The Amazing Proportional Representation Simulator

What would Canada look like if we actually got the government we voted for?

What would our Parliament look like if a political party that got 45% of the votes got 45% of the seats, and a party that got 15% of the votes got 15% of the seats?

More and more Canadians are realizing that our voting system needs to change, but they want to know, "What will my riding look like? Will I still have an MP?"

Of course, no one really knows how any election will turn out, and we know that people will vote differently under a different voting system, but we can try to get an idea of how our political landscape would change under a proportional voting system by taking the actual results of previous elections, and reallocating the seats in our legislatures under different proportional voting models.

The Model

Voting systems create proportionality in two main ways, either by electing members from lists, or by electing more than one member from each riding.

Every system has strengths and weaknesses. Pure list systems give excellent proportionality, but no guarantee of geographic representation, which works well in Holland, but would not be right for Canada. Mixed systems create two types of MP, 'riding' MPs and 'list' MPs. Small multimember ridings give good geographic representation, but poor proportionality. In northern parts of Canada, our single-member ridings are already geographically huge, and multimember ridings would be larger still.

This is a model of a proportional voting system for the province of Ontario that attempts to get the best of all worlds by combining multimember urban ridings with single-member rural ridings. Since we will still have some single-member ridings, it will also be necessary to have compensatory provincial lists, but the partial proportionality gained through the use of multimember urban ridings will allow us to keep the provincial lists small.

In this model, I have increased the size of the Ontario Legislature by 21 MPPs, about 1/6 of the total seats in the province. These members will be elected from province-wide lists, and allocated to the political parties in such a way as to make the overall composition of the legislature as proportional as possible to the votes cast for each party in the election.

The 2003 Provincial election in Ontario generated a typical phony majority government, with the Liberals winning almost 70% of the seats, on the basis of having gotten less than 47% of the votes. The Progressive Conservatives, with almost 35% of the votes, had to settle for only about 23% of the seats in the Legislature. Many voters, from all parties, were startled to see the NDP drop to seven seats (6.8%), and lose their official party status, although they increased their vote percentage to almost 15%.

The Index of Distortion for these results is 23.43, an unacceptably high number.

Now the distribution of seats to the parties matches the distribution of votes much more closely. There are a couple of noteworthy points:

The Index of Distortion has almost disappeared! The number is less than 2.0 for every party, and for the entire system.

Not only does the NDP no longer have any problem about its official status, but two new parties have also achieved representation in the Legislature, the Green Party and the Family Coalition Party, broadening the range of views represented.

Since no party got a majority of the votes, no party has a majority of the seats. Instead of a single-party monopoly government, this Legislature will generate a minority, or more likely, a coalition government, which will be able to remain in power only so long as it truly maintains the confidence of the house.

Perhaps the acid test for any voting model is the federal scene, where the First-Past-The-Post system vastly exaggerates our regional differences.

Our winner-take-all voting system has allowed the Liberals in recent elections to hold monopoly power in Canada by virtually sweeping Ontario.

These Ontario results from the 2000 Canadian federal election are pretty close to a 'worst case' scenario, in terms of distortion of the will of the voters.

As we see, the Liberals in 2000 won a preposterous 97% of the seats in Ontario, on the basis of less than 52% of the votes. The Canadian Alliance, with over a million votes, (more votes than they got in Alberta, and more votes than they got in British Columbia!), elected just two members (1.94%). The NDP got only one seat with over 8% of the votes. The Progressive Conservatives, with 642,438 votes, elected exactly nobody.

This is also a typical result under First-Past-The-Post, as we can see from recent provincial elections in B.C. and in P.E.I.

As we feared, the improvement is not quite so spectacular as in the provincial example. The Index of Distortion is still too high at 7.39, but it is certainly improved over the 45.61 in our actual results.

However, the Canadian Alliance has suddenly achieved an eastern breakthrough with 25 seats in Ontario, and the Progressive Conservatives and NDP are respectable again with 16 seats and 9 seats respectively in the province.

And we have a new voice in Parliament, with the Green Party electing a member from the provincial list.

All in all, the people of Ontario are much better represented in this model.

What to do?

Only our elected representatives can change our voting system, but they all have a vested interest in the current system.

We will not get a fair voting system in Canada until the people demand it.

Fair Vote Canada is a nationwide citizen's movement to change the voting system in Canada.

Fair Vote Ontario is FVC's campaign to change the voting system in Ontario.