Proportional Representation

2025/Mar/23
in Advocacy, Proportional Representation
3 min read

From "Because it's 2015" to "I'm a Zionist". Closing the Book on Trudeau

As a Prime Minister Trudeau, at his best, was witty and concise. Within the space of a soundbite he was able to capture a moment the way he wanted the world to see it; presenting it to the camera with a winning mixture of charm and gravitas that was able to go, at least by the standards of Canadian politics, viral.

Two of these moments bookend his career. The first came when he was newly elected on a sunny November day in Ottawa where he responded to a question on why he had a gender balanced cabinet with the quip of "Because it's 2015".¹ It was a break from the dark and angry days of his predecessor, Stephen Harper, and cemented his image as a bold, progressive and inclusive leader, strong in his principles and set on building a brighter and more hopeful future. He successfully set the tone for what was an unusually long honeymoon with the Canadian public.

2025/Mar/3
in Advocacy, Proportional Representation
6 min read

How Justin Trudeau Killed PR for a cycle

Recently (on the 27th of Feb 2025) an election was held in the province of Ontario, my place of residence. The most important part of the results is that the ruling party of the Progressive Conservatives under Doug Ford got about 42% of the vote, got about 60% of the seats, and therefore earned themselves 100% of the political power in the province for four years thanks to the First Past The Post (FPTP) rules of the election system.¹ It was a cynical snap election call and Ford was rewarded for it, evidence of an unhealthy society and a broken election system.

This outcome is pretty much exactly what advocates of a proportional system like me decry as undemocratic as, under proportional systems (henceforth called PR) getting about 40% of the votes means a party gets about 40% of the seats and has to negotiate power with other parties. Another fun bit of factual ammunition that came out of the election was the NDP party getting about 11% less of the vote than the Liberals (around 600K votes less) and yet getting double the number of seats as them.

It doesn't make any sense.

It's a mess.

And Justin Trudeau had promised to fix it at the federal level by 2019.

This is an accounting of how he broke the promise, and lied about it until the end of his career as Prime Minister of Canada