Letter I wrote to the community newspapers of my home town.

Our current political crisis is the result of a bad electoral system. Canadians living in the riding of the Pontiac will know this. Out of the 42958 votes, 28945 did not elect anyone. 67% of votes did not send anyone to Parliament. In other words, 67% of voters did not vote for Mr. Cannon. The Pontiac is among the top 5 ridings of “wasted” votes, Gatineau leading with 70%.

This situation is not unique to the Pontiac. In 193 of the the 308 ridings, more than half of the votes did not go to the winning candidate. Collectively taken, 51% of votes did not go to a winning candidate.

If Canadians are offended by the Bloc’s power in the House of Commons, then they should realize that it is precisely this broken first past the post electoral system which has consistently given them more seats then they would have under proportional representation.

In May 2009, British-Columbia will have a referendum on changing its electoral system after discussing the issue within a government mandated citizens assembly. I urge all Pontiacers to join Fair Vote Canada (http://www.fairvote.ca) in calling our federal representatives for a Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform.

So allot of Canadians are upset that the new coalition includes the Bloc Québécois, a separatist party. Many Canadians are also upset that Parliament is not working. Many Canadians think the coalition will be unstable.

Well its not working because there’s very little incentives for the parties to work together. A little swing in the popular vote - 2, 5, 10 percent, even without archiving 50% majority in popular vote - can mean the difference between minority and majority government. Plus political parties with similar ideologies will split the vote, resulting in a weird distribution of seats for one same ideology, rather than having a similar share of seats and then working together in Parliament.

Also, the Bloc Québcois has three times as many seats as it should have. It has 16% of the seats but with only 5% of the popular vote. Meanwhile, the Greens, with 7% of the vote, got 0% of the seats. That’s the result of first past the post - it favors regionalisation of political power. Under proportional representation, the Bloc would only get that - 5% - or something close to that.
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There’s been some political turmoil happening in Canada. I’d like to explain some of the stuff happening here.

As a Parliamentary democracy, Canadians vote on who to send as their “Member of Parliament”. The Parliament is similar to the house of representative. The Members of Parliament will then choose who forms government - or, if you will, the executive branch. It is usually the political party (in Canada we have 4 national parties) who won the most seats in Parliament. But, that party can be in a situation of minority: it has the most seats among the parties, but less than half of the 308 seats. So it can’t pass bills without the approval of the majority of parliament.
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