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You may have two questions about this scary assertion. Is it true? (Hint: no.) And what does the formula mean?

One of the goals a lot of people have for election reform is to make House of Commons representation “more proportional” to vote totals when it comes to party affiliation. We all have different ideas about how important this feature should be. Some of us feel strongly that MPs ought to be elected as individuals, and the wishes of voters in the riding next door, or in another time zone, should not matter. But most citizens and experts who talked to the committee thought overall proportionality was a highly desirable feature of an electoral system.

And yet … after all, the current system usually leads to mostly-sorta-kinda proportional outcomes. Regionally strong parties are sometimes overrepresented in the House, and a party might occasionally win a national election with slightly fewer votes than another, but there is usually a loose connection between the nationwide party support and the seat outcome. Moreover, alternative systems differ in their relative emphasis on proportionality.

What we need is some way of scoring systems for how proportional they are. If we care about proportionality at all, we cannot do without such a method.

This is where the dreaded “Gallagher index,” the formula on Monsef’s placard, comes in. The Gallagher index does not assign proportionality scores to electoral systems. What it does is to score election OUTCOMES for proportionality. You can plug our 2015 election into the formula yourself: you just need the vote shares and the resulting seat counts for every party. Since the Liberals got 54 per cent of the seats with just 39 per cent of the vote, and the Bloc Quebecois won 10 times as many seats as the Greens with only 36 per cent more votes, this election does not score too “well”: it’s a 12.