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You’d have thought he’d just won another majority. There was Justin Trudeau on election night, boasting of the “clear mandate” he had just been given. No mention that his party had been reduced to a minority, or that it had won a million fewer votes than it did the previous election — a quarter million fewer, in fact, than the Conservatives.

At 33 per cent of the votes cast, it is, in fact, the weakest mandate any Canadian government has received in any election since Confederation. It is only because of the accidents of first past the post — how the vote divides between different parties in different ridings; whether a party’s vote is spread evenly or happens to bunch in the right places — that the Liberals remain in power. With less than a third of the vote, a shade more than the Conservatives received in losing in 2015, they won nearly half the seats — 36 more than the Tories.

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That only begins to describe the anomalies in these results. The NDP and the Greens took 22.5 per cent of the vote between them, but won just 27 seats. The Bloc Québécois, with less than eight per cent of the vote, won 32. The basic premise of our democracy is that everybody gets a vote and every vote is equal. But, as this election has once again shown, that is simply untrue. It took 386,000 votes to elect each Green MP; it took just 43,000 to elect each Blocquiste. We might as well have issued nine ballots to each Bloc voter for every one we gave to a Green.