Anita Nickerson, coordinator of Fair Vote Canada, wrote in 2016 that recent elections showed need for PR despite a pundit shrugging them off. (Nickerson, "Under our winner-take-all electoral system, everybody loses", ipolitics, 2016 (online)).
Nickerson:
... "Most Canadians vote to be represented on policy by a local MP who shares their values and will advocate for them in Parliament. ...
By calling the distorted results of winner-take-all voting — and its consequences for Canadians — a “misalignment”, Ms. Smith misrepresents the nature of the problem. The consequences of first-past-the-post are not a minor technical accident. They can and do create serious distortions of the processes we value in a democracy.
When a single party can, with 39 per cent of the vote, pass policies opposed by evidence, experts, public opinion and MPs whose views represent a majority of voters, does that reflect our Canadian values?
...
Drawing on experience of over 90 Countries and 85 per cent of OECD countries, we know that with proportional representation, parties become accustomed to cooperating and collaborating to develop policy.
Without the lure of a 39 per cent “majority”, the incentives for better behaviour in Parliament and during election campaigns do change.
Parties with the most in common can distinguish themselves from each other more honestly and offer a broader range of policy ideas to the electorate, but are no longer each other’s primary enemy in winner-take-all battles.
More importantly, the behaviour of voters changes when every vote counts. All majoritarian, winner-take-all systems involve a high degree of strategic voting — voting for a party or candidate considered the ‘lesser evil’ in order to stop a particular candidate or party from prevailing.
In Australia, which uses a winner-take-all ranked ballot in single-member districts, parties hand out ‘how to vote’ cards based on ‘preference trading’ deals they make with other parties before the election. False majorities and a high number of wasted votes are a common outcome of any winner-take-all voting system.
With proportional representation, voters can vote for the candidates they sincerely prefer —and almost always end up electing their first choice.
[It is not clear what type of PR Anita is referring to here. But the only system I know of where a voter votes for a candidate in a PR system, is STV.
Under STV, many voters do see their first preference elected.
Take the 1948 STV election in Edmonton.
46,000 votes cast
Manning took quota (7700 votes) in the first count. These stayed with him. 7700
Prowse received 6300 votes in the first count. These stayed with him until
his election in the eighth count 6300
Roper received 6500 votes in the first Count. These stayed with him until
his election in the 10th Count 6500
Heard received 890 votes in the first Count. These stayed with him until 900
his election after the 14th Count
Adams received 950 votes in the first Count. These stayed with him until
his election after the 14th Count 950
total of first preference votes that went to winners 22,350
so 49 percent of the voters saw their first choice candidate elected.
Although this is not a majority, it is better proportion than what happened when STV was replaced by winner-take-all FPTP elections in Edmonton in 1959.
In that election, 48 percent of votes elected their first choice (or what they cast as their purported first choice - misrepresentation / strategic voting may have prevented true expression of their political sentiment).
Not much difference, actually.
But note that in 1948, supporters of the Conservative, Liberal, CCF and Social Credit parties had the satisfaction of seeing at least one candidate of their party elected in Edmonton.
In 1959, only supporters of the SC party had that satisfaction anywhere in Edmonton. The Social Credit party took all the Edmonton seats - with only 48 percent of the votes in the city.]
Anita continued:
"Voter turnout under PR averages about 7.5 per cent higher than under other systems. Making every vote count may bring new voters — and voters who have given up on our system — out to the polls.
Ms. Smith is correct when she says that the goal of proportional representation is not to create a permanent, progressive coalition. A look at the long term research into the 85 per cent of OECD countries that use forms of proportional representation shows that PR delivers stable, majority governments which at times lean left and at other times right — just not one-party majority governments.
Decades of research show that not only are proportional governments (left or right) just as stable as those elected under other systems, countries using proportional systems outperform countries using winner-take-all systems on almost every measure of democracy — and produce better environmental outcomes, lower income inequality, more fiscal responsibility and higher scores on the United Nations Human Development Index on quality-of-life.
Whether left, right or centre, they ensure representation for everyone and more consistently deliver policies closer to what voters want.
A made-in-Canada PR system can be designed with the values Canadians care about foremost in mind. Values such as
fair results,
a representative Parliament,
greater voter engagement,
more collaboration,
more accountability,
better representation of diversity and voter choice, and
stability...
In October [2016], 63 per cent of Canadians voted for parties that campaigned on platforms calling for making every vote count in 2019. That’s a real mandate."
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Of course we know that Trudeau would break his promise to us that the 2015 federal election would be the last election held using FPTP.
An example of a simple made-in-Canada PR system would include:
Grouping the districts in each small and medium city to make multi-member city-wide districts of up to 10 seats.
Grouping groups of districts in large metropolitan cities to make multi-member districts of up to 10 seats this dividing a city into a couple or a few multi-member districts.
Grouping adjacent rural districts where majority of voters vote in referendum that they approve of such a move.
Allocating 25 seats to a country-wide top-up where party tallies are used to allocate seats, each full four percentage points of support eligible for a seat. (Remaining seats are allocated to remaining percentages of support in order to quantity of un-represented support remaining.)
Proportional representation would result in each city, and thus a mixed representation in each province and region would result. (annulling the present regionalism)
As well, each party that had at least four percentage points of support would have at least some representation in the House of Commons.
This harkens back to the STV system that Alberta and Manitoba used from 1920s to at least 1948. City-wide districts were used in Edmonton, Calgary and Winnipeg to elect multiple MLAs. In each election in each district, mixed representation spread across multiple parties was the result.
It worked then. It would work again.
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