP in single-member wards or equally-disproportional Block Voting in city-wide districts are used.

so none are elected using fair voting/PR.

last city to use fair voting at city level in Canada was Calgary in 1971.

two-member wards. each voter casting one transferable vote.

London ON city election in 2018 used winner-take-all IRV, but even that change was abolished by Ford's prov. government.

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