Don proportional systems distort the vote and allow tiny regional or ethnic parties to gain huge amounts of power?
This can sometimes be an issue with certain kinds of proportional systems, such as the pure party list system used in Israel. On the other hand, there are other countries that use that system (such as the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands) which haven’t had these kinds of problems. Also, our existing First Past the Post system distorts the vote in precisely these ways already–in the 2004 federal election, for example, the Bloc Québecois received 54 seats with only 12.4% of the vote. So even if Canada did go with a pure party list system, there’s every reason to believe that this aspect of things would still be better than it is now. In general, though, I agree that it’s a good idea to prevent tiny, single-issue parties from gaining too much power, which is why it’s a good thing that there are proportional systems that prevent these problems. Under Mixed Member Proportional, each party is required to surpass a threshold of 5% in order to assume seats. Single Transferable Vote
