Colin Walmsley, associated with Fair Vote Alberta and a former national councillor for Fair Vote Canada, had an excellent opinion piece on the CBC News website in September 2021: https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-first-past-the-post-rural-urban-divide-1.6186799
Colin gives a very good message.
Here's some riffs on it I want to share: First Past the Post single-winner district elections produces artificial regionalism. To paraphrase a recent Hollywood movie, there are alot of bad things caused by an election system that elects only a single winner in each district - the worst of them is that you are only electing a single winner in each district. Colin writes "Millions of rural Canadians regularly vote for progressive parties, just like millions of urban Canadians vote for conservative ones.
First-past-the-post obscures this fact by giving one politician in each riding 100 per cent of the power with a simple plurality of the vote, denying any representation to minority voices." Or in other words, often the only minority that finds representation under FPTP is the one that takes all the power. ===================== Recently a person told me that P.R. is bad because it would allow the populous cities to overwhelm the sparsely-populated rural areas.
That actually is an old weapon used against PR -- that it would give Toronto as many seats as all of Saskatchewan, for example. Toronto does have that now anyway, even with FPTP. But under FPTP or PR, it does not have to be that way. When districts are used, the seats can be placed as you want. A multi-seat district can have as many seats (within reason) as is thought best, and that area will have the same or more or less seats than another multi-seat district.
Sparse population in one district may have the same, or more, or less seats than any other district.
A "region" used in some MMP systems is a form of that multi-seat district. I told that fellow that a district-level PR system can avoid what he is worried about - the seats in a city would be filled proportionally; the seats in the countryside (perhaps each part of the countryside separately) would be filled proportionally,
Each separately and each with the number of seats that each would be given.
If you want to represent voters in the rural area more heavily than city voters, then give them seats at a different ratio of voters to seats, which you can do easily under district-level PR. Very flexible and do-able and fair or slanted in the direction you want it to be. And it would produce proportionality in each place.
Colin says something similar: "A proportional voting system would showcase the diversity of opinions across Canada by allowing the election of both conservative and progressive voices in every region, urban and rural." My research tells me that in 2019 40 percent of the vote in each province was the same. This is almost identical in the 2021 election. -no less than 11 percent in each province voted Liberal -no less than 16 percent in each province voted Conservative -no less than 7.5 percent in each province voted NDP -no less than 2.5 percent in each province voted Green. So about 37 percent voted the same in each province. But the FPTP results in 2019 produced - a clear sweep of seats for Conservatives in Sask, - an almost-clear sweep for Conservatives in Alberta (now in 2021 only a90-percent-sweep) and - an almost-clear sweep for Liberals in Nova Scotia. In no province did the Liberals take more than 45 percent of the vote.
In no province did the Conservatives take more than 45 except for Alberta and Sask. (In AB and SK the Conservative took 69 and 64 percent of the vote, still far less than their seats count in those provinces pretends to show.)
But in every province, one or other of these two parties got seats far in excess of its vote count. To look at cities within each province, we probably see a few fewer Conservatives voters and more non-Conservative voters than the provincial average; and in rural areas the reverse would be true.
These subtleties would be shown by the results of a district-level PR system, while they are not (at least not dependably) produced by FPTP. Colin used effective language when he wrote "our electoral system detaches parties from their supporters in entire regions of the country, leading to death spirals of misunderstanding and disengagement." I hate death spirals of any kind... Super job.
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