A growing number of Canadians support a change to a voting system based on proportional representation, according to a new Angus Reid poll.
Electoral reform did not rear its head as a major issue in October's federal election but has received significant attention in the past — and since the Oct. 21 vote.
During the 2015 election cycle, the Trudeau government made electoral reform one of its campaign promises, stating that election would be the last held under the first-past-the-post system.
But by February 2017, his government reneged on the campaign promise, with Liberal Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould saying saying there wasn’t enough support among Canadians to make such a sweeping change.
In the intervening years, that sparked vocal opposition, especially from the federal NDP and Green parties.
Following the 2019 election — one in which the Conservative Party of Canada won the popular vote but failed to secure the most ridings to form a government — Conservative voters appear to be bridging the partisan divide and joining those championing a system based on proportional representation.
Seven in 10 voters who supported the CPC in the October election said they would like to see a change in the electoral system, compared to less than a third when Angus Reid conducted a similar poll in early 2016. At the time, only 53% of all respondents said they would like to see a change in how elections are conducted. In the latest poll, that once partisan sentiment has gained support on both sides of the political spectrum.
But while, by party, a growing number of Conservative voters appear to be joining the call to move to a new electoral system, when broken down by province, respondents from B.C. — a province that rejected a proposal to make such a change in a 2018 provincial referendum — appeared to be the least likely to support proportional representation, according to the poll.
One group advocating for proportional representation cites the tight race in the riding of Port Moody-Coquitlam (the tightest in the country) as model evidence that a change must be made.
“Port Moody-Coquitlam is probably the best example of why we need electoral reform in Canada,” wrote the group Canadians for STV in a Facebook post the morning after the election. The group advocates for a system of proportional representation known as single transferable vote.
