Okay.
When I began investigating this issue, I looked at the original electoral arrangement set forth in the Constitution Act, 1867. Section 40 deals with division of the original member provinces into electoral districts. You would hardly recognize most of them now, needless to say. Section 41 keeps the existing provincial election laws in place, including qualifications and disqualifications of voters and candidates, and proceedings at elections. The right to vote has now been extended well beyond the original 21-year-old male British subject with some property.
Both of those sections begin with “Until the Parliament of Canada otherwise provides”, so the Fathers of Confederation obviously contemplated that these initial provisions would evolve as decided by Parliament.
Parliament, as you know, consists of the Queen, the Senate, and the House of Commons, of which only one is elected.
Fast-forward to part I of the Constitution Act, 1982, better known as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The first democratic right listed in the charter is that of every Canadian citizen “to vote in an election of members of the House of Commons”. Subsection 15(1) of the charter provides that “[e]very individual...has the right to the...equal benefit of the law without discrimination”. This implies that the votes of all Canadians should carry equal weight, subject to section 51A, the amendment to the 1867 act that guarantees all provinces at least as many MPs as senators.
I don't believe in change for the sake of change, so I did some research on how the existing system, first past the post, has worked. For the first 53 years after Confederation, we had essentially two-party elections, and the system worked fairly well, except in 1896, when Wilfrid Laurier defeated Charles Tupper despite earning 1.2% less of the vote than Tupper. That amounted to 11,134 fewer votes. That was the first of our system's “stolen” elections that passed power to the second-place party.
Since 1921, Canada has had multi-party elections featuring at least three substantial parties. During this 95-year period, we elected 18 majority governments and 11 minorities. Of the 18 majorities, only four were true majorities. Fourteen times first past the post has produced false majorities, where a party that won fewer than half the votes was awarded a majority of the seats. That's one-third of all of our 42 general elections held to date. And there have been four more system-stolen elections since 1921.
As well, first past the post tends to distort regional results. The most glaring example was the 1993 election, when the Bloc Québécois became the official opposition, winning 54 seats with 13.5% of the popular vote. Reform was next with 52 seats but 18.72% of the vote, and the Progressive Conservatives won only two seats but garnered 15.99% of the vote. Go figure.
In my view, an electoral system should translate the votes cast across the country into seats that reflect the share of votes that each party received. A system that repeatedly puts second-place parties into power, regularly converts a minority of votes into a majority of seats, and seriously distorts regional results is fatally flawed and should be replaced.
First past the post is one of the majoritarian, winner-take-all systems with single member ridings, which are designed to produce or have historically produced a majority.
Is there another type of system, which would respect and reflect our votes? Yes. Proportional representation systems allocate seats to the parties based on their shares of the popular vote. There are also mixed systems, which combine features of the other two.
I strongly urge this honourable committee to recommend some form of proportional representation to the House so we voters can enjoy real democracy in the only elected component of Parliament.