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Tom Monto

Pro-rep is good for all parties. Time to bring it in before the next Alberta election

This letter to editor - in slightly abridged form- was published in Edmonton Sun, so thanks to the Sun for that.


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RE: "Polls a Wake-up call for Kenney, NDP leader says" (March 20, 2021)


If Conservatives continue to trail behind the NDP in the polls, they should consider bringing in proportional representation before the 2023 election.

If the NDP get more votes than the UCP in 2023, under our present First Past the Post system the NDP may take all but a handful of seats. They may leave the UCP with only 15 seats or so, about the same as Prentice got in 2015 the last time the NDP got more votes than the Conservatives.

But under pro-rep, the UCP would get its fair share of seats - 27 if it had 30 percent of the vote; 44 if it got 50 percent of the vote.

Alberta used a form of pro-rep -- Single Transferable Voting -- to elect MLAs in Edmonton and Calgary from 1926 to 1955. STV also was used to elect the Calgary city council from 1917 to 1961. In each election, it produced a mixed roughly proportional group of reps.

Pro-rep prevented the leading party from getting far too many seats as happens today under FPTP. And it gave each substantial party its fair share. This fairness works to benefit the underdog, and it seems the UCP may be the underdog in 2023.

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Also sent to Edmonton Journal but not published by them as far as I know.


The point being that the Conservatives, if their popularity continues to tank, are in the same place as Winnipeg businessman and capitalists were in 1920 following the General Strike. They had maintained their control of city council in the 1919 election by the skin of their teeth but knew that a slight change of voting behaviour could mean that labour would dominate and business's Slate the Citizen's League would have just a couple seats, less even than their portion of the vote should have given them.


So they asked local pro-rep expert Ronald Hooper what would happen if Winnipeg adopted STV for its elections would Labour win control?


Hooper responded that he could not answer that but could say that under STV, each group would get its due share of the seats no more and no less.


Based on that, Winnipeg adopted STV for election of its MLAs and election of its city councillors.


And in the next elections, the mixed sentiment of city voters was reflected by the election of mixed representation at both levels, with Labour and Business each getting its fair due of the seats and no party taking far more than its due as happens under FPTP and Block Voting.


And parties today -- in or out of power -- need to look at proportional representation and recognize its fairness and recognize how fairness is a gift that will keep giving, to all - to politicians and to voters --- and to the whole society.


Thanks for reading.

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