From Jul 1, 2024:

We hope you're enjoying the Canada Day weekend. In our last email, we outlined the broad strokes of our appeal in the Charter Challenge for Fair Voting. In short, while we feel that the judge at our initial hearing (Justice Ed Morgan) made several key findings of fact that strongly support our argument, we also believe that he "fell into error" by not drawing the appropriate legal implications from these findings.

In this update, and others to follow in the coming weeks, we'll share some more specific arguments we're making in our appeal.

The Judge Mischaracterized PR vs FPTP as Requiring "Trade-Offs"

Our first argument is that the judge incorrectly cast the choice of electoral system as a "contest of values" (see paragraph 10 in our appeal), claiming that Proportional Representation (PR) privileges the fair and even representation of voters, the democratic satisfaction of voters, and electoral turnout, while First-Past-the-Post privileges “political effectiveness” and promoting regional interests.

To support this finding, the judge cited the Report of the Special Committee of the House of Commons on Electoral Reform, but our lawyer, Nicolas Rouleau, feels that his interpretation significantly mischaracterizes the ERRE report.

Nicolas points out (p11) that the ERRE report actually found that there are numerous PR options for Canada that wouldn't involve any such trade-offs, but would in fact uphold the values of local and regional representation and stable government while also accurately representing the will of voters. He also points out that the report explicitly identified FPTP's failure to represent regional diversity as one of its central deficiencies (p13).

Nicolas also emphasizes that the judge failed to properly account for the fact that the so-called "strengths" of FPTP (particularly "simplicity" and higher odds of producing "majority governments") are not values protected by the Charter (i.e., representation, participation, equality), while those promoted by PR are. 

In short, we argue that the judge erred by falsely describing the choice between proportional voting systems and FPTP as a trade-off between equally valid values and are asking the court to recognize that (a) FPTP violates our key charter-protected rights, and (b) the so-called trade-offs cited by the judge are not supported by the evidence, so his conclusions based on these findings should be set aside.

In upcoming emails, we'll share more of our arguments. Next up - a brief summary of key findings of fact the judge made that we feel he downplayed in making his decision.