Fair Voting BC - Fair Voting for BC's Future

Does Your Vote Matter

Inequality Hurts Us All

Why Have We Not Changed

What Equal Voting Produces

Voting System Options

<p>When over half our votes don't affect who's elected, politicians pay less attention, and that’s not good for anyone. But imagine if all our votes actually had equal weight and we all had a strong voice in parliament — our democracy would be much richer, more robust, and more responsive.</p><p>The good news is we know what to do — 26 of the 27 European Union countries already use more fair and inclusive ways of voting. We just have to pick one that would work well here in BC. Unfortunately, politicians aren't much interested in fixing the problem — after all, they won under our current system, and if we vote differently, they might not get re-elected.</p><p>Read on to learn more about why we should change how we vote, what the best options for better voting are, and how you can help bring that change about.</p>

Most votes don't matter. That's a problem for us all.

Why most votes don't matter, and what you can do about it.

<p>Sign up to hear what we're up to (we send out updates on an occasional basis - more often when there's an election happening).</p>

Get looped in!

Email address

Name

Phone number (if requesting callback)

Message

Contact

<p>Most of us assume that’s how it works. You show up, you mark your ballot, and the result reflects what voters actually wanted. That's what should happen.</p><p>But the way our voting system works in practice is a different story — one that affects every voter, regardless of which party they support or whether the candidate they voted for won or lost.</p><p>This isn’t about any particular election or any particular party. It’s about the mechanics of the First Past the Post voting system that Canada uses to translate votes into seats, and about the glaring gap between what we expect our voting system to do and what it actually does.</p><p>Let’s walk through the three ways your vote might have turned out, and what each outcome really means for you and for the rest of us. Click on the section below that best describes what happened the last time you voted:</p>

You voted. So now your voice is heard in Parliament, right?

What happened the last time you voted?

<h3><strong>Three possible outcomes for you. But whatever happens, the system falls short - both for you and for all the rest of us.</strong></h3><p><strong>Weak Connections: </strong>Whether your vote was wasted, whether your representative is fighting from the opposition benches with fewer allies than voters chose, or whether your party won power but governs without hearing from whole regions and communities or takes you for granted — the pattern is the same:&nbsp;First Past the Post consistently produces outcomes where the connection between what voters want and what governments do is weaker than it should be.</p><p><strong>Structural Flaw: </strong>This is not a flaw that affects only one side of the political spectrum. It is not something that the right election result can fix. It is built into the structure of the system itself.</p><p><strong>Erodes Democracy: </strong>And the consequences go deeper than you might expect. It’s not just that your individual vote matters less — it’s that the distortions between how people vote and the representation that results warps public policy, reduces government accountability,&nbsp;and erodes the foundations of democratic trust in ways that affect all of us.</p>

<h3>Some people hear the discussion on the previous page and think: <em>so what? Every system has imperfections. Votes get wasted, politicians get complacent — that’s just how it goes.</em></h3><p>That response is understandable. But before we catalogue the practical consequences of our voting system’s shortcomings, it’s worth naming what kind of problem this actually is.</p><p><strong>An unequal vote is a civil rights issue.</strong></p><p>We no longer consider it acceptable to deny someone the right to vote. The historical exclusion of women, Indigenous peoples, and others from the franchise is now recognized as a profound injustice — not a minor procedural matter, not an unfortunate feature of the times, but a fundamental violation of the principle that citizens are political equals. We fixed it, because the old way became incompatible with our view of what democracy should mean.</p><p><strong>But the right to cast a ballot is not the same as the right to an equal vote.</strong> When a system routinely gives some voters meaningful influence over the outcome while others’ votes change nothing, we have a different form of the same underlying problem: not all citizens are being treated as political equals. The mechanism is different, but the principle is the same.</p><p><strong>Our Charter Rights:&nbsp;</strong>This is not merely a philosophical argument. Section 3 of the <em>Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms</em> guarantees every citizen the right to vote — and the courts have held that this means considerably more than simply being permitted to mark a ballot:</p><ul><li><p>In the <strong>Saskatchewan Boundaries Reference (1991)</strong>, the Supreme Court held that Section 3 protects not just the formal right to vote, but the right to <strong>effective representation</strong> and <strong>relative equality of voting power</strong> — the principle that no citizen’s vote should count for dramatically more or less than another’s<br></p></li><li><p>In <strong>Figueroa v. Canada (2003)</strong>, the Court held that Section 3 also protects the right to <strong>meaningful participation</strong> in the electoral process — the ability to play a genuine role in shaping political power, not merely to go through the motions of casting a ballot</p></li></ul><p>First Past the Post, by systematically producing outcomes where millions of votes influence nothing while a relative handful determine governments, sits in tension with both of these principles. The consequences that follow are not just policy failures or political inconveniences. They are the practical expression of a civil rights gap that our own legal framework already recognizes — in principle, if not yet in practice.</p><p><em>All of the consequences described below — consequences for voters, for political parties and competition, for government policy, and for our democratic health — follow from the foundational inequality produced by our First Past the Post voting system.</em></p>

Check out the negative consequences of FPTP for:

<p>A voting system that produces unequal votes is not a minor inconvenience. It is a structural problem with consequences that ripple outward — affecting the health of our political parties, the fairness of government spending, the range of ideas our society considers, and our conviction that democracy belongs to all of us, not just to those who happened to live in the right riding.</p><p>These are not abstract harms. They are documented, measurable, and cumulative. And they are the predictable result of a system that was never designed to deliver equal representation.</p><p>But two-thirds of the world’s democracies have already found a better way. Read on to learn how they run their elections.</p><p>That raises an obvious question: what would a better system actually look like?</p>

Negative consequences all around. So why don't we change?

