Peter Russell, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, and former president of the Canadian Political Science Association, said the major party leaders' aversion to majority coalition government may provoke a constitutional crisis. Russell outlined his concerns at the Eighth Annual Templeton Lecture in Winnipeg on October 15. See news article here.

Cameras from four television networks recorded Ed Broadbent, Nathalie Des Rosiers and John Trent as they became the first three signers of the Declaration of Voters’ Rights at an October 16 press conference.

Ed Broadbent at FVC press conference

Fair Vote Canada developed the Declaration to give voters a means of demanding our democratic rights to equal votes, fair election results and legitimate majority rule.

The recent German election results provide a classic illustration of how badly first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting can distort election results in a multi-party political system.

If Germans had used FPTP in last weekend’s election, Angela Merkel would have won 73% of the seats with just 39% of the votes - dwarfing the Canadian record for distorted election results (set by Brian Mulroney in 1984, when 50% of the votes translated into 75% of the seats for the Tories).

Today Fair Vote Canada released a paper on why the Alternative Vote (AV), sometimes called Instant Run-off Voting, is not a solution for Canada's democracy deficit. The paper documents how AV, another form of winner-take-all voting, fails to meet the key democratic principle of equal representation for every voter.