Why Electoral Reform Is the Missing Piece in Canadian Democracy
How first-past-the-post pushes politicians to chase swing ridings—while millions of Canadians are left out of the conversation
Why does it feel like Canadian politicians only care about a few specific blocks in the suburbs? According to YouTuber Paige Saunders, it’s because our electoral system literally tells them to ignore everyone else.
In this week’s episode, we go deep into the engine room of Canadian democracy. Paige argues that our current electoral system acts like a monopoly, repressing political innovation and protecting the assets of a small sliver of the population at the expense of the middle class.
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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.
Cara Stern: Here at The Missing Middle, we often talk about how the political and economic system is tilted towards the people who have. And getting reform means getting someone who’s doing really well, being willing to sacrifice for no gain.
Paige Saunders is one of my personal favourite YouTubers, and he has a theory that there’s one issue that lurks under the surface of many of our problems. And if we make this one big fix, many of our structural challenges will become easier to tackle. So first of all, welcome, Paige. I’m so happy to finally have you on the Missing Middle. So what is that big fix that we need to do? What is that issue?
Paige Saunders: Shocker: Not getting what you vote for when you go to the ballot box is a very large problem in a democracy, and has distorted Canada’s electoral outcomes and the policies that we get for decades. And it’s time to put a stop to it Cara. As a person who loves Canada, as a person who likes to see Canadians well housed, I think that the fact that we have an electoral system which prioritizes the preferences of suburban swing ridings and doesn’t give people who live downtown much of a say at all on the the electoral politics map, is a major problem.
So for me, proportional representation is a broad reform. It’s not necessarily the top of any particular list. If you want to fix housing, the top thing you can do is pass right-to-build legislation. But proportional representation sits down the list of the number of things: transportation and health care and the economy and housing. And makes it so that if you pass proportional representation, you get a much better outcome for your country.
Cara Stern: Much of our audience obviously cares about housing, and I know that we need, as you said, many more homes built so people can get back to living that middle-class dream of at least having the option to own a home, even if they don’t want one. So how could proportional representation help us solve the housing crisis?
Paige Saunders: Okay, I’ve got a little map. So what does this map look like? And for people watching can now turn to your YouTube channel, Missing Middle Podcast. Check it out on YouTube and tune in if you want to see the map on screen. What does this map look like to you?
Cara Stern: So it’s a map with some red on it. That’s where the yellow belt has been historically, where you see a lot of single detached housing, and basically it’s a map of the suburbs of the GTA and some of the inner suburbs.
Paige Saunders: Well, it’s not, Cara, I got you. It is a map of swing ridings. These are ridings where the vote was within 5000 votes away from switching between different political parties.
That is the case in much of Canada and Montreal and Vancouver and obviously in Toronto. Where you have this empowered swing riding dynamic. And when a politician or a political strategist looks at an area, they don’t see Bob, Susan, house here, house there, they see the relevance to winning the election.
They’re pushed in this direction to be like, what will help us win? And for someone like Doug Ford, if they’re looking at downtown Toronto, they’re never going to flip that riding. It’s not up for play. It’s a stronghold riding for a different party.
Cara Stern: Even though a lot of the downtown ridings have a lot of Conservative votes. A lot of them have 20% to 30% Conservative votes or more.
Paige Saunders: And it’s a big thing that they’re missing out on — having choices on the conservative side of the political spectrum. If you are a conservative, there are the social conservatives. There’s the populist wing, and then there’s the fiscal conservatives, and all of them are in an unhappy marriage in one Progressive Conservative party in Ontario.
It would be really nice if conservatives can be like, I’m not so much into the social conservative side of things, but I am a fiscal conservative or a conservative living downtown who’s like, well, I do like taking transit and riding my bike, but I also want the government to be more responsible, and keep taxes low.
Those people should exist. They should be part of the calculus of a party deciding, “Oh, I’m going to run for office. What votes can I pick up? Oh, there’s a lot of conservatives who work in finance living in downtown Toronto, and they have this set of values. So let’s have on our policy platform not cancelling a bunch of bike lines.”
Whereas what you have right now with the conservatives in Ontario is, who cares about downtown? They’re not in play. They’re never gonna give us any votes. And so they’re effectively abandoning their own voters downtown in favour of scoring political points by doing things that appeal to suburban voters.
