A handy dandy guide to proportional representation

With the federal election just around the corner, it’s a good idea to stay in the loop about various policies and ideas that have been put forward by candidates during the campaign.

Electoral reform is one of the issues that has been brought up time and time again during campaigns.

Changing the way Canadians vote has been a hot topic for years and a number of alternatives have been suggested. The most popular in Canadian politics is the electoral process known as proportional representation.

Under Canada’s current voting system, known as first-past-the-post, citizens vote for a local candidate they would like to be their representative in parliament.

Each province is divided into ridings and one person is voted in from each riding.

With the current system, the candidate with the most votes in each riding has a seat in Ottawa. With this voting system, however, candidates can receive the most votes but not the majority of the vote (50 per cent or more) and still have a seat in Ottawa. In fact, most winning candidates don’t hold a majority.

Let’s say there is a riding with 100 voters and the results break down like this: Candidate A: 45 votes.

Candidate B: 20 votes.

Candidate C: 35 votes.

Candidate A received the most votes but does not hold the majority. They now have a seat in Ottawa.

A popular alternative to the first-pastthe-post system that many countries around the world have already implemented is known as proportional representation.

In essence, proportional representation means that the percentage of seats a party holds in Ottawa is proportional to the percentage of the vote that they received. Under this electoral system, citizens vote for parties rather than individual candidates.

Let’s say Canada has 100 voters and three parties running for election.

Party A: 30 votes

Party B: 30 votes

Party C: 40 votes

Party A and Party B both received 30 per cent of the vote, which means both parties would receive 30 per cent of the seats in Ottawa. Party C received 40 per cent of the vote, which means they would hold 40 per cent of the seats in Ottawa.

The candidates to fill the seats would be chosen by the parties. They rank their candidates in a list and seats would be filled according to that order.

The proportional representation voting system allows more political parties to be represented in Parliament, which means voters’ interests are more widely represented and smaller parties have a greater chance of winning seats.

Under the first-past-the-post system, parties are easily able to form a majority in the legislature despite not holding the majority of the vote because citizens are voting for individual candidates.

For example, party A holds 51 per cent of the seats in Ottawa because of the candidates who received the most votes in their riding, but the party may only have received 20 per cent of the popular vote. With proportional representation, if party A only received 20 per cent of the vote, they would only receive 20 per cent of the seats in Ottawa.

It is an alternative that is described as more fair and it is an electoral system that Canadians should be familiar with when the topic comes up for debate.