The plummeting poll numbers for Justin Trudeau and the federal Liberals might not seem as dire if Canada had adopted a new voting system.
The plummeting poll numbers for Justin Trudeau and the federal Liberals might not seem as dire if Canada had adopted a new voting system.
Single Transferable Vote is perfect for Canada. It’s, essentially, proportional representation within multi-member ridings. So, a Quebec riding could get 5 seats, and get 2 Bloc, 1 Con, 1 Lib, 1 NDP (for example) giving most people in the riding a representative who more accurately reflects their views.
STV perfectly meshes with our constitutionally-protected geographic representation while also giving roughly proportional representation, and without giving seats to tiny fringe parties. It’s also been used successfully in Ireland for over a century.
I love STV but imho it just doesn’t work for Canada. We have too many massive wilderness ridings. If you had a heavily-urbanized province like if Southern Ontario was its own province, I’d say it would be the perfect system for that area.
Here’s why: The northern areas of every province are extremely low-population and are enormous. For example, if BC had 5-seat-riding STV federally, the entire province north of Kamloops would be one massive riding. It’s possible all their MPs would be from the populated end of the riding, so that people in the ass-end of the riding live over 1000km from their “representative”. Ontario would look similar - Northern Ontario is probably the most sparsely-populated area outside of the Territories. That’s not an acceptable outcome – being 1000km from your MP means you are not represented.
Contrast this vs Mixed Member Proportional, where local ridings still exist - under MMP, 2/3 of the seats are normal-ass ridings that work exactly like we do today. Then we group them together in “regions” and back-fill the most popular party-members within that region to make it proportional. A lot of people get upset about non-local representatives, or “unelected party staffer MPs” in MMP, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
The plan that was floated for BC is actually really awesome – imho it should be applied Canada-wide. It’s basically a vanilla MMP plan but there are details that do great work to mitigate the main complaints about MMP:
Take the map of Canada and carve it up into regions of 14 ridings (obviously for provinces with less than 14 ridings, just take the whole province). These are our “regions”. So, for example:
Within each Region we have 9 ridings (or 2/3 of the total number of Seats if the Region is smaller than 14 seats). Those are normal-ass elections. So Calgary Centre still has its own MP, and so do more remote areas like Gaspésie—Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine. These ridings are only about 50% larger then our current ridings.
The other 5 Seats within the Region are backfill seats, that are used to fill up the Region until the proportion of party-members roughly matches their % of the vote within the Region. So even though the back-fill people don’t represent a riding, they’re still somewhat local. Flin Flon’s non-riding members are still from Manitoba. People in Markham will still have a local MP, but also will have regional MPs from the rest of York. So locality is still good for the regional representatives, and we have a proper local riding MP, we’re not losing that guarantee of locality.
Avoid the “nobody elected this asshole” problem with open-lists. The ballot is simple, it has 2 sections:
So, we figure out how many seats to back-fill by % of votes per-party (on the regional section) - so if there are 14 seats in a Region, and one party gets half of the regional MP votes, got 5 local seats? They’ll get 2 Regional seats. And which of their Regional candidates get those 2 seats? The 2 that got the most votes.
So it’s not like they’re unelected. They still have to be the most popular people within their party and within the region.
So let’s think a concrete example - imagine Southeastern Quebec region, which includes Quebec City. Generally not a very Red area except for the city itself. The Liberals continue to run Steven Guilbeault in Quebec City itself as a local MP, but to drum up interest they also run Stephane Dion and Joël Lightbound as regional candidates in the Quebec City regional area, including a massive amount of rural and suburban area they expect to get a little support from but generally lose. To pad out the rest of the list, they also run Ricky the Pigfucker as a regional candidate. Now, this is an open list - if the Liberal voters outside of Quebec City really hate Dion, they can still vote for Ricky. And so instead of the expected three MPs for the Quebec region being Guilbuealt (elected directly by Quebec City), Dion, and Lightbound, it’s an upset and they get Guilbeault, Dion, and Ricky the Pigfucker.
And Independants “I don’t want to run as a party” types? They can still run as a local riding MP. They’re not frozen out like most people think of about in “Proportional systems” that are very “party-oriented”.
It’s not a perfect system. It’s very party-oriented in the way that STV isn’t. It’s weirdly complicated. But it works. It’s used IRL in real first-world countries like Germany and New Zealand and Scotland. There’s lots of fiddly knobs to argue about like whether it’s okay to add more top-up MPs beyond the fixed size to preserve proportionality (true-MMP vs AMS - personally I’m on the fixed-size side AKA AMS) But with Canada’s geographic considerations, I strongly think it’s our best option.