Should Canada Replace First Past the Post Before the Next Federal Election?

Before the next federal election, Canada should replace the “first past the post” system of electing representatives to the House of Commons

Introduction

"First Past the Post" that is commonly known as FPTP is a plurality voting, simple majority voting or winner-takes-all voting is considered the basic form of voting system. It is a process in which voting takes place in the constituencies of single-member. Voters across the region put a cross on the box of their favorite candidate while candidates who collect more number of votes get elected. FPTP is considered simple, decisive, and clear in the majority of cases however several claims that FPTP can be anything but an effective voting system. FPTP is the second most used voting system across the globe while Party-List PR takes the first position ((Blais et al., 2014). Currently, FPTP is used in UK and USA to elect House of Commons members and in India and Canada, it is used to elect members of lower houses This paper argues that before the next federal election, Canada should replace FPTP by electing representatives to the House of Commons to ensure effective democracy, equal power distribution and to fulfill the desire of voters.

Discussion

First-Past-The-Post is not suitable for democracy due to which, in order to make the democracy of Canada work better, changes are needed and FPTP needs to be replaced with some effective voting system. As a matter of fact, Canada is a parliamentary representative democracy that recognizes both utilitarian and natural rights and Canadians select individuals from time to time to make effective decisions about the nation and represent the interest of the public. The elected individuals at the federal level are called parliament members that serve in the House of Commons. According to Martin (2021), Canada is a democratic country but the practice of FPTP is a loose end in the democracy of Canada. It is indicated that recently, an election was called by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as Trudeau wanted the majority government to obtain significant absolute power to practice his mission in the House of Commons so, if Trudeau gets succeeded to obtain majority then it can be said that with less than 40% votes, Trudeau can achieve absolute power while the fact is that huge Canadian majority did not vote for him and it clearly identifies that something is wrong with FPTP as it doesn't support to maintain democracy to a good extent.

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