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Proportional representation (PR) would sound the death knell to any form of small-c conservative government. Majorities would, of course, be a thing of the past. And even assuming the Tories got 40 per cent of the seats in the House, they would need to form a coalition with one of the other parties to govern, or form ad-hoc coalitions on confidence votes such as the budget.

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In Thursday’s National Post Tasha Kheiriddin argued that any conceivable variant of PR would doom the Conservatives to permanent minority status. And to rejig the electoral system for partisan purposes and call it democracy would be malevolent trickery. But a far deeper problem would be its destructive impact on the already unbalanced relationship between the branches of our government.

We have a bad habit in Canada of referring to the incumbent cabinet as “the Harper government,” “the Wynne government,” “the Notley government” or what have you. It’s not just careless shorthand by pundits or a reflection of our tendency to personalize politics analytically and operationally. It endorses while concealing the swollen pretension of the executive branch.

Our constitutional convention that the heads of various executive departments, that is, ministers including the prime minister, must be drawn from the legislative branch was created to keep the executive from getting too high-handed, a response to the same 18th century British crisis that led to the American Revolution. It was a different answer than the rigorous American separation of powers barring legislators from executive posts. But it was an answer to the same question: How do we the people continue to rein in the executive branch?