Alan Aubut is a retired geologist, based in Nipigon.I welcome debate because it exposes the strengths and weaknesses of an argument and helps bring the truth into clearer view. That is why I was pleased to see Bryan Breguet respond to my recent essay defending Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system.What surprised me was that he did not really rebut the argument. He said he could not “disagree more” and that he did not want to rebut every argument made, but then did not rebut any of them. What he did provide, however, was an opportunity to test one of the central assumptions behind proportional representation: the idea that a party’s national share of the vote should roughly match its national share of seats.For example, Breguet wrote that “polls have shown that a large majority of people do agree with the overall principle that 35% of the votes should get you roughly 35% of the seats.” No poll was cited. No wording was provided. No sponsor was identified. That is not evidence. It is the equivalent of saying “everyone agrees” while providing no basis for the claim.Polls matter to me because they are a form of data analysis, and data analysis was part of my career. For a poll to be truly representative, several conditions have to be met. The sample must be genuinely random. The questions must not be leading. The sponsor should not have a vested interest in the result. The methods should also be transparent enough that others can judge whether bias has been introduced. Unfortunately, I have seen too many political polls in Canada that fail one or more of those tests, especially when the methods and clients are opaque. So I do not accept vague appeals to “the polls” as proof of anything.Instead, I did what any data analyst should do. I went to Elections Canada’s 2025 federal election data and looked at what the riding results actually showed. That matters because a federal election is not one national contest. It is 343 separate contests. Each voter casts a ballot in one electoral district. No one votes directly for a national party total. No one votes directly for a prime minister, unless that person happens to be a candidate in that voter’s riding. In Pierre Poilievre’s case, voters in his riding had that chance, and he lost..Out of 343 ridings, the Conservatives, Liberals, and New Democrats each ran candidates in 342, meaning each had a candidate in almost every riding across the country. The winning candidate’s share of the valid vote ranged from as high as 84% to as low as 34.1%. That spread matters. It shows that ridings are not interchangeable units in a national spreadsheet. They are local contests with local voting patterns, local candidates, and local results.The numbers get more interesting when 50% is treated as the critical hurdle. In 2025, 223 ridings, or 65%, were won by candidates who received more than 50% of the valid vote in their own riding. Of those majority winners, 123 were Liberals, and 100 were Conservatives. No Bloc, NDP, or Green winner crossed that threshold. The remaining 120 ridings were won with pluralities, which is exactly what one should expect in a country with multiple registered parties and several regional political cultures.The data also show that strong regional support is not a defect in the counting system. Of the 23 ridings where the winning candidate received between 69.1% and 84% of the valid vote, every one was won by a Conservative. That does not prove that Conservatives have a national advantage under first-past-the-post. It proves that some ridings are overwhelmingly Conservative, just as other ridings are overwhelmingly Liberal, Bloc, or otherwise. Those are political facts produced by voters in particular places.Breguet still argues that proportional voting is the better solution, but he does not really explain why. He decries the fact that some areas of the country offer poor support for his party of choice. So what? That applies to every party. The Liberals struggle through much of the rural West. The Conservatives struggle in parts of urban Canada. The Bloc is concerned only with Quebec and is quite content with that, especially when it can influence a minority Parliament. No party is owed uniform national support. That is not how voters behave.Nor would proportional representation fix that. It would not make the Liberals more attractive in rural Alberta. It would not make the Conservatives more attractive in downtown Toronto. It would not make the Bloc a national party. It would simply change how seats are distributed after the votes are cast. That may appeal to those who prefer national arithmetic, but it moves the argument away from local representation and toward party machinery..As for the state of the economy, the electoral system did not cause that either. Canada’s economic problems are real, but they are rooted in policy choices, weak accountability, and political culture, not in the fact that each riding elects one MP. Blaming first-past-the-post for those failures gives the voting system far more power than it actually has.That does not mean Canadian politics needs no reform. It does. But the real problems are not caused by first-past-the-post. They lie elsewhere: excessive party discipline, weak media scrutiny, foreign interference, opaque polling, and voters who too often remain attached to political brands long after those brands have abandoned their original principles.The media problem is especially serious. Rather than adapting to a changed economic environment, too much of the legacy press has tried to preserve the old model through government support, even though the government is one of the very institutions it is supposed to hold accountable. That is institutional self-destruction dressed up as survival. At the very moment Canada needs sharper scrutiny of power, the Fourth Estate has made itself more dependent on the very people it is supposed to examine. That is a better target for reform because it addresses a source of political dysfunction directly. Changing the voting formula does not.The same applies to voters and parties. Too many voters remain loyal to political brands long after those brands have changed. The Liberals no longer have much connection to classical liberal freedom. The Conservatives too often pay lip service to fiscal restraint while failing to practise it. The NDP has largely abandoned the average worker in favour of fashionable causes, even when jobs are put at risk. These are not failures of first-past-the-post. They are failures of political judgment, party identity, and public accountability.Canada does need reform, but reform should be aimed at the real sources of failure. If party discipline is excessive, deal with party discipline. If the press has compromised its independence, deal with that. If polling is opaque, demand transparency. If foreign interference is real, confront it directly. If voters keep rewarding parties that no longer represent what they claim to represent, then the hard work is cultural, not mechanical..First-past-the-post is imperfect, but its imperfection is visible, local, and accountable. One riding elects one MP. Voters know who won, who lost, and by how much. Proportional representation may sound fair when reduced to the slogan that 35% of the vote should produce 35% of the seats, but that slogan only works by pretending Canada holds one national election. It does not.Canada elects MPs riding by riding. Governments are then formed from the MPs that those ridings send to Parliament. The 2025 data do not support the claim that Canada’s riding-based system is illegitimate simply because national vote totals do not mirror seat totals. That claim rests on the wrong unit of analysis. The proper unit is the riding. And in 2025, the riding data show a system that produced clear local winners in most cases and exposed divided local contests in the rest.Many parts of Canadian politics need serious reform. Our tried-and-true voting system is not one of them.Alan Aubut is a retired geologist, based in Nipigon.