Cara Stern: It sounds a little bit, though, that what you’re suggesting is that most of the population lives in urban areas, and you’re just taking the power away from people in the suburbs and just going to make it so that people in urban areas hold all the power. Because if the majority of the population based on where they live, if they want something, if they’re under a proportional representation system, you think that it wouldn’t matter what the suburbs want. It wouldn’t matter if this hurts rural voters.
And that’s a problem too, no?
Paige Saunders: Not really, because I mean, this is just an equalization so that people are evenly seen by the political system, but it also works in favour of rural ridings because rural ridings are also safe seats, but in the other direction, and they’re basically taken for granted. A lot of rural Ontario is like how Alberta is for Conservatives. A hay bale painted blue would win in this riding. So it would be good. You might see a small rural interest party arise.
If you look at proportional systems, it’s exciting to imagine the possibilities. You have Indigenous parties, you have Christian parties, you have traditional value parties, you have libertarian parties. There’s all these different things which Canadians feel and some groups of Canadians want. And we live in a system that represses that political innovation, and that says no, you have one option in the case of the Conservatives.
And so I’m sure there are many conservatives who are like, Doug Ford’s not exactly my cup of tea, but I really don’t like the NDP.
Cara Stern: A lot of them say Doug Ford’s a liberal. That’s the line I hear from conservatives these days is that he really is a liberal.
Paige Saunders: He’s a populist, which is this interesting new form of conservative. And I mean, populists are quite dangerous. They often do seem to erode things, like the scandal recently that was the freedom of information request.
Cara Stern: Yeah. Making it so you can’t get that information of what they’re talking about behind the scenes.
Paige Saunders: Now imagine that Doug Ford was in a coalition with another conservative party, as you would typically have if you were in power. You would be tarnishing your coalition partner with this brush of not wanting to be accountable. And to be honest, you’d probably get them breaking the line on that. I mean, you wouldn’t even try it, in that sort of situation, because people would be saying to the coalition partner, “What the hell? Why are you enabling this behavior? That’s clearly not what we’re looking for.”
I feel like in Canada we have this interesting cultural tendency towards monopolistic behaviour, right? We have a problem with it in commerce. Even in health care, we’re like, “No, you can only go to the government. There’s not going to be a private option.”
We just seem to really like a large incumbent thing. And I think that stems from our political culture, which is a reflection of this. We have created a system that represses innovation, third parties and different ideas and gives you the two options. You got the Bell and you got the Rogers, you’ve got the Liberals, you got the Conservatives.
And it’s really hard to go with the third or fourth option without effectively throwing away your vote. I think that if we passed proportional representation, you’d see this unlocking of the true desire that people have. What do people want to vote for if they’re not voting for the Liberal Party?
Cara Stern: Countries with proportional representation still have housing crises. They still have inequality, and many have the same problems that we have. So, for example, the Netherlands, it has proportional representation, but they also have a massive housing shortage. Why is our voting system the variable that matters here?
Paige Saunders: So a voting system or electoral system is not a panacea. it’s not like, “Oh, you get proportional representation. Your housing prices are now really cheap.” There’s other elements at play. So land constraints, for example, in the Netherlands, if you’re literally creating land out of the sea, you’re going to have more valuable land. You’re going to have higher housing prices. There is obviously the fundamental property rights of the country, which are also another element.
But this is the point with proportional representation. It may not be the top fix for any particular category of issues like housing or transport, but it’s always there. It’s always this modifier where you’d get a 15% performance increase in the health care system if you have this upgrade.
And so, if you’re broadly interested in reform, which I am, it is a no-brainer that it should be top of the list, because it amplifies the benefits of all the other things that you pass, and it makes those reforms much more likely.
Cara Stern: We’ve spent a lot of time talking about this, and I feel like there were some issues where I’d say to you, “Paige, I’m so frustrated with this, why is it like this?” And eventually it always finds its way back to electoral reform. However, I think there’s a lot of people who aren’t convinced yet.
So I’m going to channel that person and try to put some of the criticisms to you. Changing the system requires the support of governments who do really well under the current system. So you’re counting on a party that does really well under the first-past-the-post system to be like, “Let’s make it so it becomes much harder for us to get a majority government. We love being the King of Canada for a bit. And we would like to keep that going. Even if we’re out of power for ten years, we’ll get back in.”
