Blame first-past-the-post for Canada's growing rural-urban divide

This column is an opinion from Colin Walmsley, a representative for Fair Vote Alberta and a former national councillor for Fair Vote Canada. For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.

Congrats, Canada. You made it through a gruelling five-week campaign to end up with… well, pretty much exactly the same Parliament as before. I'm sorry if your election night watch party — like mine — was a dud, but you at least have to hand it to the TV commentators. Faced with getting us to care about what may be Canada's least interesting election results, they tried to spice up our night with some saucy language. 

Toronto has locked out the Tories; the West is a Conservative bastion; Vancouver's a progressive melange; the Greens have been swept off the map; and so on and so forth. Commentators pulled up their maps, coloured in like a child's paint-by-numbers Canada, and told us of a country divided between the conservative rural regions and the progressive cities. 

In reality, regions don't vote. People do. And if we want to address the growing regional rifts in Canada — rural vs. urban, east vs. west, separatist vs. federalist — future elections should use a proportional voting system that reflects this basic fact.

Though you wouldn't know it by looking at a map of our election results, we aren't quite as divided as our land-centric electoral system would make it seem. Millions of rural Canadians regularly vote for progressive parties, just like millions of urban Canadians vote for conservative ones. 

First-past-the-post obscures this fact by giving one politician in each riding 100 per cent of the power with a simple plurality of the vote, denying any representation to minority voices. A proportional voting system would instead showcase the diversity of opinions across Canada by allowing the election of both conservative and progressive voices in every region, urban and rural.

While it's true that British Columbians rejected proportional representation in a 2018 referendum, opponents of electoral reform have established much of their success by inaccurately painting proportional representation as a divisive and unworkable system.