There was a time when MLAs in Edmonton, Calgary and Winnipeg were elected through a form of proportional representation.
The system used is Singe Transferable Voting - a simple system that uses multiple-member districts and each voter casting only a single vote. These two elements alone guarantee that in practice no single group could take all the seats in a city. (Under our present First Past The Post system, all the federal seats in Calgary, Saskatoon, and Regina are currently held by Conservative MPs. In each city other parties won many votes but they won no seats.) As well STV votes are transferable. As unpopular candidates are eliminated from the running his or her votes are transferred to others according to voters' back-up preferences. This prevents much of the waste that occurs under our present system.
The United Farmers of Alberta promised to adopt STV when they ran for election in 1921. Alberta farmers had too many times seen one party win almost all the seats while taking barely more than half the votes. Also, Independent, labour, farmer or socialist candidates were receiving 10 percent of the vote but seldom won seats. After the UFA's election in 1921, it adopted STV for the elections held in Edmonton and Calgary. As was its right, it did not hold a referendum before making the change.
Manitoba adopted STV about the same time, also without a referendum. After the Winnipeg General Strike citizens were strongly divided between two camps. Politics at the time were as polarized as ours are today. Many feared unrest would result if either labour or capital won all the Winnipeg seats. STV as expected produced fair representation.
In the STV elections in Edmonton, Calgary and Winnipeg in each election and in each place candidates of three or more parties were elected. All the large voting blocks in each place had representation proportional to their support.
STV was cancelled in the 1950s to serve the partisan ambitions of the parties in power. No referendum was held to make the change.
And no referendum is required to bring it in today at the federal level, where I would expect it to give the same fairly mixed representation it once did on the Prairies.
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