Executive summary, September 23, 2015
DEMOCRACY FOR CANADA
by Dave Brekke
1 Canada’s current, “First-Past-The-Post” electoral system (FPTP), has often resulted in election of governments that represent the needs, wants and values of less than half of the voters.
2 Probably because of this, the system has disengaged Canadian voters to such a degree that in the last federal election, only 61% of eligible Canadians voted. (Elections Canada, 2011).
3 The Preferential Ridings Proportional (PRP) system proposed here would make Canada a more inclusive and representative democracy. PRP would allow almost every vote cast in an election to have some impact on the resultant legislative body.
4 PRP is a hybrid system that incorporates elements from Canada’s present riding-based system, but includes both preferential voting, and proportional representation.
5 The development of the PRP system is based on what people interested in improving our electoral system said they wanted in a new system.
6 The PRP system reorganizes the country, province or territory into ridings roughly twice the size of our current ridings, each electing a single representative using preferential voting.
7 The other half of the representatives will be elected to Proportional Seats to give representation to voters who did not vote for the winner in their riding.
8 The allocation of proportional seats will reflect relative popularity of the Parties in geographically coherent “Electoral Areas.” The proportional representatives will be usually the most successful unelected candidates from their Political Party within the electoral area.
9 The effect of the allocation of proportional representatives will be a parliamentary distribution of seats that fairly represents the distribution of political opinion among voters.
Thank you, Dave Nash, for adding the very important component ‘equality of votes’ to
the PRP combination electoral system.
Video – 5 minutes – “Do you want your vote to count?” https://goo.gl/NLlVbg