A letter to Jagmeet Singh: Voting reform is within your grasp

Dear Jagmeet Singh,

Before you make Pierre Poilievre the happiest man in Canada since Phil (Wizard) Kim danced his way to Olympic gold in breakdancing, I ask you to hear me out.

Make a deal with the Liberals. I realize the last one did not end well, and Poilievre’s speechwriters might invent another rhyming catchphrase for you in the House of Commons, but the Liberals are desperate for time to let their new leader make their case to Canadians.

Voting reform was a key promise from Trudeau — one he later abandoned and recently admitted regretting. Now is the time to correct that mistake. Offer the Liberals a two-part deal. The NDP would support adopting ranked ballots for the 2025 election and all future elections, while also securing a referendum to let voters decide between first-past-the-post voting and mixed-member proportional representation.

This referendum should be simple. No complex ballots like British Columbia’s previous attempt, where voters had to choose from multiple systems without knowing what would be implemented. Just a straightforward choice — first-past-the-post voting or mixed-member proportional representation with a 50.1-per-cent majority, the same standard used in Quebec’s independence referendum.

Canada needs this. First-past-the-post voting is poisoning our democracy, as it has in other liberal democracies that use the system. Take the City of Surrey, for example. Brenda Locke became mayor with just 28.14 per cent of the vote, less than one-third of the electorate, and yet got to spend millions trying to terminate the city’s police force. That is not healthy for democracy.

In Ontario’s 2022 election, Doug Ford won 40.8 per cent of the popular vote but secured 66.9 per cent of the seats, giving him a majority. Meanwhile, the NDP, with 23.7 per cent of the vote, got only 25 per cent of the seats, and the Liberals, with 23.9 per cent of the vote, secured a mere 6.5 per cent of the seats. 

Proportional voting would have prevented such distortions when the Liberals were underrepresented by a near factor of four and the Progressive Conservatives were overrepresented by nearly 64 per cent. 

Even though nearly 60 per cent of Ontarians wanted someone else, Ford was able to move forward with multiple unpopular decisions — shutting down the Ontario Science Centre, threatening the province’s Greenbelt, and breaking a beer sales contract that cost the province more than $600 million.

This is not a healthy voting system, which is why I believe millennials and generation Z are losing faith in democratic institutions. Young voters’ satisfaction with democracy has dropped over the past several decades. And why would it not? There’s rising inequality, increased reliance on food banks, and a growing housing crisis, yet governments keep failing to address these issues. 

They do not need to because the two main political parties know they will eventually return to power once voters tire from the other. That is why Canada swings between the Liberals and the Conservatives because those in power know voters do not have a real choice.

When governments are elected without the support of a majority of voters, they are not truly representative. Yet they still pass laws, allocate funding, and make decisions that most citizens oppose. Worse, the system limits voters to just two viable choices, usually a red team and a blue team, as seen in Canada, the U.K., and the U.S., where voting for alternative parties is effectively punished.

You have the power to challenge the Liberals to fulfill their promise on voting reform in exchange for six months of governance. To paraphrase The Godfather, you can make them an offer they cannot refuse and in doing so, change Canada for the better.

Sincerely,
A millennial voter