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Tom Monto

Problems with FPTP

Problems with the First Past The Post system


- wasted votes/ ineffective votes

Effective votes -- votes that help influence the make-up of the legislature;

ineffective votes are ones that don't. They re simply ignored and are wasted.


Wasted votes are not just a problem for small parties but even large parties suffer harm due to ineffective votes


Ineffective votes in 2019 federal election by party

Liberal 2.2M 37 percent

Conservative 2.5M 40 percent

NDP 2.4M 83 p.c.

Green 1 M 94 p.c.


- safe seats and swing ridings

safe seats are ones where there is no hope for change

swing ridings are ones whre a small change of votoing woldchange the outcome.

swing ridings are the ones that parties think matter the most, the others don't matter at all.

PR being about how each vote matters just as much as any other vote


- distorted results

FPTP looks at the most popular person in a small geographical area, instead of looking at the number of people with shared values [across a wider geographical area - the country as a whole for example]


- regional sweeps


2019 federal election

Alberta

votes: Conservative 69 percent of the vote, Liberal 14 percent, NDP 12 percent

seats: 97 percent Conservative 3 percent NDP


Saskatchewan

votes: Conservative 64 percent of votes, NDP 20 percent, Lib 12 percent

Seats 100 p.c. Cons


With a Liberal government elected, in Saskatchewan we see a whole province having no representation in the government causes all sorts of problems


Toronto, Peel and Halton 47 percent of voters voted for parties other than Liberal but Liberals won all 40 seats.

(Note that these are more seats than are elected in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Note that the this is due to the Ontario area having far more population than Alberta and Saskatchewan. AB/Sask ridings actually have fewer voters than those in Toronto in part to compensate for their sparse population. The number difference is solely due to AB/SK having just a small portion of the country's population (only 14 percent of Canada's voters) so it's not exaggerate our importance.)


Who represents you when all the MPs in your city are of a different party?


Back in 1979 the Task Force on Canada Unity reported:

[...] The simple fact is that our elections produce a distorted image of the country, making provinces appear more unanimous in their support of one federal party or another than they really are. Quebec, for instance, has for years given an overwhelming proportion of its Commons seats to Liberals: in the 1974 federal election, that party won 81 per cent of the seats though it got only 54 per cent of the popular vote.


In the same election the Progressive Conservatives gained the second highest popular support while, with less total support across the province, the Social Credit Party won four times as many seats. In the elections of 1972 and 1974 two Alberta voters out of five favoured other parties but every elected member was a Progressive Conservative. Nor are these examples exceptional. Under our current electoral system, which gives the leading party in popular votes a disproportionate share of parliamentary seats in a province, the regional concentration in the representation of political parties is sharply accentuated. This makes it more difficult for a party’s representation in the House of Commons to be broadly representative of all the major regions.


In a country as diverse as Canada, this sort of situation leads to a sense of alienation and exclusion from power. Westerners in particular increasingly resent a disproportionate number of Quebec members in a Liberal caucus which has very few of their own. If there were more Quebec members in the Progressive Conservative caucus representing more accurately the popular vote in that province, that caucus would be in a better position to reflect and understand the concerns of Quebecers.


To correct the existing situation with its corrosive effect on Canadian unity, we propose a major change in the electoral system. We would continue the current simple-majority single-member constituency system because of the direct links it establishes between the voter and his MP, but would add to it a degree of proportional representation. We would increase the overall number of Commons seats by about 60 and these additional seats would be awarded to candidates from ranked lists announced by the parties before the election, seats being awarded to parties on the basis of percentages of the popular vote.


We have opted for these additional seats being assigned to those on party lists announced before an election rather than to candidates who have run and placed second in individual constituencies in order to avoid any connotation that these additional members are second-class representatives and to encourage parties to use this means to attract candidates who might otherwise be difficult to entice into politics.

We have examined in some detail various ways in which this could be done, although we would prefer to leave the final choice in this matter to Parliament in consultation with experts.


One method would base the allocation of the 60 seats on the basis of the vote in each province won by a party, the additional seats being awarded to those parties which otherwise would be proportionately under-represented. Another method would be to allocate the 60 seats on the percentage of the country-wide vote received by each party and apply what is known as the d’Hondt formula for allocating seats provincially among parties.


The procedure for allocating seats in the second method is more complex and difficult for electors to understand, but reduces the likelihood of minority governments resulting.


Canadians have traditionally expressed a fear that a system of proportional representation would produce frequent minority governments and hence weak and unstable cabinets.


An analysis of how our proposal might have worked in each federal election since 1945 suggests that the combined electoral system we are proposing, with about 280 single-member constituencies plus 60 additional seats to make representation more proportionate, would not only have produced a more broadly based representation within each party in the Commons but would not have significantly increased the incidence of minority governments over that period. [...]

(https://primarydocuments.ca/task-force-on-canadian-unity-a-future-together/)


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