The members are cheering and that is exactly the point. The people who press for proportional representation are always the hopeless minor parties in any Parliament. It is because it is the only way they can have a say and actually influence what happens in the House. It is because then they have five or ten members of a party that could be a party of social left or right. It could be a party of religion or it could be a party of this or that and it is that balance of power that could actually drive the agenda of the entire House, the entire Parliament, the entire country.
I submit that history and the world are replete with examples of why that is bad for a nation. Italy alone has had countless parliaments, one after another since the second world war. There is always the opportunity of minor parties forming, four or five individuals, who could affect the outcome of major debates in the House.
Therefore we have the situation that rather than deploring the fact that our particular system tends to generate majority government, we should be applauding it. We do not have to take any instructions from Europe or elsewhere in the world. We are the model for the world because it is eminently evident that the most stable democracies in the world, Canada, the United States and Great Britain, have the same type of constituency representation that Canada uses. Certainly in the case of the United States and Canada, these are huge countries and yet we have the best democracies and we are admired around the world.
So, no, we do not have to look to other experiments that basically have failed. As the former Indian affairs minister said, “Canada is a country that does work in practice”. It may not fit the arm chair theories of academics and parties on the fringe but Canada works and it works the way we do it now.