There are people who believe that first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting does not work for them. And they really do seem paranoid about it. Since paranoia can be a serious mental condition, we would like to propose a reasonable test of proportional voting for Canadians to see how it would work for them. It seems fair.
What we are proposing is that the Senate of Canada, which is as much a part of our parliament as is the House of Commons, becomes a proportionally elected chamber. To do this, you first need to have all current senators resign. There might be a few holdouts but maybe we can bribe them.
Next we establish that all future senators to be appointed serve only for the term of the then current House of Commons. Each party in the Commons will then appoint senators according to that party’s proportional vote in the previous election. That way when the citizen is making a FPTP vote for a Member of Parliament, they will also be making a proportional vote for a senator. It gives the citizen another reason to cast a vote.
There will, of course, have to be some rounding of the numbers. It might be hard to find a senator with a split personality who could vote 70 per cent NDP and 30 per cent Green.
The first thing Canadians will notice is that while the Liberals have 54 per cent of the current seats in the House of Commons, they will only have 39 per cent of the seats in this proportional senate. At the same time, the Conservative Party will have 31 per cent and the New Democrats will have 19 per cent. And that would be a first for the NDP as the party has never had senators before. The Bloc Québécois’ 4 per cent would all have to come from Quebec. Picking provinces for the 3 per cent of Greens would be an interesting problem.
There will of course need to be some fine tuning of this idea but it seems to be a far better test of proportional voting than to completely screw up the House of Commons.
What needs to be understood is that proportional representation is no panacea. It does not ensure more women and minorities in parliament. It certainly does not create friendlier and more consensual parliaments. What it does is take away from the citizen their direct connection with their Member of Parliament. That is the single most important value we have with FPTP. To deny us that connection with our elected members is attacking the very core of our Canadian democracy.
Justin Trudeau has said that “2015 will be the last election under first-past-the-post.” It makes great rhetoric but he is going to have to start back-tracking on it. First of all he made no suggestion of what the replacement system will be. Most people think he will opt for ranked ballots but some people have figured out that instead just a majority government in 2015, he would have had a huge majority with a ranked ballot system. Canadians would probably prefer run-off elections and that is possible—if we move immediately to Internet voting.
But whatever we do, we have to think about it, talk about it and then see if we can find a consensus. Anything else would be very, very foolish.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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