2006 Election
Canada still endures a "system" of national and regional voting known as "first past the post" (FPTP). What this means is that the views of Canadians are guaranteed to not be represented every time we have an election. This year's election was no different; ignoring the very real distortion that FPTP has on voting behaviour via so-called "strategic" voting, there are severe problems evident.
Under a pure-proportional system (which has its own severe problems), what would Parliament look like right now? Using Elections Canada's preliminary results, the popular vote (and resulting seat totals) was:
So, the Conservatives would (under a pure proportional system) have approximately 112 seats, the Liberals would have 93 seats, the NDP would have 54 seats, the Bloc would have 32 seats and the Green party would have 14 seats. As we can see, there is a huge distortion; FPTP generates 12 too many Conservative seats, 10 too many Liberal seats, 19 too many Bloc seats, 25 too few NDP seats and 14 too few Green seats; the power-balance would be much more even.
Regional distortions would be much less; for example, Quebec's power via the Bloc would be reduced and Albert's 100% Conservative MP sweep (despite only 65% of the popular vote) wouldn't happen.
>Pure Proportional Systems Suck
That said, a pure proportional system (as advocated for a long time by the NDP, for example) is stupid: you lose local MPs and depend upon party-produced lists of candidates. There is then no regional representation and no Member for your riding to whine to.
There's a better way. Consider:
Instead of a pure proportional system, we could elect regional Members of Parliament just like we do now (ignoring for a moment the very real dissatisfaction which comes from FPTP). This would result in 308 MPs, just like now.
After this voting is complete, we could take a look at Parliament and note the above inconsistencies in MP-share versus popular vote. Then, by adding additional MPs to the House, we can easily correct this imbalance (for example, we could eliminate the Senate and have a budget-neutral way of doing this). Absolute worst-case, we could add 308 more MPs and assign them in such a way as to "balance" the House so that it represents the popular vote. (However, the number of these "bonus" MPs can be anything; the lower the number, the greater the chance that any given election will result in a case where you can't exactly balance the House.) [1]
[1] -- Note that an easy budget-neutral way to do this would be to double riding sizes and elect 154 seats the "normal" way and have 154 to play with for proportional rebalancing...
This could be done by selecting MPs from parties based on their riding popular votes. For example, if 20 more Green MPs are needed, we would select the Green candidates with the top 20 riding-level popular votes. This totally eliminates the party candidate lists which pure proportional systems usually use (and hence even more closely represents voters' wishes).
Way back in 19XX, this was discussed at some length on can.politics; it is not all my idea. Let us continue analysing 2006's results, however, and see what a House would look like with this system (using 308 "extra" MPs).
2006 re-analysed
Total potential house seats: 616. Remember, 308 of these have been selected by riding-level votes (ideally using a system besides "first past the post", but lets ignore that for now). In order to represent the popular vote, the total seats in the "expanded" House need to be:
- Conservative: 223 seats [36.6%; popular vote was 36.3%]
- Liberal: 186 seats [30.5%; popular vote was 30.2%]
- N.D.P: 108 seats [17.7%; popular vote was 17.5%]
- Bloc: 65 seats [10.7%; popular vote was 10.5%]
- Green: 28 seats [4.6%; popular vote was 4.5%]
This gives a total of 610 seats (due to rounding and the fact that these parties together do not represent 100% of the vote). Various strategies exist for this, but the easiest (to agree on) seems to be to just leave it as is (i.e. leave 6 of the "extra" seats empty). This gives a House which — as closely as possible — matches, mathematically, the popular vote. Where would these extra MPs come from? As discussed above, from unelected candidates based on ranking them from most to least popular (based on their riding-level vote share).
The percentages in square brackets are the percentage of seats the party has in the new 610-seat House. As you can see, there is very little error between the expanded House's percent-seats and the national popular vote. Fantastic!
But what if a party doesn't have enough candidates to fill their "extra" seats? They would simply lose them; it means the party didn't run a full slate of candidates anyway, so arguably doesn't really deserve them. In practice, this would only affect the Bloc or other parties which only run candidates regionally and happen to be extremely popular.
This system isn't perfect; you can come up with cases where it is still impossible to balance the new House, but these are more mental exercise than real concern; in practice, these are extremely unlikely to occur. However, even in the rare event such edge-cases do happen, the above-described system will still produce a more-balanced House than now.
Talk to your Member of Parliament (it's free!); demand a better electoral system.
Why hasn't this happened?
So, if a proportional or semi-proportional (or whatever you want to call the above) system produces a more-accurate House, why hasn't this happened?
As you can see, the distortions in the current electoral system serve to confine "minor" parties to fewer seats than they would otherwise have (the NDP "lost" 25 seats and the Greens "didn't get" 14 seats). These seats end up going to the bigger parties: most of them went to the Conservatives and Liberals while the Bloc also got a giant boost (the Conservatives got 12 "extra", the Liberals 10 and the Bloc 19). There is, in other words, no political will to change anything. (Note: the seats lost and gained to not add up again due to rounding and the fact these parties don't represent 100% of the vote).
Germany uses a similar system although you vote for your MP and party separately (e.g. you could vote for "Jim Prentice" [Conservative MP in my riding] and the "Green Party" on the same ballot...)