E plus 1: The Price of a Seat

It's going to be a long four years. As promised, here are some charts illustrating the strangeness of our electoral system.

Chart 1 shows the percent of the popular vote that went to each party.

Chart 2 shows the seat distribution in the House of Commons.

Chart 3 shows the number of votes each party needed to get one seat in Parliament. You will notice that Elizabeth May represents over a half million Canadians, while each Conservative MP represents just under 35,000 voters. This is not quite the same disparity as the 1993 Federal Election I mentioned earlier, but it doesn't seem quite fair to me.

Methinks we're long overdue for electoral reform. I'm not holding my breath, though. It seems that the parties in power see quite clearly that they have the number of seats they do because our system is so perverse, which blinds them, not just to how unrepresentative this system is, but also to the fact that next time around they might be the ones paying a half million votes for a single seat, while the other guys get theirs in for 30,000 a head.