Canada’s electoral system at its core has not changed since Confederation. Who has access to this system has changed, however. If extending the franchise to those without it is considered electoral reform, then Canada’s electoral system has changed. Those who are able to make use of our electoral system are more representative, but the system itself may not be. The current first-past-the-post system allows a plurality to win without a majority. If three parties are running for a seat, one third of the vote plus one is enough to win the entire riding. Is this fair? Canada has not implemented proportional representation, which is a group of voting systems which attempt to ensure that the percentage of popular vote is better reflected in the percentage of seats in Parliament. In looking at why this has not been implemented, we need to look at the issue both from the top-down, and the bottom-up perspective.
The current electoral system works fairly simply on the federal level. Canada is divided into ridings, and each riding elects one Member of Parliment. These ridings are supposed to generally represent an equal number of people, although in reality this is not the case. This source (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_district_(Canada)#Formula) and its corresponding source indicate that the “grandfather clause” and “senatorial clause” dictate that a province can not have fewer seats than it had during the 33rd Parliament, and that it cannot have fewer MP’s than it has senators. Today, these clauses are responsible fort he Maritime provinces having a consistently smaller ratio of voters to MP than that in British Columbia, for example. However, ongoing incremental reform has improved this situation over the decades. Each riding elects MP’s based on a simple plurality. This means that whoever among the parties running in a district has the most votes wins the entire riding. This can lead to problems. For example, if more than two parties are running in a riding, it is possible for a party win a plurality but less than 50% of the vote. This means that in Canada, it is possible that a majority of people in your district did NOT vote for your representative.
This system makes it possible for a large percentage of people to simply not be represented in Parliament. It also allows for issues like vote-splitting. For example, if the votes for the Green Party were added to the votes for the NDP in BC during the last federal election in all ridings, many elections would have different outcomes. This is significant because the ideological and policy platforms of the NDP and the Green party were very similar when contrasted with the Conservative platform at the time. Essentailly, 65% of British Columbians could have agreed on 90% of policy issues and still lost the election.
Proportional representation attempts to address this issue. The aim of the various types of proportional representation is to make the percentage of actual MP’s elected for a party nationally more reflective of the percentage of votes cast for that party. There are many ways to do this, and most of them attempt to address “wasted votes”. A “wasted vote” is a vote which did not elect a candidate. There are a variety of methods used to reduce the number of “wasted votes”. A runoff election is a simple way of doing so which is used in some electoral primaries in the United States. If, during a primary, no candidate gets 50% of the vote, another vote is held between the top two candidates. This addresses the issue by simply reducing the number of candidates once a first and second place among multiple candidates is established. This gives a chance for those who voted for the third, forth, et cetra candidates to influence which of the first and second place candidates wins, making their votes no longer “wasted”.
In my opinion, the three reasons proportional representation has not been established federally are that it generally does not benefit a government in power to implement proportional representation as it would usually lose the party in power seats, that those who want proportional representation have not reached consensus on exactly what form of proportional representation would be preferable, and that many Canadians prefer the simplicity of the first-past-the-post electoral system and do not trust a more complicated way of electing MPs. The first reason cannot be addressed directly, as it is an inherent flaw in democracy. The second reason may be solved if one form of proportional representation becomes popular enough. The third reason is rooted in ignorance, and can be solved through education.

Slowly unpacking,

I save as many posters from concerts as I can, now im slowly putting them all on the wall. Its a very nice feeling, I look at each poster and remember the performance. I am so lucky to have played in front of people in bands!