Frequently Asked Questions

Ha! Of course. Many groups have made many videos at many times to explain to interested people just how poor our current system of first-past-the-post actually works. Here are a few.

In Ireland—where they use a better system than ours—school children demonstrate just how simple it is to accurately represent voters.

A Canadian advocacy group for electoral reform, Fair Vote Canada, has created an excellent short video describing just how much better results are with a betting voting system.

John Cleese, of Monty Python, comically describes just how bad the UK voting system fares, which is the same system that Canada also uses.

And if you like funny, it doesn't get put any more clever than this short, written and directed by Canadian film maker Erik Anderson.

With our current voting method, it's a given that many Canadians do not get an MP of their choice in every election.

But there are many ways to elect our MPs! And many of these ways are used by other countries and districts around the world. By adopting one of these improved ways of voting that is a good fit for Canada it is straight-forward to having nearly every Canadian get an MP of their choice in every election.

Proportional Representation Systems

One way this can be done is to have top-up seats in each province to elect additional MPs. These top-up seats are based on the percent of the total votes each party receives. 

Another way is to tally up the total votes each party receives across the country and grant them the corresponding percentage of seats, which are filled by each party as they see fit.

A third way is to have ridings of multiple MPs and give voters a ranked ballot so that less popular parties still receive seats in line with the votes they get. 

There are many tried and true ways to achieve results that accurately reflect how Canadians vote. And when you compare them to our current system it is easy to see just how miserable our current way of voting is in accurately representing what Canadians want!

Right now, with our current way to elect MPs, small parties have little chance of getting seats unless their votes are concentrated in a particular area of Canada. 

So the Green Party gets one or two seats despite having 6.5% of the total Canadian vote. The Bloc Québécois works and is successful because its votes are concentrated in Québec. The Reform Party failed because it split conservative votes and this compelled conservatives to merge the then Canadian Alliance with the PCs to create the Conservative Party of Canada.

But with a way of voting that accurately reflects what Canadians want, small parties can exist with continuity and stability because their seats are always in-line with the percent of the votes they receive. The Green Party then gets 6.5% of the seats. The Reform Party or Canadian Alliance can exist because vote splitting is no longer an issue. 

Changing how we elect our MPs allows smaller, more diverse, more representative parties to gain seats and keep them in election after election. Parties grow in number and become more diverse which gives Canadians more choice in how to be represented.

I'll answer this indirectly: why should a party get more or less seats than what is in proportion to the votes they received? If they did, they would be under- or over-represented. Which means other Canadians are under- or over-represented. 

To me, for a party to have self-respect and confidence, it would not want to be over-represented because it would value and respect other Canadians, and it wouldn't want to be under-represented because it would value and respect itself. 

Accepting the wild misrepresentation of parties shows the lack of respect and confidence Canadian parties and voters have for themselves. A concise article stating very similar thoughts was written by the then federal Liberal party leader, Stephane Dion, in 2012. In 1997, Stephen Harper wrote on the same topic. There is a history of Canadian politicians recognizing that our system as it currently exists is deeply flawed. 

Meanwhile, something much better—better for everyone—is within reach.