Why would they change it?
Paige Saunders: This is part of a problem because we live inside this first-past-the-post majoritarian system. We’re used to a hyper political atmosphere where things are so gamed and it is all about the status quo and the way things are. So I guess it’s hard for Canadians to imagine what if Canada had a more reasonable and effective government that wasn’t so focused on, “What do I need to say to win power? How do I play this game so that I win these swing ridings so that I can form the government?”
So it has bred a certain level of cynicism in Canada about the possibility for this reform. The first issue you encounter is people just don’t even know, and this is a bit of an Anglosphere North America problem. We neighbour a country that has first-past-the-post, and we inherited a political system from England, which also has first-past-the-post.
This very strange system, which every other Western democracy has replaced with proportional representation. It has an outsized influence on what we think is normal. We’re just very ignorant of Spain and Germany and Sweden, New Zealand and these other countries. They’re just not on the radar as much. So your first issue is just that what you vote for isn’t what you get.
And then people are like, “Oh, what’s that? I don’t understand.” And then you walk them through it and explain it.
Cara Stern: I think there’s a lot of people who see that the U.K. has first-past-the-post, and they look back at our historical traditions and they think, we’ve created a pretty good Canada with the system. It’s working less now for a lot of people, but it’s worked for a lot of people, especially the ones who have political power.
So I don’t see why they would want to change it, because I think the political system has historically led to a pretty good country.
Paige Saunders: When you’re in a club with the U.S. and the U.K. and Canada — that’s it, that’s the three established Western democracies left with it — it’s just so hard not to notice that something is wrong. The U.K. has had a horrible 15 years, as has the U.S. And sure, all democracies have an issue like, Spain was hit quite hard by the financial crisis. Germany is having a hard time forming a government at the moment, but none of them are as bad as storming the Capitol and then voting for the guy we kicked out, and now he’s back in and forgave everyone who stormed the Capitol, or the self-sabotage of the U.K. over Brexit.
I think that Canadians are extremely arrogant to think we’re special. We have two provinces that are currently in the process of getting a referendum to leave the country. Is Australia? No. Is it really working so well for us? I don’t think so.
And I think that we are setting things up for an inevitable reckoning, which is what you see with countries that do make the transition from first-past-the-post to proportional representation.
Like again, this happens quite frequently. Like in 2024, Mongolia switched from a majoritarian system to a proportional system. It was an act of parliament. It was done by the majority government who had won a massive majority in the first-past-the-post system. People were frustrated. There were protesting in the streets. They saw the way the wind was blowing.
They were going to get crushed in the next election and totally wiped out by the same electoral system. So they passed the reforms and weirdly enough, they actually managed to form a government again, even though they lost a lot of power — they didn’t have the absolute majority — they didn’t lose all of it. They were looking at being reduced to the single digits, similar to the CAQ, in Quebec.
I would like to see Canada avoid a situation where things get so bad that it’s now the only choice left, kind of like housing. It’s like, do we have to wait until we have civil unrest? And with housing: Do we have to wait until there’s homeless people living under every bridge in your city before we fix it?
This is a thing we’re headed towards. It’s an iceberg that we will hit with a system because distorting the will of the people frustrates people. So let’s just get it sorted out and let’s have a Canada that reaches its full potential. A Canada with that across the board, 20% performance increase in the economy and in health care and in housing.
Cara Stern: So we are going to see a couple of referendums about whether provinces should leave. But there’s also been some historically about whether provinces should have proportional representation. And it never passes. And so at some point, do you just have to accept that Canadians just don’t want it?
Paige Saunders: Cara! So cynical! The thing is, in Quebec, the majority of people want proportional representation and have for quite a long time, because of that they are heading to the “as bad as things can get” mark, at an earlier stage than other provinces. So Quebec was the earliest province in Canada to deal with a multi-party system on a regular basis.
So you had extremely disproportionate elections during the rise of the Party Québécois, where you had 90% of the seats going to a party with 50% of the vote. That was when they were up against the Liberals. So in Quebec, the populace has been aware for a long time about the issues of a fragmented vote.
And most people in Quebec — something like 60% — support a move to proportional representation.
Cara Stern: So why haven’t they moved?
