I too hold Peter Russell in the highest esteem. He's an academic hero of mine. I'm not sure who originally coined the term “false majority.” My concern is less about where it emanated than how it is employed in this debate, and it's often employed in a way, I think, not to argue in favour of a different system but to, I would argue, misrepresent the nature of the system we have.
Our system is simply not intended to translate the national vote into equitable shares of seats. It's a different system. When the average Canadian hears that false majority governments result from it, without having the context of knowing that someone is arguing for change rather than describing what a system does, I think we lose the empirical versus the normative frame. The implication is that the first-past-the-post system is, obviously, illegitimate because it's producing undemocratic results, but that's a value proposition, not an empirical statement.