Electoral reform keeps stalling in Canada, but advocate says it isn't dead

During this federal election campaign, Joshua Rambout walks door to door in the riding of Elgin-St. Thomas-London South, hanging pamphlets on voters' doors and speaking with them about ideas he hopes will take hold. 

He's doing this as a volunteer in his spare time, but Rambout isn't stumping for a political candidate or party. 

Instead of talking to people about who they might vote for, Rambout would rather spur some conversations about how those votes will translate into power. With U.S. President Donald Trump making statements that threaten Canada's sovereignty, Rambout believes now is the perfect time to again broach the often thorny topic of Canadian electoral reform. 

"We're trying to get people talking about it and talking to their local candidates, talking to the party leaders, trying to get pressure on the people in power to support actual change."

Rambout is one of 50 local campaigners for Fair Vote Canada. The non-profit advocacy group is pushing for electoral reform, in particular, a shift toward some form of proportional representation. 

The current first-past-the-post system awards ridings to the party that receives the most votes in each riding. The knock against it is that parties often win 60 per cent or more of the seats with only 40 per cent of electors voting for them.

Although there are a number of different proportional representation systems, at their core, they all award seats to parties in proportion to the number of votes each party receives. 

To Rambout, it's a fairer system that leads to better governance. 

"It incentivizes parties to work together."

Trudeau promised electoral reform, but then ...

When first elected prime minister in 2015, Justin Trudeau promised electoral reform and said the election that first put him into power would be Canada's last under first-past-the-post. 

In the end, Trudeau's push for reform got bogged down at the committee level and was eventually abandoned. 

Electoral reform isn't a part of new Liberal Leader Mark Carney's campaign. The Conservative platform says a national referendum should be held before any change happens to the electoral system.

The Green Party supports shifting to proportional representation. The NDP supported a bill, which eventually didn't pass, that would have created a non-partisan citizens assembly to study electoral reform. 

Devil is in the details

Laura Stephenson is a political science professor at Western University who's researched different voting systems.

She said the difficulty of switching to proportional representation is that under that general descriptor, there are multiple versions of the system. Each variant has different ways votes translate into seats that can easily confuse voters, trigger criticisms and splinter support. 

"One of the reasons the 2015 effort failed is that there are no clear answers that were to satisfy everybody," said Stephenson. "If you read the reports that came out of [Trudeau reform process], there were no obvious routes to go." 

The Fair Vote website doesn't push for a particular version of proportional representation, though it does include descriptions of three versions here: mixed-member proportional, single transferable vote and rural-urban proportional. 

Stevenson likens the proportional representation choice to a situation in which everyone in a group agrees they want to go out to eat but can't decide on a particular restaurant. In the end, everyone winds up staying home. 

"We have a status quo bias," said Stephenson. "And none of the political parties that are winning have an incentive to bring in a system that is likely to splinter power." 

An Ontario referendum on mixed-member proportional representation failed to pass in 2007, with voter confusion cited as a problem in how the system was presented to the electorate. 

Rambout doesn't deny there are challenges to shifting electoral systems but said they can all be overcome and are worth working through. 

"Our primary goal is to push for a healthier democracy in Canada," he said.

Just Asking on CBC Radio wants to know: what questions do you have about first-past-the-post and our electoral system? Fill out the details on this form and send us your questions ahead of our show on Saturday, April 19, 2025.