Picking Winners: Study on Why Proportional Representation Has Failed in Canada

The Canada West Foundation, a think tank based in Calgary, Alberta, has just published Picking Winners, a study of the failure of five recent attempts to introduce proportional representation electoral reforms at the provincial level:

"(...) British Columbia launched one of the most innovative exercises in citizen participation in Canadian history when it created the Citizens’ Assembly for Electoral Reform with a mandate to 'assess all possible models for electing MLAs, including preferential ballots, proportional representation, and our current electoral system.' The BC government then put its money where its mouth was and held two referendums to see if the people of BC were in favour of the Assembly’s recommendation to switch to a system of proportional representation. "

"Significant reform efforts have also taken place in Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. All of these efforts failed. For whatever reason, change was stymied."

"Legislators in BC, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and PEI are still elected using the first-past-the-post method. What happened in each of these five jurisdictions is the topic of this report."

An earlier Library Boy post from January 3, 2006 listed some Electoral Law Resources on the Internet:

"Here are some of the top Canadian and foreign web resources on the topic of elections, electoral law and electoral reform."

[Source: Reports Canada]