Hello, and welcome to another post. This is the first post of my grade 10 year! What a milestone. This post will contain some opinions that you might not agree with, so watch out, and don’t get too mad.

This post will focus around the Canadian federal election that happened just a few days ago. And how the Canadian government is structured.

This election was not like a normal October election. You see, normally elections are held every 4 years in October, but there’s more to it. The current Prime Minister of the country can call an election at any time during their term. We can only guess at what our current Prime Minister, Justin Treaudau’s motive was, but it was most likely an attempt to attain a majority government (if so, it didn’t work). A majority government is when a single party hold more than half of the seats in the House of Commons where there is a seat for each and every riding in Canada.

These are the current seats as of writing this post. image from CBC News

Our election system is called “first past the post”. This means that, as seen above, our leader is determined by the amount of seats their party got. To acquire a seat, a party must get the highest amount of votes in a riding. A riding is an area where certain candidates from each party run a campaign to attract the attention of voters (voters must be over the age of 18). The candidate with the most votes in the riding is elected and get one seat in the House of Commons. Personally, I believe that while our country may be functional as a government, it has failed as a representation of all of our people’s views. This is because of a flaw in which a party could amass hundreds of thousands of votes over different ridings and not en up with a single seat. This is explained well in a video by CBC News titled “What would parliament look like with proportional representation?”

As seen in CBC’s video above proportional representation is a system in which seats are given to parties relative to the percentage of votes they got across the whole country. Using this system, a majority government is likely never going to happen, but the views of all parties will be shared more equally. This system is likely not going to be implemented soon or ever, even thought it is a much better representation of what the people want from their government, because the leaders of the country benefit more form the current system. This means that while this may be a flaw to us people who want our views to be shared, it is an integral part of, at the moment, the LBC’s (Liberal Party of Canada) position of power. This will most likely not change in the future, and the Liberal and Conservative parties will likely stay predominant in the next few elections.

Here’s a chart I made with the data collected at CBC News’ Federal Election Results site.

As you can see with the chart, with proportional representation, the seats are much more spread out between the different parties. While this might make decision making slightly harder in the House of Commons, it guarantees that all parties views will at least be pitched as ideas. The only problem with this is that for this system to be fully implemented, it requires the current leading party’s support, which is unlikely to happen due to the fact that the current system favours those who can get just slightly more votes in certain ridings as opposed to the new system that favours those who get more votes altogether.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk and I hope you enjoyed seeing a little through my eyes on this topic. Until next time.