Paige Saunders: Well, because politicians didn’t do what they said they’re going to do, which all the parties that were in opposition signed on to, to say that they would shift over to a proportional system. And so you saw this very familiar pattern. There’s the slow roll of: “We need to look into this. We need to do some consulting.”
Then, “I know we said that we would switch over to proportional representation, but actually we’re going to have a referendum on it instead, and we won’t have a referendum before the next election. We’ll have it during or after the next election.”
So you see these barriers put up by politicians. And I think that the solution is to get away from this like referendum solution and move towards a binding citizens’ assembly promise.
So that’s where you say, look, this is a constitutional decision. We need to get a large selection of citizens in here to choose an alternative solution or decide to stick with the same system. They will hear from experts, like a jury, and decide on a system to use. And then we will implement it, not have a referendum where you ask people, the entire population, do you want to move to this electoral system?
Because the reality is that referendums are an extremely conservative process, where people generally get scared of the unknown. And when you tell people, hey, here’s the electoral system that has three options that we’re discussing. One has a mix of local ridings, one has got a party list, it’s an open party list vote. So this sort of stuff you can’t expect 10 million people to get up to speed on it.
And so you do get this phenomenon where people will say no until everything’s terrible, which is what’s happened when you’ve had referendums that have succeeded in places like New Zealand. It took New Zealand having an absolutely catastrophic financial crisis and decades of false majority governments for New Zealand to vote yes on two referendums.
Cara Stern: And when you say two referendums, I guess what they do is the first one will say, do you want proportional representation or do you want to keep the current system? And then they voted yes. And then the next one would be like, which system do you want?
Paige Saunders: Exactly. So they had that. The party promised to implement electoral reform and was like, “Okay, here’s a referendum. Would you like to change?” People said, yes, and I think they had to choose which particular system they’d be interested in. And then the second referendum was simpler: change to the system that came out on top last time, or keep what we have. And it passed, but it’s a small miracle.
Most countries that have changed their electoral system, you just do it through the legislature. We’re really lucky. If America wanted to change its electoral system it would have issues. You’d need to change the Constitution. It’s got a limited range of systems that it can change to.
In Canada we can just do it. Any province can just do it. The parliament can just do it. And I think that is the way we need to move forward on this thing. Otherwise we’re just going to be waiting until it gets bad enough that people go like, oh, they won 90% of the vote with only 40% of the popular vote. It’ll be outright outrageous, and it’s so outrageous that people can finally see what’s going on.
Cara Stern: I’m still stuck on the fact that we know that older voters turn out at higher rates. They live in the ridings that are more important electorally. They own the assets that it seems like governments keep trying to protect. Obviously, they’re resistant to change. And then we know politicians are resistant to change. That hurts this crowd of voters. So I just don’t understand how we would get them on board to the point where a government would feel comfortable making this change.
I know you said there are examples like in Mongolia, where they did have the party that had a majority and was losing and they decided, let’s do that. We didn’t see that happen federally when the Liberals looked like they were going to be crushed. I thought maybe then we would see something, because they could have been wiped out and they weren’t, and they were rewarded for it.
So then I just keep thinking, why would a government do it? Like is it just out of the goodness of their heart that they’re like, this would be fairer? “I know we do really well and we want to keep doing really well, but it’s just not fair. So we’re going to do it.” Because I just don’t think that people act that way.
Paige Saunders: The thing is, in aggregate they don’t. Most parties and most politicians will let you down on this issue. But some of them don’t, like to his credit, John Horgan in B.C., when they were running their third electoral reform referendum. The questions were about as good as a referendum can be. He said that he’d do it. He did it.
I think the lesson really, in looking at an example like B.C., is that you have to move off the referendum thing. It’s just too hard. In the end, politicians are people. Some politicians have more credibility or integrity.
Justin Trudeau didn’t have integrity. He lied about it. He deceived that he would pass electoral reform in 2015. Lots of people, including myself, were really excited to vote for that. Then it got slow rolled. He went through the typical process, but there are plenty of examples of politicians and parties like the Yukon who just had a referendum to decide if they wanted a ranked choice system. They followed through. They asked the public.
And if you look at all these referendums in aggregate, you can see trends. You want to make sure a referendum is binding. There’s a lot of referendums that are like a public information session. It’s just up to the government to decide whether to implement it. You want a binding referendum, as in, we’re going to do the results.
