Funnily enough, many people who think they understand FPTP have wrong idea - they think you need majority of votes to be elected or that it is rare to be elected without majority but in fact as much as half of the members, more or less, are often elected with just minority of votes in their district with all votes cast for others being simply disregarded and electing no one.
FPTP is no simpler than STV (where back-up preferences are voluntary as in past Canadian practice) or SNTV . Under all three, voter is able to mark just one choice ---or if FPTP is simpler, it is only so because the voter has choice of - at most - just one candidate from each party.
Multi-member districts do not have to add any work for the voter, and a multi-member riding may put the elected representation no farther from the voter than a 7-district region would do. Every province except Quebec elected all or some of its members in multi-member districts at one time or another in its history - it is not that out there. And each district having its number of members determined by its population, not the districts determined by arbitrary target number allows districts to have organic presence on the ground. Less gerrymandering with fewer districts dividing voters; no possibility for gerrymandering if city boundaries or county boundaries are used to determine districts.
I personally don't see any reason to use FPTP in a supposedly-PR system. FPTP produces local representation but in each district only for those who vote for the leading candidate. All others - often the majority - have no local representation at all - without top-up, they help elect no one at all.
A large amount of top-up (50 percent) means that each district is twice the size on the average than presently - unless many more members are added to the chamber.
City-wide districts or fractional-city-size districts, electing multiple members (say 3 to 9 in each district) through single voting (STV or SNTV) plus provincial-level top-up, seems to me to be nice balance of province-based proportionality and local (city or "ward"-based) representation. A large portion of votes cast would be used in district elections to elect someone.
And with MM districts and single voting, mixed representation would be produced in each district election - thus preventing the artificial regionalism that FPTP often produces, without relying on top-up to achieve that result.
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At various times in the 20th century, every province except Quebec used multi-member districts to elect all or some of their members. The systems used included Block Voting/Multiple non-transferable vote, Single transferable voting, Limited voting and a system where each seat was filled through a separate contest.
The various provinces switched to electing all its members in single-member districts elected through First Past The Post in these years:
Ontario 1893
Manitoba 1954
Alberta 1956
New Brunswick 1967
Saskatchewan 1967
Newfoundland and Labrador 1975
Nova Scotia 1978
BC 1990
PEI 1996.
(PEI's elections were special cases as each district elected two members but voters who owned property in the district voted for the Councilman while voters resident in the district joined with them to vote for the Assemblyman.)
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