Careful what you wish for: Proportional representation is the opposite of a democratic panacea when it leads to fascism, just ask Israelis
It's intellectually honest to change opinions when new information comes along, and wow was I wrong about pro-rep
After every single federal or provincial election in Canada, lesser parties and others interested in electoral reform clamour about the need for proportional representation in Canada.
The same reasons come up year after year: “Fairness” and “wasted votes” and “everyone hates Toronto.”
If 6.3 per cent of the population votes for a political party, wouldn’t it be nice if that party instead of seven seats had 22, which is 6.3 per cent of 343. It would be more fair.
Votes for very small parties wouldn’t be wasted, and the winning parties wouldn’t have such a disproportionate number of seats.
Our federal government makeup in Ottawa would also not be decided before polls even close in Vancouver, mostly by the Greater Toronto Area where 20 per cent of the Canadian population lives in 62 electoral districts covering less than 0.07 per cent of the nation's land mass.
It’s OK to change your mind
Any scientist or observer of the world who is looking for truth should have the intellectual honesty to change their mind when new evidence comes along.
I was once a strong proponent of proportional representation, the electoral system that several democracies around the world use, but one that is at least part of the reason tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, and the democratic nation of Israel is slipping into genocidal fascism, a tragic irony to be sure.
The world watches with either vicarious pleasure, pathological ambivalence, or an intellectually empty policy of appeasement as Israeli defence forces, under the direction of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government, slaughter, maim, starve and traumatize hundreds of thousands people who were already living in a state of occupation in the open-air prison that is the Gaza strip.
It is at least arguable, and perhaps true, that the root cause of the scale of the unjust war in Gaza is proportional representation.
Here’s why: Proportional representation (PR) is an electoral system that is more representative of voting intentions than a first-past-the-post system. There are many varieties of PR, but simply put, elections using PR allocate seats to political parties based on the proportion of votes cast. In our current system, the government is formed by the party that wins the most seats, but not necessarily the most votes.
In federal elections, if you vote Liberal or NDP or Green or People’s Party of Canada in the Eastern Fraser Valley in B.C. or rural Alberta, your vote is flushed down the toilet because a Conservative always wins even if they don’t really campaign or communicate with voters.
One form of PR includes a parliament filled half, or in some other fraction, with those who are elected directly in their respective ridings. The rest of the seats are filled with names from a list provided by the parties that creates a proportional representation more closely matching how people voted. For example, if we divided Canada up into 300 electoral districts instead of 343, we would still have 343 MPs but the extra 143 would be picked off party lists to get the representation proportional.
In the Canadian federal election on April 28, 2025, the Liberals won 43.7 per cent of the vote but got 49.3 per cent of the 343 seats in Parliament. The NDP got 6.3 per cent of the vote and just two per cent of the seats. Doesn't seem fair, does it?
I don’t know exactly what type of pro-rep system is used in Israel, but essentially the 120 seats in the Knesset are divided up using PR after an election. One thing that happens in first-past-the-post electoral systems is smaller parties tend to come and go, dissolving completely until we are left with two-party systems such as exist in the United States. Not ideal.
There are dozens of fringe parties you have never heard of in Canada because they only run a few candidates and certainly never get a substantial number of votes. In Canada we also have not-fringe parties such as the Green Party and the People’s Party of Canada (PPC). Well-known as they are, the Greens are withered down to one lonely seat while the PPC went from 4.9 per cent in 2021 to 0.7 per cent in 2025.
In debates about PR over the years where I have been a proponent, those opposed point to Israel and Italy as examples of countries where two things happen:
1. Fragile coalitions are formed to govern, which means Israelis and Italians rarely live in stability for long and have frequent elections; and
2. The system allows for extremists to win seats and, sometimes, become part of a government coalition.
I always brushed off these criticisms although both do indeed occur. Democracy isn’t supposed to be clean and tidy, it’s messy and complicated. Israel had four federal elections between 2019 and 2021 before they could come up with a governing coalition.
Because elected representatives are more proportionally representing how people voted, strategic voting isn’t as necessary. This allows small, fringe parties to, if not thrive, at least exist. In 2025, the PPC and even the NDP were decimated as Canadians knew we would have Mark Carney or Pierre Poilievre as prime minister and, divided more than every, with an existential crisis on the ballot, people fled those radical right wingers and socialists to ensure the Liberals or Conservatives won.
In our current system in Canada, unstable meat puppets such as Maxime Bernier are left to chirp on X/Twitter, and are ignored in the media while the adults in Parliament conduct business. If, however, we had a pro-rep system as described above, in the 2021 election when the PPC received 4.9 per cent (the threshold in Israel is 3.25 per cent) of the ballots cast, that would have meant 16 or 17 PPC MPs.
EXCLUSIVE: Canada Should Adopt America's 2nd Amendment Self-Defense Castle Laws, Says Top Canadian Conservative Maxime Bernier
— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) April 25, 2025
» LIVE X STREAM:https://t.co/JfMrWqQXoT pic.twitter.com/XBMmLQ4Scu
Can you say "Yikes?"
