OTTAWA - "I want us to have the ability to achieve what we came here to do... and proportional representation will be a big part of any discussion."

Those were the words of New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton on the eve of the 2006 election. Progressives across Canada are quick to applaud Layton for promoting this position on electoral reform, but many forget that it is only a natural fit for Jack's New Democrats. It is well understood that the NDP, whose base of support is broad across the entire breadth of Canada's ridings, would benefit hugely from the move towards proportional representation. That broad support is almost always brought low by the superior concentration of Liberal or Conservative voters in Canadian ridings. The result is a high proportional vote share, but a low result in tangibly translating that support into seats.

So Jack Layton, like his opposite in the Green Party Elizabeth May (whose own electoral fortune suffers from similar woes), has decided to take the sensible and pragmatic course. Instead of accepting that the vast majority of Canadians are uncomfortable with New Democratic representation in Parliament, particularly at the local level, Mr. Layton now seeks to change the rules of the game to fit his numbers.

Dare I suggest that Canada's Dippers and Greens may have a vested interest in seeing the status quo change?

Canadians have been bombarded with arguments suggesting that Canada's election law must move away from our traditional and British first-past-the-post, to a more continental European system of proportional representation. What that new system will look like remains hopelessly unclear: more than 300 variations on PR electoral law exist around the world, with many incorporating some elements of first-past-the-post.

Arguments abound as to why pursuing such changes to Canada's election model are irresponsible. PR is simply the wrong model for this country.

One must always first point out that PR systems are terrible at producing governments. In its first experiment with proportional representation, New Zealand required a two month hiatus before a coalition government was successfully formed. For a philosophical democrat, and for those with classically liberal notions of legitimate government, the thought should be terrifying. For two months New Zealand was ruled by a party which had lost its governing mandate, and acted as a steward while its contemporaries got their act together. Not exactly a reassuring thought.

The problem gets deeper from there. When that government was finally formed, New Zealand found itself ruled by a coalition in which the lead party had won only 13% of the popular vote. While coalitions define the phrase "brokerage politics", there is no doubt that the leader on policy development within such governments is the largest party. In this case, that party had a mandate from about 13 of every 100 people - certainly not an inspiring number.

PR advocates suggest that first-past-the-post elections produce governments which are unrepresentative of all voters. There is a certain amount of fairness to this argument. Without a doubt, the voter whose party's support has no local concentration will lose out in the equation. But there are two rightful responses to this concern: one pragmatic, one principled.

A pragmatic response would be to note that PR encourages the proliferation of small parties. PR advocates dismiss this point, and indeed, proliferating small parties (in their view, more representative of minority views ignored by larger brokerage parties) is a part of the goal of PR reform. But these are not simply small parties in the sense of membership: these are small parties in the sense of purpose and vision as well. Professor Herbert Grubel refers to the phenomenon as "pizza parliaments": larger parties without the slightest hope of forming majority governments are forced into alliances with smaller parties that often exist for the narrowest political purposes. Often times, their sole purpose is patronage.

Take for example an extreme of proportional representation: Israel. Eleven seats in the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) go to Shas, a party which represents a highly concentrated ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. In the words of McGill Professor Harold Waller, Shas is obscenely talented at exchanging a steep cheque for its religious schools in return for upholding whatever government happens to be in power at the time. For a short time, a party existed in Israel that advocated exclusively for seniors. These narrow-minded interest groups turned political parties poison the spirit of brokerage that should exist to some degree in all democracies.

The principled response to the challenge that SMP governments are illegitimate is even simpler: from a classically liberal view of democratic legitimacy, representation must be grounded on geography. That is to say, a representative should be elected by a particular locality and should advocate for that locality in Parliament. When the people of Westmount-Ville Marie, Calgary Southwest, or Eglinton-Lawrence cast a vote, they should be voting for a person to represent them as a constituency. Constituency representation is a hallmark of British parliamentary democracy. While not all proposals for proportional representation suggest we abandon constituencies, the ones that do should be tossed aside out of hand.

This is certainly a different perspective on the legitimacy of elected officials. One view demands a vote translate perfectly into parliamentary seats, the other suggests that the true worth of a vote should be at the local level and for a local representative. While both have merit, Canadian history would favour the latter. In a nation that spans some of the world's most diverse regions, it is important our politics reflect locality. PR reform does not offer us this.

In terms of local representation, SMP is the clear winner. But PR reform looks beyond local representation, and asks the question: does SMP provide ideological congruence?

What is ideological congruence? In the words of G. Bingham Powell Junior, ideological congruence involves "facilitating a better fit between voters, median legislators, and governments in their positions on a right-left dimension of political discourse." In that sense, firm ideological congruence is a state of ideal democracy where the elected representatives of Canadian citizens would be closely aligned to the voting choices and political preferences of the Canadians who elected them.

Scholars like Lijphart in 1994 and Rae in 1967 had reinforced what Powell refers to as a "scholarly consensus" around the notion that PR models facilitate a greater amount of ideological congruence than do SMP systems. It was this thinking, the idea that voters were better represented within PR systems, that likely fuels a great deal of academic support for proportional representation. In his presentation to the Ontario Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform, Dan Mailer of Citizen Impact Canada noted that "(he) was the only speaker of ten who argued against a move towards a proportional representation model."

Powell’s findings regarding ideological congruence turn the traditional argument on its head. In evaluating reliable new data, Powell found that ideological congruence was not a natural result of proportional representation, and neither was it found to be particularly more strongly associated with that electoral model than single member pluralities. Indeed, "which electoral systems offers voters the advantage in producing ideological congruence depends on the relative successes and failures of these somewhat different processes." Each model requires a different set of conditions to produce congruence, but one model did not produce congruence particularly over the other.

At the end of the day, electoral models are public policy choices, and these choices produce outcomes with strengths and weaknesses. Herbert Grubel is a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute, a Professor of Economic Emeritus at Simon Fraser University, and a retired MP from the now defunct Reform Party of Canada. Writing on the topic of proposed PR reform, Grubel hit it right on the head with the following comment:

"Canadians who are impressed by the arguments for proportional voting systems should remember that its advocates are not giving us the whole picture.  Like ideologues of all stripes, they criticize the existing system without considering its benefits while they present a utopian view of their preferred alternative without considering its shortcomings.  Canadians should not let themselves be misled by this technique."

There is no magic button to address the flaws in Canada's electoral system. But many of those flaws hurt only one particular group of people: small parties like the Greens and the NDP.

I have no doubt proportional representation would help Jack Layton and Elizabeth May. But would it help Canadians? Would it help our democracy? I wouldn’t count on it.