Ideally avoid the referendum and just have the citizens’ assembly and make sure it’s a binding citizens’ assembly, because that can happen too. The citizens’ assembly will most of the time say, oh my God. We spent two weeks in a room learning about electoral systems. We don’t want to have first-past-the-post. We should change the system and then the politicians will go, “Good suggestion! Anyway…”
Cara Stern: I think about Justin Trudeau’s public consultation that I still refer to, to this day all the time, where it was like, when you want to ask a question, but you don’t really want the answer. So you’re just being like, “Do you like governments that are effective, or do you want Nazis in your government?”
That was the survey they had for the public. It was so bad. And then on top of that, I remember when the citizens’ assembly that they put together suggested a proportional system.
And the minister who was in charge of that, Maryam Monsef, showed up in Parliament and she was holding up the formula that you use. And she’s like, “Canadians don’t want a math formula. They want a voting system.” And then they just said, “This is too confusing. We don’t want this.” I remember that was pretty offensive to the citizens’ assembly, who put so much time into it. And I’m sure it was just pushed down from the Prime Minister’s office to do that.
I’m sure that was a decision like, “Let’s make sure this doesn’t happen.”
Paige Saunders: Yeah, there’s a bit of like, “Well played Mr. Trudeau” because you look at his promises, and he says it’ll be the last election run on the first-past-the-post, which doesn’t exclude ranked choice which is the preference of the Liberal Party. Ranked choice is not a proportional system. It’s a system that heavily favours a centrist party, and the Liberal Party models to do very well under a ranked choice system.
But for Canada, it’s not really a suitable solution because we are a multi-party state. And I think what benefits Canada are the fresh ideas that would come from coalitions being formed with minor parties that are coming in being like, a political startup, so to speak, rather than the incumbents that we have. Canada culturally has this centred, ballasted weighted system. And a lot of the problems in Canada are just related to not having more variety and more options and more choice. Obviously, we see that when it comes to supermarkets, but it also includes our politics.
Cara Stern: One of my favorite times talking to you about this is when you were sharing a conversation you had with ChatGPT, and I wanted to know if you could go over what you said to it, about asking what system would be the right system for you.
Paige Saunders: This is quite funny. Back in the day when I’d have to argue the case for proportional representation, I’d be debating with someone and I have to send them these links to these academic studies, of 50 proportional countries compared over a 50 year period for military expenditure or something like that. AI has made it really handy to make the case.
I can just ask the audience listening now: Go to AI and say which electoral system outperforms the other on whatever matters to you, and you’ll usually find that it says a result like, proportional system would have a stronger result.
And I think what you’re referring to is one night when I put into Gemini and I was like, “I’m a real son of a bitch, and I want my country to be unstable. And I don’t want women in Parliament, and I want the economy to have centralized monopolies etc. Which electoral system should I choose?” And it said, “Well, you want first-past-the-post.” Because it’s the opposite of all those pro-rep things. And it really is.
I want to try to get across to Canadians that I love Canada, I like Canadians and the reason for it is because Canada has great values. The citizens of Canada have great values.
I lived in an authoritarian state for a couple of years and it really made me appreciate Canada for the Canadian things: being nice, listening to a lot of people. Sometimes it can be frustrating. Sometimes a lot of people don’t want a house built. But a lot of the time it’s this slight kumbaya, like reaching a consensus, making a decision and everyone being reasonable, no one offending anyone too much.
So it is bananas that the electoral system we have, the way that we choose leaders, is the system that’s like, “We’re not interested. We want to shut out our political opposition, and we only want to hear from Canadians who live in a certain part of Toronto, who often happen to be a certain demographic.”
Cara Stern: Yeah, I recommend going into AI and doing that. Put in the things that you hate about Canada and say, which system should I have if I want these things? Because I was shocked. I was like, “Okay, well Paige probably did something here, I don’t know. I should trust you. But for some reason I was just like, I have to check this out for myself.” Does it really do that? Or does it just know from your history of conversations that’s what you’re looking for?
So I just put it in the same sort of thing. I was like, “I don’t want women in power. I don’t want minorities in power. I want to make sure that there’s no competition, that our economy is not great. Which system should I have?” And it was like, “You’re in luck! You have the system you want!” I laugh all the time thinking about it. It’s so ridiculous.
