Rep by pop (representation by population) is guarantee that each province would have the number of seats that their population makes them due,
not based on votes cast or number of voters or votes used effectively or any other thing, but only that each province has about same ratio of total population numbers to its number of seats.
Despite rep by pop, we see great disparity when seats are not filled fairly, as we see under FPTP.
For example in Alberta in 1984 the Conservatives took all 21 of the Alberta seats. They received 700,000 votes (68.8 p.c. of the votes cast in the province).
The province of BC had population of 1.4M (twice the Conservative vote in Alberta) and had 28 seats (less than 1.5 times the number of AB seats).
Or put another way, Conservative voters in Alberta were about half as many as the population of BC but they got almost as many seats.
This was due to unhealthy combination of rep by pop and FPTP.
The non-Conservative voters in Alberta (and the families behind them) were counted when it came to setting the number of seats in Alberta even though they did not have the right to elect any of the MPs in those seats.
And the Conservative MPs, elected in Alberta to seats that had been ben made possible by the existence of the non-Conservative voters in Alberta, then opposed MPs elected in other provinces who reflected views of the spurned non-Conservative voters in Alberta. Sort of a double insult.
A double insult also experienced by all non-Liberal voters in PEI and many in Toronto as well.
PR if nothing else will/should ensure that each party will have the seats that it is due (as much as possible) replacing this hit or miss affair of counting heads for "rep by pop." then giving seats to parties based on something else entirely.
rep by pop is necessary for balanced geographic representation but it is not sufficient to have fairness.
we need to keep rep by pop on the provincial basis and
add PR on party and candidate basis.
This means effective voting, where most votes actually elect someone (in the province where they are cast).
(An exception to rep by pop is that territories are each given one seat although each does not have the population number that is needed to have a seat elsewhere, so they are over-represented but we could hardly not give a measly three seats to a whole third of the country no matter how few people it has!)
Rep by pop is approximate and prone to bending. but any gross divergence in it would produce appearance of our system obviously out of kilter.
less apparent is the waste of votes under FPTP. This is unfortunate for the drive for electoral reform - most don't see the harm done by FPTP..
The mass waste of votes under the FPTP plan prevents the balance made possible under rep by pop
in 2019 federal election 2.2 M Liberal votes did not elect anyone, and those were votes cast for candidates of the party that elected more members than any other.
These "ignored voters' were not equally distributed across the country -
all Liberal votes in Alberta in 1984 were ignored;
only some of the Liberal voters in most other provinces were ignored..
in the 2021 federal election, every Liberal vote in PEI was used to elect someone.(perhaps they were surplus votes but they were used to elect someone).
no other party in any other province can say that.
So that just shows the great miscarriage of democracy possible even under a system that has rep by pop if a PR system of one sort or another is not used.
any goodness of rep by pop -- and any harm caused by only-loose adherence to rep by pop -- is small change compared to that kind of waste.
But note the recent storm of protests against Quebec retaining one seat it should not under strict rep by pop and compare that to the [sounds of crickets] in 1984 when Conservatives took seven more Alberta seats than the 14 they were actually due.
And that was only one instance of the one-party province-wide sweeps produced by FPTP,
often experienced in Alberta throughout its history
and the kind currently seen in Saskatchewan and in PEI,
and so forth.
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