I have been a critic of the idea of switching the Canadian voting system from First-Past-the-Post to Proportional Representation for quite some time. It is not that I dislike that particular way of voting it is just that I reject the notion that it is "more democratic" than any other voting system including FPTP.
I also have a problem with the fact that most of the proponents of PR, in Canada, are partisans for the NDP and Green Party. If anybody does not believe that they are proponents of that system because of naked partisan interests, I have a bridge to sell you in New York City. I have had discussions with proponents of PR who have rejected all other forms of voting that would allow "all votes to count" including ranked ballot and they have not been able to give a reasonable answer as to why. (I know why but they would never admit it.)
One of the arguments against PR is it can lead to unstable governments or allow the more extreme elements of society a chance to access some levers of power. The response of the proponents of PR is to confidently assert that PR in Canada would result in such stable governments as Germany or New Zealand. They reject out of hand any notion that it might actually resemble Italy or Israel or that Canada might suffer the same fate as Czechoslovakia, where a PR system completely failed in preventing that country from breaking in two.
The proponents of PR in Canada absolutely refuse to consider what kind of governments would result if that system was used in Canada. They just stick to the German or New Zealand example and take it on faith that Canada would be like them.
So let us consider this issue. Are they correct?
The assumption of PR proponents, in Canada, is under such as system only four national parties would make up the composition of the House of Commons. The Conservatives, Liberals, NDP and Greens. With four parties there would always be stable coalitions and therefore things would be great. When you ask the obvious question of what about the Bloc Quebecois they confidently state that if they win 5% of the vote they get seats in the House but if they do not reach that threshold they do not. The big problem with that is 4% of the national vote for the Bloc equates to about 25% in the Province of Quebec. Do the proponents of PR truly believe that Quebecers would take the Bloc being excluded from the House after it won 25% of the vote in Quebec? Not likely and if they tried to force that through it would cause a national unity crisis in this country. So, Canada being Canada the solution to such a crisis would be to give way and make an exception to the 5% threshold for the Bloc Quebecois.
Of course, such a solution would only create problems in other regions of the country. The Prairie Provinces, the Eastern Provinces, BC and Ontario all make up distinct regions in this country and if a regional party in Quebec were to receive special treatment it would not take long for regional parties in the other regions to demand the same treatment. Again to prevent a national unity crisis exceptions would have to be made for those parties and the number of parties could be quite large. Conceivably, the number really has no limit, strictly regional parties could arise or a bunch of single issue parties only based in one of the regions could pop up, all demanding the same treatment as the Bloc Quebecois.
While not all of these parties would receive enough votes nationally and/or regionally to earn seats in the House enough of them would to make our parliaments much less tidy than what the proponents of PR believe it would be, where the House of Commons only has four parties in it. In the end the most likely result is a parliament that resembles the Italian or Israeli parliaments as opposed to the German and New Zealand parliaments.
As both the Italian and Israeli parliaments have demonstrated having that many parties vying for a seat at the government table provides large openings for extreme single issue parties to gain much more power and influence than they would normally have in a non-PR system. Right now the FPTP system provides some insulation against the really extreme crackpots from accessing the levers of power, although it is not perfect in doing so by any stretch of the imagination. However, a PR system in Canada would strip away all of that insulation with untold impacts on the social fabric of our country.
The simple fact is Canada is a huge country geographically, where each region has their own interests and ways of looking at being Canadian. Anybody that believes that fact would not impact how a PR voting system would be implemented in Canada is dreaming. That fact alone is a reason not to adopt a Proportional Representation voting system at the Federal level in this country. When you add all of the other reasons that I have discussed in this space before the case against PR in this country is quite compelling.
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The scarier thing about NDP and Green PR diehards is that when they bring up Germany in the same breath as they spit on Trudeau's warning that PR would allow fringe parties to have an outsized influence, they're ignoring the fact that the AfD -- Nazis by any other name -- are now as strong in Germany's parliament as the NDP and Bloc are in Canada. When anyone mentions this they're accused of strawman arguments. Some NDPs and Greens however, are just fine with this because it's "undemocratic" not to represent those views in parliament. They would be just fine if Max got more seats as long as they did too. In fact, Austria today has PR, and the Greens hold the balance of power with the governing neo-fascists. Politics sure makes for strange bedfellows when all you care about is power.
Moreover, it was the German far left who sought to squeeze out the centrists in the 1930s, believing that Germany should have to suffer under the Fuhrer so that the pendulum would swing back hard the other way, and Germany would have their utopian communist revolution once and for all. Well, they got their revolution good and hard and half the country continued to suffer until 1989. The slogan for this group was "Nach Hitler, Uns" or "after Hitler, us" (our turn). The NDP of Layton's era, and now Singh's post-Layton populists huffing Bernie's hot air from the US, seem to have a similar mentality: "Nach Harper, Uns." Jack's gambit didn't work out for the party (and they blame Trudeau to no end, some even venturing into Clinton conspiracy theory territory alleging that he caused Layton's death). But Canada did suffer plenty under 10 years of the most misery-inducing PM the country had endured since Johnny Mac himself. Both conservatives, big surprise there.
The NDP base are drifting disturbingly close to embracing actual communist ideologies, having been radicalized by Internet echo chambers as much as the MAGA cult influences the Cons. Their intentional obfuscation of jurisdictional realities, and faulting of Trudeau for not waving a magic wand to implement pharmacare or doing so with the Emergencies Act (thus turning a blind eye to the likes of Ford and Kenney) isn't just posturing and gaslighting. They're showing their roots as tankies, hell-bent on implementing central planning. They're in hock to the impatient Gen-Z activists who think governance is or should be as easy as sending a tweet (or a Tik Tok). Now who else do we know of, who felt governance by Twitter was the way to make America great again? By making common cause with the Trumpsters of the North, NDP are really showing their true colors with that shade of orange...
If and when the Greens dump Annamie Paul, it's believed that an "eco-socialist" wing is eager to take over. Over on the NDP side meanwhile, the Leap Manifesto power couple of Avi Lewis and academic concern troll Naomi Klein, are slated for an entry into the race this election. Canada would be a complete mess if the Liberals were forced to enter into a PR coalition with these extremists. Really, the best hope the country has is that the CPC completely collapse into the QAnon Reform rump, the entirety of the remaining PC wing jumps ship to the Liberals, and the NDP and Greens continue to languish in the nosebleed section tweeting from their AOC stan accounts.
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