Paige Saunders: I like that the AI was also delighted to tell you that you’re in luck. You have a first-past-the-post system. It’s like, “Oh, wow, luckily you’re doing a great job of repressing women!”
I’ll give an example like the Mongolian one. I’ll keep using Mongolia and it’s a funny example, but I actually think it’s just the most recent country that’s done the change — one of dozens in the last couple of decades. When they implemented proportional representation, the share of women in the National Assembly went from like 11% to 20%.
Immediately you get the results when it comes to who’s representing you. And then within, over the course of a few decades, you’ll start to see the actual results. So you have things like mega-projects not getting cancelled because they go through a riding that irritates someone. All these chronic issues that have held back urbanism in Canada. “We have to bury it because it’s going through this neighbourhood, and that’s a riding that’s very important to the province.”
Why is it important to the province? Inevitably, when you look into it, it’ll be a swing riding that gives them the power that they have.
It’s funny when people say, we wouldn’t want a complex proportional system. Look at this math. It’s like people don’t realize the hot water that they are boiling in. In Canada, we have an immensely complicated gamified political system where 20% of the vote equals 30% of the seats. And you have to mathematically model.
We have a really hard time projecting seat counts, for example, because it’s so complex to figure out how to win the election and what will result in actual power and actual outcomes. We have an incredibly complicated electoral system. It’s just we’re used to it, so it’s easy.
We’re speaking English. Apparently it’s a complicated language, but it seems easy for us just because it’s always been this way, and it’s what we’re used to.
Cara Stern: Often when we talk about electoral reform, you bring up when you came to Canada and that you were shocked we still had this system. So I was hoping you can tell us a little bit more about that.
Paige Saunders: I was born a Canadian citizen, so I always knew that I was going to be here at some point. And it actually wasn’t until I went to vote for the first time that I realized it used first past the post.
I went into the booth and was presented with single member candidates, who do you want to be your representative from the riding that you’re in? And I came out from behind the booth and said to the electoral officer, “You guys don’t have proportional representation?” I was shocked, as a fresh citizen, I was just ignorant of it because you don’t expect to see it in Canada, given the things that Canada has, like socialized medicine.
Given a lot of stuff like all the achievements that are typically on the democracy spectrum, like giving non-landowning men the right to vote, giving women the right to vote, Indigenous people and immigrants the right to vote — all these things Canada has achieved.
So it was like coming to Canada and realizing that all high schools are private, that you have to pay for them. Just something that’s really out of line with the civilizational achievement that the country is on. And I think it’s important to see this as part of the democracy spectrum.
The story of democracy is a gradual inclusion of more people and gradually more equally representing the will of the people. So in the past, it was just a very small sliver of people who were able to vote. And then over time, we’ve allowed more people to vote, so that you now have the representation of women and their preferences.
And at each step of the way, the people in power, like dudes — guys gave women the right to vote. Women asked for it, fought for it, and convinced enough men to give it; to allow them to participate. Same thing for all the other achievements that we’ve had on this democracy spectrum.
Cara Stern: Yeah, but I don’t know that we see this fight the same way, as we did with women. You have this group of people that’s very invisible that you can say, “Oh, these people don’t have a right to vote, and that is unfair. Look at all the things that they are contributing to society.” And it was like 50% of the population that did not have the right to vote. That’s very easy to look at and say that’s a problem.
Doug Ford got about 40% of the vote and he has a majority. That is obviously more than half the population who didn’t vote for him, who then have a premier who isn’t necessarily representing them at all. If they’re lucky, they have an MPP who’s at Queen’s Park pushing back sometimes. But they don’t really have any power. So yes, it is a majority of people — I see that line there as I said — but at the same time it’s not the same sort of group. People don’t see themselves as part of the disenfranchised group in the same way that women would have seen it, right?
Paige Saunders: Well, you’re starting off with the worst offenders, right? The first political reforms in Canada were to enable non land-owning men to vote, then women, then minorities and then Aboriginal people. And honestly, all those delays are shameful. Canada was way too late. And to anyone who is pushing for proportional representation today, you hear people say, “Sure this system empowers wealthier people on average, and it’s not good for the representation of women.” And that’s why Canada and the U.S. and the U.K. have hardly any woman as the head of state, while New Zealand, half of my life, has been led by a female prime minister.
