Canada must push on electoral reform
If Canada intends to continue to evolve as an inclusive democracy, electoral reform is essential.
In the last election, Justin Trudeau expressed the need for electoral reform in Canada. But as prime minister, he recently announced that his Liberal party would not follow through on this promise. He said it’s not important to the majority of Canadians.
In a sense, Trudeau is correct. Only 44 per cent of Canadians who visited a government website to make their thoughts known are in favour of reforming our electoral system. Based on the data from responses to mydemocracy.ca, then, it isn’t that Canadians don’t want electoral reform. The issue is that most don’t know what electoral reform means.
To try to understand what’s going on, I looked for contrasting views. What I found is that the greatest opposition to electoral reform comes from the larger political parties. That makes sense. If Canadians chose to reform the electoral process using proportional representation, it’s not very likely that two major parties would take turns dominating Parliament. Countries that use this system normally have coalition governments.
Another criticism to changing our system is that political constituencies would become much larger. We would no longer have one person in Parliament representing us. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Some current politicians represent their constituents very well but others don’t. With larger ridings, we’ll each have more members of Parliament speaking for us — and more people to contact. We may identify more with one member than another. And that’s a very good thing.
There’s a great deal of voter apathy in Canada. And when we look at election results, that’s quite understandable. There have been too many instances of majority governments being elected in Canada with less than 50 per cent of the vote. If you didn’t vote for the winner, essentially your vote didn’t count. Countries that use proportional representation have much higher voter turnout, because every vote matters.
There are many forms of proportional representation and we don’t yet know which will work best here. It is clear, however, that we need to pressure our government to improve the electoral system so Parliament reflects the values of our diverse population, so Canada can remain competitive in the 21st century.