That's actually thanks to single-member-electorates.
As long as you have single memeber electorates, you can have one party narrowly win a whole lot while another party wins crushing landslides in fewer. In the Canadian election the Conservatives 'wasted' a lot of votes running up the popular vote scoreboard in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
I agree, but arguably switching to multi-member districts entails replacing FPTP. (Another way of looking at it is that closed party-list PR, single non-transferable vote and/or multiple non-transferable vote are generalisations of FPTP to multi-member districts. The non-transferable vote systems have a lot of disadvantages.)
True, but given that the vast majority of canadians voted for progressive candidates (green, ndp, and liberal) it's unlikely the conservatives would do better under a more fair voting system... in fact a lot of the seats they have are the result of more vote splitting on the left than the right.
Edit: i crunched the numbers.
If you pool the green + lib + ndp votes from this election, conservatives end up with only 69 seats. The reality probably wouldn't be that bad for them, since some large percentage of Liberal voters would pick Conservatives as their second choice over the NDP or Greens... but it gives you a lower bounds. i.e. they would be somewhere between where they are now and 69 seats.
That's a fair point, but it's worth noting that FPTP risks vote spitting and handing power to the wrong party. Perhaps they cancelled out in this case, but these problems often don't cancel out. These problems reduce voters' equality, power and choice, even where they do cancel out in terms of election winners.
Totally agree. I'm very much in favour of using almost ANY system other than FPTP. I'm only arguing that calling the conservatives the "party with the most votes" is a distortion of reality enabled by FPTP. They have the most votes of any single party, but their _ideas_ have far fewer votes than progressive ideas.
FPTP systematically underrepresents left-of-centre voters in legislative elections, due to their concentration in urban areas and due to their votes dividing between parties.
