The Optics Ain’t Good!
Why Canada Could Not Reform its Electoral System
In the 2015 election campaign, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau promised a reform of Canada’s Electoral System.
When Canada got its independence from Great Britain in 1867, it inherited the Westminster system of governance. Basically, geographical areas, called “constituencies,” are delineated. In each constituency, the political parties nominate their candidate to represent the party in the general election. The voters vote. The candidate with the most votes wins the right to represent the constituency in the next Parliament. The candidate’s party gets one more member of Parliament to improve its influence in that Parliament. While there has been some fine-tuning of Westminster since 1867, the structure has remained the more or less the same.
The major flaw with this system is that seats allocated the parties are often askew with the popular vote of Canadians. For example, the 2011 Canadian election produced this result:
The Conservatives got a majority government but did not get a majority vote. They had 14 percentage points more power than the people that supported them. The Liberals were underrepresented in this Parliament, with a disadvantage of 9 percentage points. This disadvantage may have been the reason for Justin Trudeau to promise…