It’s tempting to say, “Well, why would they let it happen? Why would they change it?” But I would never want to say that to a person advocating for Aboriginal people to be given the vote.
Just because we have waited for too long doesn’t mean that the problem is that the reformers wanted reform. The problem is that the system hasn’t changed, and Canada is late on this one. We should have dealt with this decades ago. We haven’t, and we’re now in a really dangerous situation of having an electoral system that is harming our democracy, lowering our economic performance and increasing our housing prices, and just taking us into a really dark and dangerous place.
We should fix it. Now.
Cara Stern: As someone who’s covered a lot of elections, I see every time there’s an election year, electoral reform and proportional representation pops its head out a little bit and it’s like, “Remember this thing?” And every election you’ll see some media coverage afterwards being like, “This is what the vote was. This is what it would have been if we had a proportional system.”
And then they talk about it for a bit. And having worked in newsrooms, it seems like it’s a little bit like, “We always have to talk about that but obviously this is not a serious suggestion because it’s never going to happen. But at the same time, we have to give them the airtime now.” And then it disappears for a little bit.
And there are lots of examples in this country. I mean, if you look at, as I said, Doug Ford with a strong majority, with 41%. You have Olivia Chow who got her mandate with 37%, which I know it’s different in the mayoral elections, but still. Even Justin Trudeau, I don’t think people appreciate that he lost two elections in terms of the share of the vote and got minority governments out of them. The Liberals won way more seats than the Conservatives despite losing the popular vote.
And these conversations have never led to change. So what’s your answer to someone who says, “I’ve heard this argument over and over and over. The arguments are good. There are some valid points here, but like, you’ve got to accept that people don’t care. Maybe they don’t want it. And just at some point, just like move on to another topic because it’s just never going to happen.”
Paige Saunders: So I understand why it is hard for people to get their head around this one. Because when you have something like woman not having a vote, you can be like, look, this is obviously terrible for them. And that’s systematically terrible for women in a very overt way because it’s discriminating against them. The problem with electoral reform as an issue is it goes through this complicated process.
We have an electoral system that is really bad for women, but to explain why it’s bad for women. You can’t just say, well here are some women and they can’t vote. Instead you have to go, “Here is a system where everyone’s elected to a riding. Parties want to go with the safest bet. So they tend to choose men.”
There’s no party list. So that’s where women came through in other systems. So you have this complex process producing an outcome. And that’s just less satisfying for individuals to get involved in. It takes years for people to get their head around it. However, people do get their head around it once you go on about it for long enough. People start to see the pattern and then they come on board. Like, at this point, I’m devoting my life to getting this thing across the line in Canada. And you just have to get more people who want to participate in that, which I think is possible.
I’ve seen a lot of my friends over time go from being like, “Whatever. What’s that about?” To being like, “This is a big issue.”
Cara Stern: Do you have to convince the so-called elite in order to make this change, or do you think convincing young people who are frustrated with housing prices, if you can convince the general population, do you think that that is good enough to get us change? Or do we need to convince the people who are part of the system?
Paige Saunders: I think you just have to constantly highlight that this is crazy. It’s crazy to live under this system. There is an elite problem in Canada. There is a bias towards the status quo. And when I have arguments with people, when it’s late at night, over a couple of drinks, and it’s someone who’s very much involved in policy and quite influential, in their own way. You’ll find the ugly truth a lot of the time is, “It’s working for me. I have the ear of the Liberal or Conservative Party over-represented.” So they quite enjoy it. And so it can be interesting.
You’ll be debating with them and they’ll be telling you these stories like, “Well, you see, for the reason we have first-past-the-post is it creates a strong and stable government.” And the data shows that it does not. These coalitions that form under a proportional system are difficult to assemble, but continuity of policy is better on a proportional system. Or often there will be stability, but in a form of repression, like notably one of the few countries in the last couple of decades that has gone back towards a majority system is Hungary.
Like the first thing that Viktor Orbán did when he got in Hungary was implement a majoritarian first-past-the-post dynamic into their electoral system. And it’s from that point on, he suppressed the opposition. So it’s telling. So I say, “You want to do what Viktor Orbán did? You want us to stick with the Viktor Orbán electoral system and not move on to the next thing?”
