There seems to be some confusion around what kind of voting prime minister Justin Trudeau might be promoting these days. All I have ever heard him promote was ranked ballots. Which just goes to prove that he is no student of voting systems.
What former conservative leader Erin O’Toole was talking about as he quit politics was “brokerage” voting which is just another name for proportional representation. It is assumed under proportional representation that most of the time there will be no one party winning a majority. This is the situation Mr. O’Toole referred to as parties would be required to broker an arrangement to share or just support whatever combination of political groups can form a government.
It is probably somewhat premature to assume this is the answer to Canada’s political problems. Proportional voting was developed to solve the voting problems when a large portion of the voters are illiterate. The illiterate need only select a pictograph that represents the party for which they want to vote.
One of the aspects of proportional voting is that it encourages the creation of many small parties. In Israel for example, the larger parties always encourage the religious parties in what is a mostly secular country, in case they need a bit of support. It is why Saturday in Israel can be the most boring day of the week.
The other problem with proportional voting is that Canadians are used to sending a candidate from their electoral district to parliament or the provincial legislature. In proportional voting, the members of the parties are appointed from lists according to the voting results.
Toronto was very lucky in the voting system used for the recent byelection for mayor. They had asked the provincial government for permission to use ranked ballots. Luckily, premier Ford said ‘No.’ It is very hard to guess who would win when you have 101 candidates to choose from for your second choice. It would be my guess that Olivia Chow would not be the second choice of anyone who did not make her their first choice. Mind you, can you imagine ranking 102 candidates? It would be an interesting computer program needed to count the results.
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