What if the different political parties were represented in Parliament in proportion to the number of votes they got? This is called proportional representation. It implies that everyone's vote has exactly the same weight. This is only fair, which is why it is also called fair voting. Fair Vote Canada is a national organization devoted to promoting the idea of fair voting. They have a lot of information which you may find interesting.

More specifically we can ask how many seats each party would have ended up having if the number of seats was proportional to the number of votes. This is not a difficult calculation, and the result, which I will show you in a moment, is very revealing. There is a subtle little difficulty, which is how do you assign a small integer number of seats in proportion to very large numbers of votes. It can't be done exactly, but there is a way to come as close as possible, called the D'Hondt method. I wrote a little Python notebook to calculate the seat distribution using this method. (Let me know if you would like a copy; my email is in the Contact Me page. It's very easy to adapt to any parliamentary election, just plugging in the relevant numbers). Elections Canada hasn't yet published the numbers, but I found the number of votes each party had on the Global News website, except for the People's Party of Canada which I found on Wikipedia. I haven't included other parties or independents, assuming that their numbers would be too small to alter the results significantly.

So <play drum roll here> here are the results:

A couple of things jump out immediately: The Liberal Party got 17 seats more than they should have, and the NDP got 14 seats fewer than they should have; and the Bloc and the NDP should have got the same number of seats, having got practically the same number of votes, and yet the Bloc got roughly $\pi$ times as many seats as the NDP. Had the NDP had its proportional share of the seats, there would be no question about losing party status.

The comparison between the Bloc and the NDP illustrates perfectly a major flaw with First Past The Post: it is heavily biased towards geographical concentration of votes. The Bloc only runs candidates in Quebec, with about 6.5 million electors, while the NDP competes nationally, with about 37 million electors. Another extreme example is the Green Party. They only won a seat because Elizabeth May is very popular in her own riding, but the rest of their supporters are spread too thinly throughout the country to be able to win a single seat.

OK, you say, what about the previous election in 2021? It's very easy to plug in the numbers into my little program, and the results are even more shocking.

OK, first of all: The LPC got 48 more seats than they should have? I am no fan of the Conservatives, but can you imagine getting more votes than the Liberals and 41 fewer seats?

And then, the NDP. They got nearly two and a half times the number of votes of the Bloc and three quarters the number of seats! At 61 seats for the NDP and 112 for the LPC, the NDP could certainly have demanded a coalition with seats in cabinet, and not a very grudgingly conceded small confidence and supply agreement.

As for the Liberal Party, it is very clear from both elections why Trudeau was willing to pay the political price of promising to end First Past The Post, and then breaking his promise as the parliamentary committee on electoral reform held public hearings and received submissions from all over the country, overwhelmingly in favour of proportional representation. The Liberal Party gains the most from FPTP, and the NDP, their rivals on the progressive end of the political spectrum, loses the most from FPTP. Trudeau's preferred method of instant runoff is not proportional, and in fact produces very similar outcomes to FPTP.

This calculation shows the failings of FPTP from the point of view of the parties. There's another simple calculation we can do that shifts the spotlight onto the voters themselves: let's calculate how many votes it takes to elect an MP for the supporters of the different parties. This simply requires dividing the second column by the third in the tables above. Here's the result (not including the PPC because they didn't win any seats):

The violation of the principle that everyone's vote should be equal is painfully evident. It takes over three times as many voters to elect an NDP MP compared to a Liberal or Conservaitve MP; and it takes nearlly five times as many Green voters to do the same. It's also interesting to note that from the point of view of the voters we don't have a two-party system as we often hear, but a three-party system. The Bloc has been able to buck the natural trend of FPTP to produce just two big parties by only running in their home province of Quebec.

Canadians have been discussing electoral reform and fair voting for a long time. Notably the Law Commission of Canada, an arm's-length commission designed to advise Parliament on law reform, released a report on electoral reform titled “Voting Counts: Electoral Reform for Canada” in 2004, after two years of research. In it they proposed mixed member proportional representation, a system used by, among others, Germany whereby voters get two votes, one for their local representative and one drawing from a party list to top up the number of seats for each party so that they are proportional to the number of votes. This system satisfies both the requirement of proportionality and that of local representation. Stephen Harper shut down the Commission two years later.

It is high time that we abandon the blatantly unfair First Past The Post. We cannot call Canada a democracy until we do.

#Canada #ProportionalRepresentation #FPTP #Voting #Democracy

Donald Trump has at various times offered different justifications for the punitive tariffs:

• To encourage Canada to give up its sovereignty and become the 51st state;

• To disadvantage Canadian exports and make American producers great again;

• To force Canada and especially Mexico to stop the flow of drugs at the border, particularly fentanyl.

Let's look at the last point. Canada and Mexico are accused of not doing enough to control the flow of drugs, especially fentanyl, into the US. Both countries have managed to persuade the US government to delay the tariffs by committing thousands of troops to the borders [1] in an effort to stem the drug trade.

Fentanyl is a product of the American pharmaceutical industry,first synthesized in 1959. It is a powerful but also dangerous painkiller and sedative, and it is still widely used medically today. It is also an ideal product for the illegal drug trade: it's easy to synthesize, a single dose is just a few milligrams, and it is extremely addictive. Because it is so potent, it leads easily to overdosing, particularly when the dose is not controlled or when it is mixed with other drugs, as is of course the case when you're getting a drug in an unregulated black market.

Fentanyl has caused a drug crisis in the United States, and it has spread around the world causing similar distress.

The route that leads to the finished fentanyl entering the United States is long and tortuous. A lot of the precursors are first produced in small shops in China, which then find their way to labs in Mexico where they are processed into the finished fentanyl, which is then smuggled in pills to the US and sold at a high markup. This has created some powerful and violent crime gangs particularly in Mexico. Politics also affects the process, as the government of China looks the other way in proportion to American threats. When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August of 2022 and expressed “unwavering commitment to supporting Taiwan's vibrant democracy”, and we all know what that means, Beijing responded by suspending anti-drug-trafficking cooperation with Washington.

One would imagine that since fentanyl is a product of the American pharmaceutical industry and its trafficking is motivated by a high demand for it in the United States, that the US government would cooperate with efforts to shut down the illegal trade. Especially since drug trafficking has created a wave of crime and generalized violence particularly in Mexico, and to a lesser degree in Canada. Instead the US government wants its neighbours to bear the full cost of tackling a problem they didn't start, forcing them to acquiesce with trade sanctions that damage their economies. Ultimately it's working people in Canada and Mexico, as well as in the US [2] that pay the price, who are not the ones who created the problem in the first place. #Canada #Trump

[1] Actually the troops were already committed before, during the Biden administration. Canada and Mexico have simply told Trump about it, as if it was something new. But the fact remains that those troops would not have had to be deployed if it weren't for the drug trafficking.

[2] As many pointed out immediately after Trump announced the tariffs, it is Americans that actually pay them.