Those who favour proportional representation argue that while the first-past-the-post system may be simple, the electoral boundaries readjustment process can lead to malapportionment and gerrymandering.  But eliminating constituencies altogether would be a heavy price to pay to eliminate this corruption and an altogether worse sort of corrupt practice might well develop in which "MPs would find themselves beholden to party leaders with the power to put them on the party list.  MPs would spend more time courting party bosses than talking to voters," (Barker 296) as if this doesn't happen quite enough already because of perhaps excessively rigid party discipline in the House of Commons.

    The major arguments against proportional representation are that the system tends to produce minority government situations more often than does first-past-the-post and that in supplanting the current practice of electing a single Member of Parliament for each constituency it "eliminates the one direct tie each of us with government" (Barker 300).  In addition, the particular system of proportional representation suggested by Hiemstra (281 and 285), list-system PR, would have the great disadvantage of placing far too much power in the hands of the party leaders who would decide whose names would appear on the party list at the next election.  Furthermore, in reducing the power of "small, regionally concentrated parties" (Hiemstra 283), proportional representation might actually aggravate the regional divisions in Canada, since it would effectively deny these parties the forum they now have in the House of Commons and thereby force the simmering regional discontent out of the mainstream political process and into the streets.  Canada is a country with real regional divisions and concocting an electoral system to move us away from regional representation might easily backfire, especially with the bulk of the country's population located in Ontario and Québec.  Without the regional constituency basis for election of MPs, parties might choose to concentrate their campaign efforts in central Canada and forget about the regions entirely.  Party leaders might fill the party lists with political hacks and cronies from "back east", and then who would speak out for the interests of a smaller province, for instance, British Columbia?  Would anyone in federal politics be able or willing to speak for a B.C. or a Nova Scotia with a legitimate grievance or would provincial governments begin to assume an even more militant role in fighting "Ottawa" than they have to date?  The current problem of the Liberal Party of Canada catering largely only to Ontario and Québec, the Bloc Québécois only to Québec (and mainly to pure laine separatists within that province), and the Reform Party of Canada [later the Canadian Alliance] to the Western provinces, is not so much the fault of the first-past-the-post system but rather of the near-total dysfunction of the Senate, the chamber of "sober second thought", which was also supposed to provide "equal regional representation" (Dyck 561), but which in point of fact has provided no such thing for a very long time.  If there is to be proper regional balance in Canadian government without major Senate reform, it will come when short-sighted political parties more concerned about re-election than about the national interest start to seriously address the concerns of all regions of the country, instead of casting off huge portions of Canada as bad electoral or fiscal investments, as if they were political wastelands not worth their time or effort.

    Another point that supporters of proportional representation often seem to forget is that while PR might produce a legislature with parties' standings proportional to the percentage of popular vote received, there is no guarantee that the composition of the cabinet would be proportional to popular vote, and the cabinet is where the majority of the power is in an executive-dominated system like Canada's.

    Some excellent points about minority government situations are made by Paul Barker:

        ...For a government to rule effectively, it must have the support of the legislature, but PR--unlike FPTP--would make this impossible.  The result in most cases would be minority governments.  Under these circumstances, the party in power could never be assured of passage of its policies, and accordingly would find it difficult to respond to the issues of the day.
        Weak government would also entail unstable government.  The prospect facing every minority government is defeat.  Each time it submits a bill for consideration by the legislature, there exists the chance the government will fall.  That is how our system works.  The survival of any government under PR would be a day-to-day affair.
        In some cases, a party facing a minority government situation might ally itself with another to form a coalition government.  A coalition would provide the seats necessary for majority support in the House of Commons.  But this solution would only transfer the problem from the legislature to the government.  Now, the lack of support would be found within the government itself.  The haggling and the disagreements would be centred in the cabinet, and the same forces that frustrate minority government in the legislature would emerge in the executive.  (Barker 294)

    Many supporters of proportional representation seek to justify their scheme by pointing out problems with the first-past-the-post system, some of them quite serious, as evidenced by provincial elections in New Brunswick in 1987 (Hiemstra 282), Prince Edward Island in 1993 (Hiemstra 281), and British Columbia in 2001.  Much is made of the supposed unfairness of the "winner-takes-all" nature of first-past-the-post.  However, acknowledging that first-past-the-post may have its flaws does not necessarily mean that proportional representation would be better.

    With all of these conflicting arguments being heard, it is hardly surprising that suggestions for some kind of a mixture of the two systems are heard from time to time, such as the proposal by William Irvine for a half-and-half system where each province would elect half its MPs as it does now and the other half would be elected using some kind of PR (Dyck 355).  However, these proposals always seem to be rather complicated in nature and in execution, and in addition to making the electoral system totally incomprehensible to the majority of voters, there is the danger that gerrymandering could continue for the plurality half (the ordinary FPTP MPs) and the list-system problem could continue for the other half (the PR or 'provincial' MPs) and Canada could easily end up with the worst of both systems, rather than the best.

    A final problem with proportional representation is that if it, in fact, did lead to a more representative government, which is far from sure, how small in size and in interest would some of the smaller parties become?  There might be separate parties for environmentalists, for women, for the West, and so on (Barker 300), each of them more limited in scope and concern than the ones before.  The cumulative lack of national interest could lead to severe political dysfunction in Canada, which would not bode well for the constitutional ideal of "Peace, Order, and good Government".

    For the reasons developed above, I believe that adopting a system of proportional representation in Canada would do more harm than good to our political system, and that, instead, attention to other areas of concern such as party discipline, electoral boundaries readjustment, and Senate reform should be pursued to address the perceived electoral problems.

Barker, Paul.  "Voting for Trouble."  In Mark Charlton and Paul Barker, eds.  Crosscurrents: Contemporary Political Issues.  2nd ed.  Scarborough ON: Nelson Canada, 1994.

Dyck, Rand.  Canadian Politics: Critical Approaches.  2nd ed.  Scarborough ON: Nelson Canada, 1996.

Hiemstra, John.  "Getting What You Vote For."  In Mark Charlton and Paul Barker, eds.  Crosscurrents:  Contemporary Political Issues.  2nd ed.  Scarborough ON: Nelson Canada, 1994.