Welcome to Israel where Netanyahu runs a coalition government formed with people far scarier, far more extremist than Bernier and his fear-mongering populists.
PR and the ugly face of fascism
The man pictured in the photo above with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is Itamar Ben Gvir, leader of the far-right, ultra-nationalist Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party.
Yes, Jewish Power. Sounds like "White Power" and there’s a reason. Israel’s Minister of National Security is a fanatical Zionist settler who openly calls for the ethnic cleansing of Arabs in Gaza and is not just supportive of, but is in charge of directing the bombing of civilians, aid workers, and critical infrastructure.
The Jewish supremacist was feted at Mar-A-Lago by Donald Trump in April and he encouraged Zionists in America to rampage through the streets where they chanted “Death to Arabs” and beat up Jewish anti-genocide protesters, according to reports, including a young Jewish woman who was beaten and hospitalized by Zionists on April 24, 2025.
Long before it came to the place where Netanyahu is beholden to a genocidal far-right party, and long before the current war crimes were taking place in Gaza post October 7, 2023, even leading figures responsible for law and order in Israel called Gvir out. Shortly after he was elected to the Knesset in March 2021, Israel’s police chief blamed Gvir for adding fuel to the fire in Jerusalem stirring up hatred that led to violent demonstrations, reuniting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"The person who is responsible for this Intifada is Itamar Ben Gvir," Israel's police chief, Kobi Shabtai, told Netanyahu in a morning briefing in May 2021 as reported by France 24.
This is a man who, at the age of 19 in 1995, got public attention for brandishing the Cadillac emblem torn off then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s car in front of TV cameras.
“We got to his car,” Gvir said on the news. “We’ll get to him, too.”
They did. A Jewish extremist assassinated Rabin a few weeks later.
Gvir has been charged more than 50 times since adolescence most notably for incitement to hatred. He became a lawyer, by his own words, to defend himself and then became the go-to lawyer for Jewish extremists and Zionist fanatics.
“In 2006, for example, he defended two teenagers accused of participating in the attack on a house in the West Bank where two parents and their baby were burned alive,” France 24 reported.
In the lead-up to the 2022 election in Israel, Gvir toured a Jerusalem neighbourhood market called Mahane Yehuda where he was greeted like a rock star.
“Mahane Yehuda is a well-known bastion of right-wing sentiment, but until recently, a visit by Ben Gvir, 46, would have been little more than a minor curiosity,” the Times of Israel reported.
“But just over a year after squeaking into the Knesset as part of Bezalel Smotrich’s far-right Religious Zionism alliance, polls show Ben Gvir leading the party to a commanding Knesset position.”
This is a man “who, until recently, had a picture of a mass-murderer hanging in his living room.”
This is what you get with PR
It is because of small extremist parties with seats in the Knesset and because of PR that they were then invited to form a coalition with Netanyahu’s Likud Party in 2021.
On Oct. 7, 2023, Israel was infamously attacked by Hamas, and 1,200 people were killed, hundreds kidnapped, many held prisoners in Gaza. Netanyahu, not exactly a centrist himself, had to become a strongman and attack. But the prime minister was increasingly beholden to far-right fringe voices in his coalition, such as Gvir.
It’s quite possible that Benjamin Netanyahu might have thought adhering to international law was the right move. He might have thought bombing hospitals was a bad idea, as was killing children, murdering journalists and aid workers, and intentionally starving people. He might even have wanted to sign a ceasefire agreement, release Palestinian political prisoners in exchange for kidnapped Israelis.
But to remain in power that was held by a tenuous coalition because of Israel’s PR electoral system, he couldn’t do any of that.
Proportional representation not only got religious extremists such as Ben Gvir elected, the system gave them political clout, so much so that their extremist ideology is leading to the devastation of the Palestinian people with Israel intentionally creating a humanitarian crisis while committing war crimes in an unjust conflict that will never be forgotten.
It's intellectually honest to admit when you are wrong and boy was I wrong about proportional representation.
Speculative results
If Canada had a PR system like my simplified version above, and if the voting percentages went exactly the same as they did on April 28, 2025 (and they would not have), instead of 169 seats, the Liberals would have just 150; the Conservatives would move from 144 to 142; the Bloc Quebecois would be exactly the same at 22; the NDP would go from seven to 22; the Greens would have four seats; and if the threshold to get elected didn’t exist, the PPC would have two seats.
Of course, if the threshold was the same as it is in Israel at more than three per cent, neither the PPC (0.7%) nor the Greens (1.2%) would have a single seat in Parliament.
Some other important elements of the results that would have been different with a no-threshold PR system:
• Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre wouldn’t have to make someone resign to have a byelection, he’d get in because of the party list
• New Democrat Party leader Jagmeet Singh wouldn’t have to resign, same thing
• PPC leader Maxime Bernier would have a seat
• Green co-leader Jonathan Pedneault would have a seat
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Paul J. Henderson
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