Hi everyone,
With the Canadian Election Coming to a close I have been reflecting on the results. After two weeks of learning about how the Canadian government is structured and how the election process works I have some interesting ideas. These ideas have helped me better understand the democratic process in Canada. The sources I used to research statistics about proportional representation voting were fairvote and Ace Project.
My main idea is why Canada should abolish the current first past the post voting system. In order to understand why we need to change the Canadian Election System we first to understand how it works. Canada is both a constitutional monarchy and a parliamentary democracy. This means that Canada elects our leaders but the Queen is our head of state. Instead of the leader who got the most votes winning the election. The leader who’s party wins the most ridings gets to lead Canada. Ridings are smaller sections of Canada. In each of these ridings we elect one MP (Member of Parliament) to the house of commons.
I believe Canada should abolish this system as it doesn’t always represent what the majority of the country wants. Canadas current system simply doesn’t respect the popular vote. I never quite realized how significant this was until I looked at this years election results. The Conservative Party won the popular vote but the liberals won 32 more seats. This seems insane to me. The Conservatives got over 200,000 more votes then the Liberals. That’s a similar population to the Kelowna metro area! This clearly shows that Canadians as a whole favoured the conservatives while certain areas, where their votes have more influence preferred the liberals. I don’t think this represents Canadas fundamental freedoms. Particularly free and fair elections and equality rights. No one person’s vote should carry more power then another’s vote. Our current elections are not completely fair. The other way this system is exploited is how parties focus on swing ridings. Swing ridings are ridings where the vote is very close between parties. Therefore parties focus more energy campaigning there in order to gain more support. Riding which are safe seats, this means that they typically elect the same party, get less focus during campaigns. This leads to these areas being under represented. Check out more information on swing ridings in Canada here.
This Graph came from fairvote
If you’re wondering whether ditching this system works, it does! Many developed nations have moved onto this system and experienced many benefits. Countries which no longer use the first past the post system have 7% higher voter turnout. It also much more likely that an individual helps elect a representative. In Sweden 95% of voters help elect a representative, while in Canada just over 50% get this privilege. Abandoning this system will also force parties to collaborate with each other and pool there resources. This leads to more decisions reflecting the overall opinions of the country.
Changing the system would have so many benefits. Not only would elections be more fair, voters would be more encouraged to go out and vote. Particularly in ridings which normally vote the same party in to office. If a party gets 30% of the votes, they get to make 30% of the decisions in government. This would force parties to work together and it would help lead to better representations for all Canadians of different socio-economic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds.
I first started questioning this systems when I was looking at the student vote results. I thought the NDP had won as they had the most votes. Then one of my classmates pointed out to me that the liberals won. This shocked me as both the conservatives and NDP had more votes then them. It wasn’t a small difference, the Conservatives had 10,000 more votes then the liberals and the NDP had 35000 more votes. That is a significant difference. The student vote only involved around 800,000 students.
One of my biggest issues with our current system is how we use the first past the post vote. This simply means that only one candidate can win in each riding. It doesn’t matter how many votes the other candidates have. This leads to voter inequality. Ridings are not organized based on collective interest. In many ridings, such as my own (Burnaby-North Seymour) there is very different interests among separate areas of the riding. Burnaby and Seymour’s respective populations are quite different socio-economically. If two candidates both get a large number of votes they should be able to represent us together. I think that this would lead to more even representation.
A good example of a riding where two candidates were both popular is in the West Vancouver, Sunshine Coast and Sea to Sky Country Riding. Liberal Candidate Patrick Weiler had 19,424 votes or 33.6% of the vote. While Conservative Candidate John Weston had 17,247 votes or 30.2% of the vote. That’s a tiny difference and it is clear they are both fit to represent their people. Check out the results across different ridings in canada here.
Of course switching electoral systems would require a lot of work but I think it would make Canada a better place. Certain peoples votes shouldn’t carry more weight then others just because they live in different places. Canada needs to change electoral systems now to better represent the people living here.