A lot of ink has been spilled this past week on the idea that Western separatism is on the rise.

Looking at a map of the election results, it’s not hard to see why: a solid wall of Conservative blue stretches across Alberta and Saskatchewan, unless your eyes are sharp enough to pick out the speck of orange in Edmonton Strathcona. Hand-wringing political commentators have pointed to this result as a sign of an unravelling country at risk of breaking apart.

The reality, however, is that the election results are more a sign of a broken political system than of a broken country.

While advocates of first-past-the-post talk about how it allows voters to send politicians a strong message by “voting out the bums,” the danger of our winner-take-all system is that it amplifies small shifts in public sentiment, and in doing so sends messages that don’t actually exist.

The fact is, a majority of Westerners reliably vote Conservative, election after election. In 2015, 57 per cent of voters in Alberta and Saskatchewan voted for the Conservatives. In 2011, it was 64 per cent. In 2019? Sixty-eight per cent.

However, our first-past-the-post electoral system acts like a lever, taking relatively small shifts in popular vote and amplifying them out of all proportion. So instead of discussing a 10-per-cent shift in popular vote towards the Conservatives, we end up raving about “sweeps,” “waves” and “surges.” If anything, it is this overheated rhetoric that sustains the Wexit narrative, not the run-of-the-mill shift in support toward the Conservatives.

That’s not to say the results of the election in the West aren’t concerning. Although not the nation-threatening rupture our electoral system would have us believe, Western alienation is a very real thing. A lot of that sentiment may have to do with the fact that the major political parties have always ignored Western issues.

Not that we blame them. Why drop by Edmonton and its one or two swing ridings when you could stop by the 905 and hit up a half-dozen target seats in a day? Why deal with the pitfalls of pipeline politics when voters in your battleground ridings would rather hear about the boutique credits you’re going to offer suburban families?

First-past-the-post cheats everyone in the West. Because progressive parties can’t compete with the Conservatives, left-wing voters don’t get any local representation. Because Conservatives win Western ridings by huge margins, many of their votes are wasted and right-wing voters don’t get the national representation proportionality would demand. And because there are few swing ridings in the West, parties can safely ignore Western issues.