<h4>If so many people's votes don’t count, and fairer systems exist, why hasn’t Canada changed?</h4><p>It really comes down to self-interest — as Upton Sinclair said nearly a hundred years ago, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."</p><p>Our FPTP voting system routinely hands the winning party more seats than their vote shares warrant. If you’re a party leader who just won a majority government with 35-40% of the popular vote, you’d have to be unusually selfless to look at that result and say, “I should change the system so I get less power next time.” Most people aren’t that selfless.</p><p>And individual politicians who get elected under FPTP, especially in regions where their party won most or all of the seats, realize that a different voting system might mean that they could lose their seat if the system changed (even if someone else from their party wins a seat in a different region). It's easy enough to rationalize keeping the system that was wise enough to elect you and resist changing it.</p><p>The core problem is that these politicians are in a conflict of interest — the people who have the power to change the rules are the same people who benefit most from keeping them. As <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://openparliament.ca/debates/2001/5/29/scott-reid-1/"><strong>former Conservative MP Scott Reid </strong></a>once said, "for all the failings of the first past the post electoral system, and they are considerable, there is nevertheless a very powerful interest group that has a strong incentive to keep that system in place. <strong>That interest group is us</strong>." </p><p>Few people are willing to acknowledge this, and fewer still inclined to surrender an advantage they didn’t have to fight for — especially when the people asking them to do so don’t have equivalent leverage.</p><p>This isn’t really a story about intrinsically bad people. It’s a very human story about what people do when asked to give up an unearned advantage so that disadvantaged people can be treated fairly.</p><p>Note: for more on this, check out Professor Dennis Pilon's insightful article, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.academia.edu/98228148/Myths_Damn_Myths_and_Voting_System_Change_How_Canadian_Political_Scientists_Misrepresent_Democratic_Reform">Myths, Damn Myths, and Voting System Reform</a>.</p>

Why haven't we changed yet?

Frequently Asked Questions

<h4>Our FPTP system persists not because it’s the best we can do, but because the people in charge have self-interested reasons not to change it.</h4><p></p>

The main obstacle to change isn't not knowing what system to use.

<h4><strong>Our democratic system works, to a point.</strong> Elections happen, governments form, laws get passed. But what if it worked better — for everyone? What would it look like if our legislature truly reflected the full range of views that voters actually hold?</h4><p>That shouldn't be a controversial question — healthy democracies strive to improve themselves And most of the world’s democracies have already answered it — by adopting voting systems that ensure the mix of people elected actually matches the mix of views voters hold. Canada hasn’t yet. Below, we explore in concrete terms what better voting might mean, why it matters, and why the evidence for moving in that direction is overwhelming.</p>

What if every vote had an equal impact on who was elected to Parliament?

What better voting means for our society

<h4>The case for proportional representation isn’t ideological — it’s practical. Countries where every vote carries equal weight give everyone a stronger stake in society. They consistently produce better outcomes — more representative governments, more stable policy, less polarization, higher voter participation, and stronger performance on the measures that matter most to people’s lives.</h4><h4>Once they've started down this path, none of those countries have gone back. Canada is still stuck in the past. We can move in the same direction — but only if enough of us ask the following simple question: </h4><h3><em>What voting system would help Canada become the best possible version of itself?</em></h3>

The right to vote is our responsibility as a citizen of our countries. Hoping for a civil response in the United States after this election in 2020.

The question we still need to answer:

<h4>Since we don't use proportional voting here in Canada, people aren't necessarily very familiar with it. When they first hear about it, they sometimes assume it’s a new idea or something untested. The reality is almost completely the opposite — Canada is really an outlier by not using it.</h4><h4>Of the world’s established democracies, roughly two-thirds use some form of proportional voting to elect their national governments. This isn’t an recent trend — most of these systems have been in place, and delivering solid results, for decades. We just don't hear about them very much.</h4>

How proportional voting works & key options

<h4>The benefits of proportional voting aren’t theoretical — the evidence is sitting right there in the election results of dozens of countries. Proportional voting works, it’s stable, and it makes democracy more representative.</h4>

Most votes don't matter. That's a problem for us all.

Why most votes don't matter, and what you can do about it.

Why your vote likely isn't doing what you expect it to:

How inequality in voting hurts all of us:

What would it look like if every vote counted equally?

So how does voting work in the happiest, most free & prosperous places?

If the way we vote is so bad, why haven't we changed it yet?

Contact

info@fairvotingbc.com

Media: 778-244-4242