Bryan Breguet is an economist at Langara College and was a candidate for the Conservative Party of BC in the 2024 provincial election.The Western Standard published Alan Aubut’s “Why Canada’s ‘first-past-the-post’ system still works better than you think.” I couldn’t disagree more, and I genuinely believe electoral reform is not only still relevant, but it might be more needed than ever. Even if I acknowledge that the public’s appetite might not currently be there.I don’t want to rebut every argument made in that piece, but I’d like to mention 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. This isn’t just fairer on appearance, it is fairer and righter, period. And we can achieve this without switching to a system with a list only. Many systems, such as Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP) or Single Transferable Vote (STV), allow voters to still select local representation and who ultimately gets elected. Nobody in Canada has ever suggested switching to the Israeli or Dutch models after all. But this, ultimately, isn’t what I want to focus on.I have two main arguments for switching to what I believe is a better system. The first one is that First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) creates really bad incentives for parties to cater only to part of the country or a province. In 2017, when John Horgan became NDP Premier of BC, he stayed in Metro Vancouver almost the entire time because he knew that going to the Interior was a waste of time. What about Poilievre and Quebec? The Conservatives don’t really have an incentive to campaign in Quebec, as increasing from 20% to 25% or even 30% of the vote would barely lead to more seats. Do we really want leaders and parties that will ignore big parts of the country simply because it isn’t ‘efficient’ for them to try to get votes there? A proportional system like MMP or STV would solve that issue. It would also be beneficial for the entire discourse. Right now, people too often think that ‘everybody’ is conservative in Alberta and ‘everybody’ is a liberal in Toronto when, in reality, the minority option in both cases can be as high as 30%, but you wouldn’t know it looking at a map of the results..Secondly, I will strongly disagree with the idea that FPTP has worked well for us. Canada has seen almost no economic growth for a decade and has been falling behind some of its usual peers, such as Germany, Sweden, and Australia (let’s not even mention the US here, as the widening gap makes us look really bad). On healthcare, every metric you can find shows the Canadian system is both expensive and not particularly effective. In education, our kids are falling behind as well. The list goes on. While I don’t think FPTP is the only reason for those issues, I do believe it played a role. Our so-called Big Tent parties, where coalition building is supposedly happening internally before the election, aren’t really that. Our main parties are big machines with a heavy top-down approach. If you become a leader, you control all of it with your staff. MPs or MLAs barely have a voice. Trust me, in the nine months I was a candidate in 2024, not once did the party discuss actual policies with us. Meetings where just “this is our position, go door-knocking.” The directives were usually chosen and communicated by a staff member the public wouldn’t even know existed.Look at immigration and how Poilievre and his close guard pretty much ignored it (or worse, took positions that would lead to even higher numbers) for a long time. This isn’t the sign of a healthy internal democracy (I can guarantee you that local MPs were hearing complaints about this from their constituents). This is the illustration that our parties aren’t listening. And this ultimately leads to policies that are not what we need. We are afraid of reforms and more radical (which isn’t the same as extreme) proposals, even though this is exactly what we need to get out of our slump. If we had a more proportional system, these diverse voices and solutions would be more likely to be heard. Opponents to PR almost always cite the risk of ‘Nazi in Parliament.’ Beyond the fact that the real concern should be more than some of our fellow citizens would vote for a Nazi candidate (according to these opponents), I worry more about the fact that our Big Tent parties are happy to propose incredibly dull and small changes to the current situation, simply because they just care about gaining 2-3% in the right ridings to take power, without thinking of the bigger picture.People on my side of the political spectrum usually oppose electoral reform as they think the Left would win permanently. I disagree with this assertion, and I’d joke that we lose federal elections anyway. More seriously, though, the Right in Canada is diverse, going from business liberals to right-wing populists, with social conservatives and others in the mix as well. I believe our varied voices would be better represented if they were in different parties. Parties that wouldn’t all be under the iron grip of the Chief of Staff of the leader of the official opposition, for instance. And we could influence policies better that way. This would, ultimately, be a net gain for the country.Bryan Breguet is an economist at Langara College and was a candidate for the Conservative Party of BC in the 2024 provincial election.
