David J. Parker of Edmonton presented the case for electoral reform in a letter in the March 2021 issue of Alberta Views.
After demolishing the argument put forward by a contributor in an earlier issue that oil and gas will come back into favour to provide the economic base for an Independent Alberta, Parker went on to say --
"Coupled with that myth is another -- that Alberta is a solid blue, unanimously conservative province. After all, didn't we elect federally all but one Conservative in the entire province in the 2019? Yes, but that is purely the result of our antiquated (first past the post) electoral system, which allocates every seat to the candidate with the most votes in their riding. If ever we become a proportionately represented country (as Trudeau promised pre-2015 and reneged on post-election) you would see a sizable number of NDP, Green and Liberals in our fair province."
An improvement I would offer is to say
"but that is purely the result of our antiquated (first past the post) electoral system, which divides up the province into 34 arbitrary districts and then allocates a seat to only one candidate in each riding."
And actually -- as difficult as it might be to believe -- not the NDP nor the Greens but the Liberals were the second most popular party in Alberta in the 2019 federal election. Liberals took 14 percent of the provincial vote, NDP 10 percent, Greens 3 percent. Some of those Liberal votes - and even some of those NDP votes - could have belonged to voters engaging in strategic voting and not "real" party votes.
As I stated in my Montopedia blog "A Proportional Analysis of the 2019 federal election",
If all the votes cast in the election were a dollar:
(Each cent would equal 3.4 seats and about 179,000 votes.)
Conservatives would have 34 cents, ten of which would be in AB/Sask, with 24 cents spread across the rest of the country.
The Liberals would have 33 cents, two cents in AB/Sask., 31 spread across the rest of the country.
The NDP would have 16 cents, two in AB/Sask.
The Greens would have seven cents.
The People's Party 2 cents.
Instead The House of Commons looks like this.
If all the seats won in the actual 2019 election were a dollar: Conservatives would have 36 cents, ten of which would be in AB/Sask, with 26 cents spread across the rest of the country. The Liberals would have 47 cents, no cents in AB/Sask., 47 spread across the rest of the country. The NDP would have 7 cents, less than one in AB/Sask.
The Bloc Quebecois would have 9 cents, all in Quebec. The Greens would have less than one cent. The People's Party would have no cents.
A much different result than the proportional-vote dollar described above.
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Thanks for reading.
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