Round table on proportional representation.

• Author: John McKay, and others

Traditionally, political representation has been based on territory. A member of Parliament is elected from a specific constituency and once elected he or she represents all of the interests of all of the constituents. In recent years various groups have been arguing for an understanding of representation not based solely on territory but which takes into account other factors including sex and ethnicity. Parliament, it is argued, does not reflect well enough the composition of the whole of society. This issue was discussed at the 35th Conference of the Canadian Region of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association held in Winnipeg. The lead speakers were John MacKay, MLA of New Brunswick and Dennis Richards, MLA of Nova Scotia. The following extracts are based upon the proceedings prepared by Manitoba Hansard. The complete transcript is available from the Clerk of the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba.

John McKay, MLA (New Brunswick): The electoral system as it now exists in Canada returns one member of Parliament for each constituency. Parties nominate one candidate; the voter indicates his preference by marking opposite one name on the ballot and the candidate with the highest number of votes wins. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees every Canadian citizen a right to vote and to be considered equal under the law. But does the Charter require each person's vote to be of equal weight? This issue was at the heart of discussions around the ideal average population for ridings and the amount of deviation allowed from the average during the representation and electoral boundaries commission in recent hearings in New Brunswick.

The first past the post system allows an elected member to win his seat or her seat without an absolute majority in his district. All they need is to receive more votes than the nearest runner up. This means it is possible and indeed most often the case that the political party with the majority of seats in the House of Commons will not have received the majority of the popular vote. In other words, with very few exceptions our national government has had more votes cast against it than it has in favour. In the 1980 federal election, there were over a half million Liberal votes in Saskatchewan, Alberta, B.C., but the party was wiped out in the West because all of these votes did not produce a single member in the caucus of a majority government.

Opponents of the first past the post system feel that this under-representation exaggerates the regionalization of the country. By giving the Liberals no seats in Alberta and occasionally the Progressive Conservatives virtually no seats in Quebec, this system appears to confer an image of unanimity on provinces. The traditional voting system reflects the philosophy of unlimited majority rule, gives the voters representatives they did not vote for, reduces the opportunities for minorities to be represented and gives political parties undue power over all citizens. This system can distort the translation of popular vote shares into legislative seat shares leading to overrepresentation of the party that wins the largest share of the vote, underrepresentation of the second place party and even nonrepresentation of smaller parties.

Supporters of our present electoral system feel that measured against other countries, Canada does well nationally. Our system does less well in ensuring proportionality in the level of regions and provinces. Supporters of the classical theory of election by plurality from single member constituencies feel that it concentrates politics almost completely in two parties enabling the people to exercise a clear choice of government and opposition. Since the party that gets the plurality of the popular vote will almost certainly get a clear majority of elected members it produces strong and stable governments.

This system has basically been in effect for some 600 years in Britain and more than two centuries in the United States and Canada. There have been calls for changes that in the view of the proponents would result in more equitable representation through proportional representation or some variant of that. The calls tend to come from the losers under the current system.

In 1987, the New Brunswick Liberals won 100 percent of the seats in the Legislature. The Progressive Conservative Party received 28 percent of the vote but did not receive one seat. The NDP party received 10.5 percent of the vote but did not get a single seat. With proportional representation, the Progressive Conservative Party would have had 16 seats in the New Brunswick Legislature at that time and the New Democratic Party would have had six.

In the 1993 Prince Edward Island provincial election, the P.C.s with 39 percent of the vote, won only 3 percent of the seats while the Liberals with 54 percent of the vote ended up with 97 percent of the seats. It can work the other way as well. In 1974 in New Brunswick, the Liberals received more than 2,000 more...