For immediate release
November 8, 2011

In Monday's provincial election in Saskatchewan, the Saskatchewan Party got 64.21% of the votes, the NDP got 31.99%, and the Green Party got 2.88%.

Simple logic would suggest that if there are 58 seats in the Saskatchewan Legislature, then surely the Saskatchewan Party must have won 37 seats, the NDP 19, and the remaining two seats will have gone to the Green Party.

In fact, thanks to the magic of first-past-the-post voting, the Saskatchewan Party won 49 seats (84.48%), the NDP 9 seats (15.52%), and the Green Party was shut out as usual.

"Now, there's no doubt who won here," says Shoni Field, President of Fair Vote Canada, Canada's national grassroots movement for electoral reform. ”Brad Wall's Saskatchewan Party received a healthy endorsement from the voters of Saskatchewan.”

"But the people of Saskatchewan are not well served by a system that delivers an Opposition only half the size it should be.”

"The purpose of the Legislative Assembly is to hold the Government accountable," says Field. "It doesn’t make for a healthy democracy when distorted election results give us bloated governments and neutered oppositions. There is no good reason why we would continue to use a system that fails to accurately reflect how Saskatchewan voters, indeed all Canadian voters, actually cast their ballots."

"No one has a good explanation for this," adds FVC Executive Director Wayne Smith, "Except, well, that's the way we've always done it. We still use the system we inherited from our colonial masters, while most developed countries switched to proportional voting systems a century ago."

"Proportional representation," adds Smith, "is just a fancy way of saying you get what you vote for."

Meanwhile, our former colonial masters have adopted newer, proportional systems in regional parliaments in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Fellow former colonies New Zealand and South Africa switched to proportional voting systems in the 1990s, and Australia has had a proportional Senate since 1948.

"Someday soon, Canada will catch up to the 20th Century and adopt a proportional voting system” says Smith. “Then we can start developing solutions for the problems of the 21st Century."

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Contact:

Shoni Field, President
604-720-0541
Shoni.Field@FairVote.Ca

Wayne Smith, Executive Director
416-407-7009
Wayne.Smith@FairVote.Ca