I think it really comes down to us as citizens elevating this issue and not letting people get away with it. We have multiple provinces that are poking away at this issue, I think what’s going to happen is Quebec or Ontario, because both of the last elections were incredibly disproportionate — one of them will implement proportional representation. I think, from that point on, it will spread across the country pretty quickly — if the Americans don’t do it first. I mean, they’re passing electoral reform in a number of states.
Cara Stern: If you’ve convinced some people watching that this is something that they should care about, but they’re new to talking about this, or maybe they just want to find out more, where do you recommend they go to get an understanding? Because it is a complicated issue and you start looking into it and you start seeing the different proportional representation systems, and there are so many of them out there.
Where do you recommend people start?
Paige Saunders: So people who are into electoral reform have preferred systems, and it can create this sense that there’s like a lack of consensus. That’s often what’s used by the politicians who are opposing it. It’s because people are going, “Oh, I think single transferable vote.” Or “Oh, I think in MMP, I think party list or whatever.”
I would tend to suggest avoiding that little debate when you are out in public, arguing about stuff. But if you are interested in this, it could be a good point of entry for technocratic people, the sort of people that listen to the Missing Middle, to have a look at how different countries choose their governments.
Like I find as a fan of civics, it is really fascinating to look at the constitution and the structure of Colombia, or France.
Cara Stern: Where would you recommend people look that’s the most similar to Canada that deals with some of the local representation that people really like from first-past-the-post? Which country should people look at as a starting point?
Paige Saunders: What’s a good example would be Australia’s upper house. So Australia has a pretty powerful senate relative to Canada. It’s not like a suggestion mechanism like ours. And it is elected using a proportional system called single transferable vote. So all of the senators in Australia are linked to a local geography. There’s no party lists.
Citizens choose that senator and that senator. But you have these larger multi-member constituencies where you might have two politicians or three politicians representing you in your area. And I really like STV. I think it’s a pretty good solution for Canada. Ireland has it for example, because it allows you to have someone to go to effectively. So if you are in a riding, you’ll have maybe an NDP, a Liberal and a Conservative MP representing you.
And so if you’re a conservative, you can go to your Conservative MP that’s representing you and talk to them, and then you can go to the Liberal and the NDP MP and try to convince them too.
But it gives you that local accountability with a completely proportional system. It’s also known as proportional ranked choice voting in the U.S. because it uses a ranking mechanism.
Anyway, that’s where I would suggest jumping on a YouTube video to learn about different electoral systems. Look at single transferable vote (STV), look at mix member proportional, look at party list, if you really want to be a dork about it and get your head around it, because it is fun to consider like what we could have.
And then from there, there’s groups like Fair Vote, which advocate for this stuff in Canada, and obviously Canadian Civil. It’s a big issue for me. It’s probably the top issue. And I feel like over the next few years, my whole job is just going to be drawing people’s attention to the fact that any one thing that I’m focused on, we’ll have underlying it that by the way, it is important how you choose your leadership. And if you choose your leadership using the system that we have, it’s not going to be as effective at getting this reform passed.
Cara Stern: Well I want to recommend one video. It’s an amazing YouTube video called “How the Two Parties Crushed Competition” on a great channel called “Paige Saunders”.
Honestly, I think you set the gold standard for explainer videos on YouTube. You have the humour, the intelligence, the production value. No one does it better.
So honestly, people, please. I know when he hates when I compliment him, but go and watch it. It really shows you how America became so dysfunctional in their political system, and how the Trump Party basically took over the Republican Party. And I think it’s really worth a watch.
And we’re so grateful for you to join us today, so thank you so much.
Paige Saunders: Thanks. And I hope that Canadians are proud of our multi-party democracy. And when you look at the US, I think it’s easy to see this is what happens when you only have two options, when when there’s just two political teams and you have to slot yourself into one often because you’re just like, “I hate this other party so much that I will reluctantly pinch my nose and vote for this one. At least not those guys.”
I think by setting up a proportional system, we’re going to see Canada reach its full potential as a multi-party democracy and become more Canadian, because we have the American electoral system. Why don’t we have a more Canadian one?
Cara Stern: And thanks, as always, to our producer, Meredith Martin, and our editor, Sean Foreman. If you have any questions about how to set up a survey like a proportional representation one, where you get the exact answer you were always looking for, you can send us an email to [email protected].
And we’ll see you next time.