Andrew Coyne: Our winner-take-all system turns too many voters into losers and leaders into gamblers

If we were trying to come up with a way to divide and destroy the country, we could hardly do a better job of it than the first past the post system

 https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/election-2019/andrew-coyne-our-winner-take-all-system-turns-too-many-voters-into-losers-and-leaders-into-gamblers?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter&fbclid=IwAR11ZPfcNiDN-3kpg2cVbaYN0v8YtGq__Ixi9xkgObwsovn972MmXi9jtH4

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.