What is Proportional Representation? Proportional representation is any voting system designed to produce a representative body (like a parliament, legislature, or council) where voters elect representatives in proportion to our votes. Isn't that what we have now? Canada’s Parliament and provincial legislatures all use the first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system, where each riding has only one winner, and the candidate with the most votes wins. What's wrong with the candidate with the most votes winning? With just one winner in each riding, half of Canadian voters don’t actually elect anyone, and our Parliaments and legislatures don’t actually look anything like us. We believe that “[i]n a democratic government, the right of decision belongs to the majority, but the right of representation belongs to all.” (Ernest Naville, 1865)
How bad can it be? In 2011, the votes of seven million Canadian voters elected no one. Conservatives in Quebec, New Democrats in Saskatchewan, Liberals in Alberta, and all Greens (not just the 5% of them in one riding) all deserve to be represented by someone they voted for. Each of Canada’s regions is actually much more diverse than our voting system suggests. It's an election. Doesn't somebody have to lose? Candidates and parties can lose, but voters never should. In their 2011 election, 97% of New Zealand voters cast a vote that elected someone to represent them. In Canada, less than 51% of us did. Who actually uses Proportional Representation?
81 countries use elements of proportionality when electing their national assembly, including most long-term democracies, most European countries, and most of the major nations of the Americas. Most of these have used it for decades. New countries almost never opt for a system like Canada’s when setting up their first democratic voting system. What about representation of women and minorities? Less than a quarter of Canada’s parliamentarians are women. That’s barely enough to rank 54th in the world, well behind Angola, Belarus, Iraq, South Sudan, and Afghanistan. Some countries set aside a certain number of seats for women. But those that elect the most women without such quotas use proportional representation. In Canada, visible minorities also hold relatively few seats, despite being a growing segment of society. Very few Aboriginal people serve in Parliament. When parties can only put forward one candidate per riding, they will naturally nominate the candidate that they think is strongest. “As long as there are even subconscious biases in our society about who makes the best MP, white men will be overrepresented.” But when each voter has a say over more than one seat, parties will put forward a more representative range of candidates to earn the votes of a diverse population, and voters will indeed take them up on it. For more information, check out the Fair Vote Canada website, here:http://www.fairvote.ca/about-fair-voting/
