OTTAWA

From Canada’s perspective, the overdue rehabilitation of the concept of coalition building in a minority Parliament was just one of the beneficial collateral results of the recent British election.

Another could be to put electoral reform squarely on the federal agenda.

As part of the deal between Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative party and Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats, the UK will be looking at alternatives to the first-past-the-post system.

But there should be no need for Canada to wait for the UK to work its way through a discussion on its electoral system to have one of its own.

Since Ontario and British Columbia foundered in their attempts to move to more proportional voting systems, the issue has fallen off the parliamentary radar.

The failed provincial bids have just about killed the notion that a Medicare-style domino effect would, in time, provide a compelling provincial model for a federal reform

If this debate is going to regain momentum, it will have to come from a change in the dynamics at the federal level.

Until now the NDP has been the only party to champion the cause of electoral reform in Parliament and, so far, the results of its efforts have been underwhelming.

By contrast, conventional federal Liberal wisdom has been that the first-past-the-post system worked well for the party and its position has been to stick with it.

In the 1997 election, it helped Jean Chrétien eke a governing majority out of as shallow a pool of popular support as 38 per cent. But looking back on three decades of steady erosion of the Liberals’ national foundation, the party has traded short-term electoral gain for long-term pain.

While the distortions of the system did benefit the Liberals in Ontario, especially over the period when the right was divided, they have also exacerbated their absence from other important regions.

Western Canada is a case in point: In the last election the Liberals won 19 per cent of the vote in Manitoba but only 7 per cent of the seats and the support of one in five British Columbian voters translated into only five Liberal seats out of a provincial total of 36.

Over time, those distortions have resulted in a vicious circle.

The Liberals have yet to stage a leadership campaign that features a top-tier contender from Western Canada and since the advent of the Bloc Québécois, the party’s pool of francophone talent has also shrunk dramatically.

On that latter score, the same is true of the other federalist parties.

For almost two decades and even as a majority of its voters have supported federalist parties, Quebec has been massively represented by sovereignists in the House of Commons.

A recurring criticism of a more proportional election system is that it would make majority governments harder to secure.

But given the well-entrenched regional fault lines in federal party support across Canada, the best a party could hope for under the current system would be to achieve a technical majority – i.e. one that reflects regional divisions rather than a national consensus.

At the same time, some of the most pressing issues on the federal plate – matters such as climate change, energy and equalization, to name just three – will require a serious amount of intra-regional compromises.

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That give-and-take is much more likely to be fostered under the common roof of a national caucus than across the federal-provincial table.

If the Liberals are serious about restoring their status as a national institution, it is time for them to abandon their faith in short-term electoral short cuts and rethink their approach to a more proportional voting system.

Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.