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PR would spare the need for Canada’s extreme left to gather in a big tent. It would allow leftists to indulge their well-known taste for endless schism without paying a collective electoral price. And it would create the conditions for brokerage between centrists and small fringe parties of the left and sorta-left-oid-ish.

It should be instantly apparent that all of this goes equally for the right wing, or for any group of voters that shares an interest or a preoccupation. Broadbent accuses Kellie Leitch of trying to win the Conservative party leadership with objectionable Trump-style tactics, and I guess I agree that she is making cynical use of the Trump persuasive apparatus. But since we don’t have proportional representation, she is required to try and win the leadership of a major party in order to exercise power. If we had PR she could just quit the Conservatives and form a Leitch List. I doubt she would have much trouble getting ten or 20 seats in a proportional Commons, and such a Commons would feature members wayyyy to her right politically.

This is what brings us to the PR advocates’ trick: Broadbent says “extremists” could not exploit PR because “countries with such a system have established a threshold each must cross to win seats.” Put another way: no one on Earth, anywhere, really believes in proportionality in the legislature as a logical principle. They all support curtailed proportionality. Curtailed, that is, at some numerical point which suits their particular naked interest.

Our first-past-the-post system has a varying informal threshold which tends to hold down the New Democrats because their vote share is usually around 20 per cent. New Democrats like Ed find that devilishly unfair, but would happily cut off parties below ten per cent, or five. This is nothing but dismal intellectual shamelessness. It may be good politics — but only until we come to our senses and learn to laugh at it.

National Post

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