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It’s a safe bet this argument was carefully focus-grouped. The notion that only the electoral system stands in the way of Canadians voting neo-Nazi en masse — or Islamist, or Radical Vegan, pick your bogeyman — is never far from the surface of these discussions. Like other fears of the unknown, it is easy to raise, and hard to refute so long as nobody stops to think about it for half a second.

What, first, is the evidence of this barely suppressed urge to vote for fringe or extremist parties? In the past election, the vote for all fringe parties combined — parties, that is, other than the five currently represented in the House of Commons — added up to 0.79 per cent of the vote. Over the past two decades, it has averaged just over one per cent. The largest fringe party typically receives less than one-third of one per cent of the vote.

Even at the riding level, it is the rare fringe party that manages to obtain so much as one per cent of the vote. In the past election, just 49 candidates from half a dozen parties managed it; in the previous election, only 22. Fewer still get over the two-per-cent mark, and you could count the number of those who reach the fabled three-per-cent threshold on one hand.

Of course, if you change the voting system, you change voter behaviour.

Without the formidable hurdle presented by single-member plurality voting, where only the first-place candidate in each riding gets into Parliament, perhaps it would not feel quite so futile to vote for smaller, even fringe parties. Perhaps more people then would. Fine.