Political scientists have been writing about the inequities of Canada?s election laws for a very long time. Alan Cairns? pathbreaking essay, documenting how the Canada Elections Act has exacerbated regional tensions in the country, was written in 1968. A decade later, in 1979, William Irvine published his internationally acclaimed book, Does Canada Need a New Election System, in which he highlighted these and other discriminatory effects of election laws, (known as single member plurality (SMP) systems), that award representation in a Parliament or legislative assembly to those who win the most votes in geographically defined constituencies.
Since then, many others have added their names to calls for a re-evaluation of the laws we use to translate votes cast in an election into representation in Parliament and our provincial assemblies. All of the more recent studies confirm the biases that Cairns and Irvine had identified against smaller, issue based parties like the Greens and established national parties, like the NDP, (and more recently the Progressive Conservatives), whose supporters are spread across the country but have no realistic hope of winning an election. They also show that our election laws make it much more difficult for women, (and members of minority groups who are not concentrated geographically), to stand as candidates and claim their fair share of seats in the legislative and executive branches of government.
http://www.song.on.ca/makingdemocracy.html
Note: http://www.song.on.ca/m...
Stumble It!