David Eby an die Grünen: Für die NDP ist das Verhältniswahlrecht ein Tabu

Booo!!

This is what I’m always afraid of. Once a party gets in power via the dynamics of FPTP, it usually means your political equilibrium has settled around two main contenders and (if you’re lucky) a third or fourth flanker party. 

If those two main parties are never realistically at risk of being dumped from those top two positions, they know there’s no benefit to them (from a pure power or influence perspective) to entertain shifting to a more proportional system. 

The real tipping case for electoral reform is if the non-winning parties are consistently in a situation where there’s a good chance for a minority government, and the flankers have a significant amount of seats — not just a king-making position with a single hand’s worth of seats or less.

So looking at the current terrain, that essentially narrows down to QC and possibly ON. Federally we’d seem to be in a good situation for entertaining electoral reform, except the Conservatives are ideologically opposed to it, and the seeming flanker party in the BQ is structurally limited to one province so they don’t really care (although I would have thought that fluid coalitions provide them with more consistent opportuniies to extract concessions.)