Canadian electoral reform is on life support and, at a national level, debate is overdue. But is one system really better than the other?

Is electoral reform in Canada dead? The initial diagnosis is not good.

Five recent provincial electoral reform efforts have failed. Voters in British Columbia, Ontario, and Prince Edward Island rejected the reform proposals presented to them, and reform initiatives in Québec and New Brunswick fizzled before even getting to the referendum stage.

These failures have put electoral reform in Canada on life support. Before picking out a tombstone, however, I would get a second opinion regarding its chances of recovery. Indeed, as long as those who see value in electoral reform don't give up, change is possible.

I for one am hopeful that the failure of these provincial reform initiatives will not preclude a national debate because Parliament is deeply flawed, and electoral reform has the potential to fix some of the problems that undermine its fairness and effectiveness.

At present, we use an electoral system called first-past-the-post or, more formally, single-member plurality. In this system, a candidate for office wins a seat in the legislature by getting more votes than any other candidate running for the same seat. It is winner-take-all and you don't need to get a majority of votes to win. All you need is more votes than the next closest candidate.

Say that there are three candidates running for a particular seat – the victor can win the seat with as little as 34 per cent of the popular vote. Indeed, it is typical in Canada for a party to win a majority of seats with only a minority of the popular vote.

An alternative to first-past-the-post that is quite popular in democracies around the world is called proportional representation. This can take many forms, but the basic idea is that the legislative results reflect the proportion of votes cast. For example, if 40 per cent of people vote for Party A, 35 per cent for Party B, and 25 per cent for Party C, then each party gets the same percentage of seats in the legislature as its share of the popular vote.

Which system is better? There is no right answer as there are pros and cons to both systems and their many variations.

What is clear, however, is that a dose of electoral reform at the national level is overdue.

The reason for this is the tendency of the first-past-the-post electoral system, working in tandem with longstanding regional voting patterns, to nearly shut out some parts of the country from the government side of the House of Commons.

For example, when Jean Chrétien's Liberals won the 2000 election, they did so with only 14 out of 88 western Canadian seats. When Stephen Harper's Conservatives formed a minority government in 2008, they did so with the support of only 10 seats out of Québec's 75. No matter how hard prime ministers try to address these representational shortfalls, the fact of the matter is that the current system tends to create severe regional representation imbalances on the government side of the house.

Grafting on some form of proportional representation to the current electoral system would help alleviate these regional imbalances by evening out the geographic distortions. Liberals would get a few more seats in western Canada, the Conservatives would get a few more in central and Atlantic Canada, and so on.

This would not solve the regional representation problem in its entirety (the dreaded spectre of Senate reform is needed to do that), but it would get us part way down the road.

At the same time, adding some form of proportional representation to how we select MPs would bring with it other pros and cons. What we need, therefore, is a serious debate about these pros and cons. If the pros carry the day, all that is needed is an Act of Parliament to put in place a new system – perhaps even on a trial basis.

Ideally, the precedent set by B.C.'s Citizens' Assembly for Electoral Reform would be followed and Canadian citizens would get a chance to both design the new system and vote on its implementation. That would be a healthy debate for us to have given the democratic reform paralysis that has kept change at bay in Ottawa for decades.

It is too bad that the provincial reform efforts failed as one or all of them would have provided a live Canadian experiment with an alternative system that we could learn from and a spur to change at the national level.

Now is not the time to give up on strengthening Canadian democracy. Now is the time to press on and ensure that the debate gains a beachhead. If it doesn't, the chances that regional differences will once again divide Canada will go up rather than down.