Reforming the canadian first past the post electoral system

Reforming the first past the post (FPTP) election system in Canada.

Dear Prime Minister Trudeau 

I have been annoyed at the method by which elections have been held in Canada for a long time.  I have seen governments come into power with a majority in the house with significant less than 50% of the popular vote.  Here is a list of recent occurrences:

 

Year	Majority Government	Number of seats/ % of seats	Percentage of popular vote
1993	Liberal	177/60%	41.2%
1997	Liberal	155/51.5%	38.5%
2000	Liberal	172/57.1%	40.8%
2011	Conservative	166/53.9%	39.6%
2015	Liberal	184/54.4%	39.5%

 

This occurred in the 2011 Conservative majority with just 39.6%.  This would not be so bad was it not for some laws that were passed which perhaps should have been significantly improved or worse yet should not have passed at all. 

The last time as you know it occurred with the Conservative Party of Canada under Stephen Harper.  I saw two juggernaut omnibus bill  (there were eight in total) namely the Jobs and Growth Act (Bill C-45) and the Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act (C-38) become law.  With a combined length of 900 pages and 1,200 clauses affecting 125 unrelated federal laws these were rammed through parliament without proper time for review.  The last one is the famous anti-terrorism bill C-51 that is also now law.  This is an omnibus bill in that it amends roughly a dozen other laws from the Department of Fisheries Act to the Criminal Code to the Income Tax Act.

What is most preoccupying with the Anti-terrorism Act 2015 (bill C-51 new name) is the fact that it grants Canada Spy’s agency or the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) significant new powers.  Normally a spy agency has the right to collect intelligence but with this law it grants CSIS disruptive powers allowing the spy agency to do things above mere observations such as preventing a citizen to travel by revoking a passport with little or no oversight from the Canada’s Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC) which has been starved of staff and resources in recent years according to Craig Forcese, a law professor from the University of Ottawa.

Another disadvantage of the current system is that due to the unequal distribution of voters across ridings of different sizes it is possible for a party to win an election even though they did not have the highest number of popular vote.  This happened quite a few times in the past (see Canadian Parliamentary Review): Quebec 1966, New Brunswick 1952, 1974, Nova Scotia 1970 and in the federal elections of 1957, 1962 and 1979.

Enough on why we need a reform and let's get into my proposal for a representative form of electing our members of parliament. First in my opinion in order to be successful such a reform must meet the following criteria:

1. The reform must be done in a manner that requires the least amount of legislative modifications. Some people may disagree but if I presented omnibus bills as a problem in general I believe that a reform should affect as few legislation as is necessary. This also ensure it’s criticism is minimized as it does not require a huge amount of time to review in committees as it will have the smallest legislative impact as possible
2. The reform must be as easy as possible for Canadians to understand since some of the mechanics of electing representatives are not widely understood by the public at large.
3. The result of the reform must provide true proportional representation of the people of Canada in the House of Commons. I reject the criticism whereby minority governments will be more often the norm and hence it will be difficult to implement the electoral platform. Any solution that artificially alters the representation in the House of Commons (such as the first past the post existing solution) to avoid minority government is a disfavour to Canadians.  If Canadians voted for a minority government this is what they should get.  There should be no more devious ways to alter the electoral districts such as to favour certain constituencies or requiring Canadians to vote “strategically” such as in the 2015 elections to effect a desired change. All citizens should vote for the best candidate of their choice with no other considerations.

I gave this problem a long hard think many years ago and never took the time to put it in writing because I truly believed politicians to be too cynical to ever implement something that would benefit all citizens as opposed to benefitting them. This is until the new discourse that came out during the 2015 elections from then candidate Justin Trudeau from the liberal party of Canada.

I always deplored that a huge numbers of citizens would end up not having any representative weight in the House of Commons with the current system. This is why I came up with a very simple and non intrusive way to render the electoral system in Canada truly representative of the will of its citizens. This goes a long way into restoring the confidence Canadians must bestow upon their elected representatives namely the members of parliament(MPs).  Here are the specifics of my solution to this long standing problem.

1. Allow the current method of electing MPs in each riding i.e. the candidate with the largest percentage of votes wins the seat and becomes MPs for this riding.
2. When all votes are tallied and each seat is assigned to a candidate the weight for a given party is calculated by taking the number of seats in the house (nsh) multiplied by the percentage of the popular vote for that party (ppvp) divided by the number of seats won by a party (nsp) as in the following simple formula:  weight = ( nsh * ppvp )/ nsp
3. Whenever a vote takes places the number of MPs for a given party that votes in favor is multiplied by the weight for that party to calculate the total number of votes for that party.
4. If a party has a popular vote greater than certain percentage (to be decided by parliament, I would recommend 1%) but does not manage to have any members elected in any ridings then a number of floating seats in the house would be assigned to the leader and his votes would be calculated the same way as before

For example, in the 2015 elections the weight for all parties that elected at least one Member of Parliament would be:

 

Party	Electoral Districts		%	Number of votes	%	Weight Top of Form
Bloc Québécois		10	3.00%	818652	4.70%	1.5886
Conservative		99	29.30%	5600496	31.90%	1.089111
Green Party		1	0.30%	605864	3.40%	11.492
Liberal		184	54.40%	6930136	39.50%	0.725598
NDP-New Democratic Party		44	13.00%	3461262	19.70%	1.513318Bottom of Form
Total		338	100.00%	17559353	99.70%	n/a

 

This means that every time Elizabeth May would vote in the House of Commons her vote would be multiplied by 11.5.  Every Liberal MPs’ vote would be reduced to .72, each Conservative MPs’ vote would be multiplied by 1.08, each Bloc Québécois MPs’ vote would be multiplied by 1.5 and as is the case for the NDP MPs.  This changes only requires changes in how votes are tallied in the House of Commons and does not require complex voting scheme such as multi round voting.  Of course other rules could be modified to reflect the representative nature of the new system such as the number of MPs required to be granted official party status.

This system is simple, easy to implement and would guaranty Canadians their votes would always be represented and not be ignored due to the unequal voter distribution across ridings of different sizes in the current first past the post system.