First Past the Post is non-proportional. Under it, many of the voters, sometimes most of them, are ignored. Those elected under FPTP are elected sometimes just by a minority of the votes.
This does not happen under a system of proportional representation.
Giving decision making ability to a majority is preferable to giving it to a minority.
in our legislatures, a majority is required to pass legislation. The more does have power than the few. This makes sense. But it is not carried over to our elections, to how we elect the legislators.
Giving decision-making ability to a majority government is preferable to giving it to a minority of the legislators. Especially if that majority government is supported by a majority of the voters, as under a proportional system
But we should note that non-proportional winner-take-all FPTP does not guarantee a majority government, and in history of Canada it has only given us a majority government supported by a majority of voters six times in entire history of the country.
PR does not necessarily mean a minority government.
Look at the present NZ government. The Labour Party won a majority of the seats (although taking only 48 percent of the vote).
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(This is described as a landslide but that is a mistake in my opinion. Much as we are proud of the Labour Party's success, it was not a landslide as usually defined. The party received 48 percent of the votes, not a majority, and only 10 seats more than the other parties (put together).
The term landslide applies where the governing party gets say 60 percent of the votes and 80 percent of the seats or more. A landslide election is one where one party takes so many seats that it leaves few or no seats to the others. That is how Wikipedia defines landslide. if that is the definition, then NZ's 2020 election was not a landslide election. A decisive victory, yes but not a landslide.
Un-balanced landslide results do actually happen in some FPTP elections. Look at Alberta's election in 1963. Now that was a landslide. Due to the non-proportional FPTP system that was in use, the Social Credit party won all but three of the seats in the Legislature. And it was not that the SC party was that popular - it received only 55 percent of the votes, a majority of the votes but just barely.
Thankfully, NZ's MMP elections are held more proportional-ly than that, and the result was more balanced than that. The term landslide does not apply to there.)
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The voters in many provinces give a majority of votes to one party, so if PR was adopted, elections would still rightly produce a single-party majority government, an eventuality I personally don't have trouble with.
In our effort to hold fair elections, we might incur more suspicion of creating ineffectual governments than we gain from appeals to fair-minded-ness. But PR doesnot mean minority governments always, only if no party has more than say 48 percent of the votes.
Majority government if it is elected fairly is the ultimate. It is power named by most voters wielded for the public good. It allows government to take action. Minority governments are sometimes ineffectual - if the leaders of the major party are not in co-operative mood.
Single-party government also has the advantage of transparency.
We don't want to put such impediments in the way of government that nothing can ever change, that voters cannot see the result of their votes, which for democracy is surely as much of a problem as giving power to a simple majority of the legislators.
If we give no one party power and responsibility, voters would not be able to learn from past mistakes or glory in their wise choices.
Perhaps a government's term in office could be determined by a government's popularity.
if government was elected with less than 40 percent of the vote, it should be in government just for a year (even if it holds majority of the seats).
if 40 to 50 percent of the votes --- no more than two years,
more than 50 percent of the votes --- for four or five years.
Thus we look at its popularity (its vote percentage) as well as the number of seat it holds. That is the idea of party-list PR or MMP. We look at the vote tallies, not just district seats won.
Under such a scheme Trudeau's government should hold an early election And lo and behold it looks like the government will do just that even without such a variable-term rule.
One of my acquaintances says,
"The only way we're going to see reform, IMHO, is to educate a large portion of the electorate to recognize that FPTP negatively affects every single area of policy: housing, healthcare, education, the opioid crisis, old-growth logging, the economy, the pandemic response... everything.
No matter what you're passionate about, FPTP gives us worse results than a PR system would.
And then we need those more informed citizens to demand that the question be taken out of the hands of politicians and given over to a neutral body, like a CA."
Someone else points out that non-proportional FPTP means that Liberals and NDP and Greens suffer under-representation across the country, Liberals and NDP suffer under -representation on the Prairies and Conservatives suffer under-representation in Atlantic Canada Quebec. All parties suffer in one way or another so all should want the practice cleaned up.
I think both are important. The last argument has the power of fair-mindedness. The other, pointing to the practical outcomes of better governance from PR that benefit almost everybody, makes a strong case as well.
Coalition governments or even single-party governments elected by the most voters are more capable of dealing with the many major issues that we have to deal with.
A government elected in a FPTP wrong-winner election is not the choice of the most voters and should not have power.
PR does not have to mean taking power away from voters.
Direct election on a candidate-based system, such as STV or even SNTV, produces mixed roughly proportional results in each district and thus across the province or country. Election of a diverse representation in each city/district means diverse representation in each province and region. There would be none of that artificial regionalism that we now see created under non-proportional FPTP..
STV worked successfully for city elections in Winnipeg and Calgary for more than 40 years. It worked well in to elect Winnipeg Edmotnon, and Calgary MLAs from the 1920s to the 1950s.
People need to get used to the idea. Perhaps 10-15% of seats to start with would be easy way to start to ward over all PR.
It was suggested in Ontario about a hundred year ago to have one or two districts use STV as an experiment, or a foot in the door if you want to think positively.
This is perfectly possible under STV. Group the districts in one city in each province into a multi-seat district and educate voters in how to use transferable votes.
The use of transferable votes is not difficult. And even if many voters don't want to mark back-up preferences and only mark one preference on their ballot, having Single Voting in a multi-member district alone will give mixed results that will better represent the voters than our present FPTP system does. The votes of Victoria showed support for PR in the last BC referendum. Choosing that city as the BC test case would be welcomed by those voters there.
And many voters in other cities across the country would go along with the idea, as it is guaranteed to reap more fair results than the non-proportional FPTP system that we use now.
If the present elected politicians fear for their jobs under a reformed system, such as re-districting caused by the need to provide seats for top-up reps under MMP system, that may be sufficient obstacle to hold up such electoral reform. But where the same number of seats are retained in each city as could happen under a straight conversion from FPTP to STV, that fear should be assuaged.
Let's use STV again. It is what we need!
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