I've always thought that an advantage of PR is that candidates for a district's multiple seats could appeal to particular communities of interest within the district that they have an affinity to. If a constituent was having a problem with LGBTQ discrimination, for instance, they might have an LGBTQ rep to talk to, or at least could pick the one that they think would be most sympathetic. You alluded to this factor in this piece ("specialization"), although I don't quite see it reflected in your four 'Possibilities.'
Yes, having multiple members vying to serve a constituent and having one of them with particular interest in the subject of the constituent's concern is very different from say the position of an environmentalist-minded voter in Alberta trying to get his or her Conservative MLA to vote agsint fossil fuel usage.
because multi-member district are so critical they from the base of my submission to the BC special Committee on Electoral reform sent in in July 2025.
This was my submission:
Tom Monto (Author of When Canada Had PR; blogger Montopedia wix.site)
I recommend that BC switch to using Multi-Member Districts and Single Transferable Voting (STV).
MMDs should be drawn to conform to existing geographic units - cities, Regional Districts and regions like the Okanagan and the Coast. Currently electoral districts include portions of two, three or more Regional Districts, which is un-necessary. Regional Districts work as local identifiers so should be preserved in the electoral Districts by being used outright or as building blocks to compose Districts made up of multiple whole Regional Districts.
Metro Vancouver now gets one seat per 72,000 pop. and most of the rest of the province one seat per 38,000 (using 2021 census figures for Regional Districts). Under my proposal, District Magnitude (number of seats in the district) would vary and be determined based on population figures of the new MMDs using those same ratios.
The present Vancouver-to-nonVancouver disparity can be retained if desired. With MMDs of varying District Magnitude, addressing this disparity would be easy in the future with no need for redrawing boundaries, simply by adding or subtracting seats in the MMDs. Periodic redistribution of seats could also be achieved easily, by adding or subtracting seats in the MMDs. As well, the use of existing cities and BC’s Regional Districts, solely or as building blocks for Districts, means little possibility of gerrymandering, intentional or otherwise.
My proposal carries on the existing disparity, with Metro Vancouver getting one seat per 72,000 pop. and most of the rest of the province one seat per 38,000 (using 2021 census figures for Regional Districts). The Capital Regional District would have an intermediate pop.-to-seat ratio. The legislature would still have 93 MLAs.
Each District should be drawn to have a population of at least 75,000, to allow a minimum of two seats, with a maximum of 11 seats to start. This would allow room to grow - STV can work with DM of 21 or more.
In most cases Regional Districts would be grouped to compose electoral Districts. The proposed system would ensure representation of voters living in just a section of a larger MMD if voters there mark their ballots that way and if they compose a quota. This is assured because each voter would have just one vote, preferential ballots (ranked votes) would be used, and STV elects any candidate that accumulates a quota (roughly 20,000 votes).
The change to STV would improve the fairness of BC elections. The winning party's "seat bonus" would be much less than happens under FPTP, where it is common for a party with only 40 percent to form majority government, producing minority rule.
STV allocates seats fairly to each party. Under STV, each MLA is elected by the same or about the same number of votes in each district but also pretty much the same number from district to district. Districts will vary in District Magnitude, but if Districts are drawn with the same ratio of population-to-seats, the quota will be approximately the same in each District. Thus any voting block with about 1/100th of the province-wide votes (about 20,000 in the 2024 election) will elect one MLA, as long as those voters are all within one District.
Under STV each District will elect a variety of members (as voters vote in diverse ways and STV elects fairly). This would address artificially-created polarized regionalism.
Under STV, a party’s seat share in the district reflects its vote share in the district, with more-popular parties getting the same or more seats than less-popular parties.
The form of STV chosen should not be complicated. Marking of back-up preferences should be optional - the voter should not be required to mark more preferences than he or she desires. Transfer of surplus votes of winners, where necessary, should be done using the whole-vote “exact method” of transfer used from the 1920s to the 1950s in STV elections of Winnipeg, Edmonton and Calgary MLAs.
STV in many respects is the same as the FPTP system used in the 2024 BC election. No more work is required of the voter than under FPTP. When marking back-up preferences is optional as it should be, the voter can mark just one candidate, same as under FPTP. But still under STV a vote even without marked back-up preferences would be much more likely to be used to actually elect someone, and the make-up of the legislature would be much more fair and diverse, than under FPTP.
With STV the full results would not be known on election night. But the official results in the last BC election were not announced until nine days after E-day, which could easily be done under STV. In 2022, Scotland's local authorities election used STV. More than 1200 members were elected in more than 300 districts by 1.9M voters, not much less than the number who voted in the 2024 BC election, and the final result was announced within three days. Having a strong deadline for mail-in ballots helped achieve this quick result.
STV has three elements - each voter casts one vote; preferential ballots (AKA ranked votes) (most ballots would bear back-up preferences marked by the voter); and Multiple-Member Districts (MMDs) -- all things that BC has now or has used in the past:
Each voter today casts just one vote in provincial elections.
The 1952 and 1953 provincial elections used preferential ballots.
STV was used for city elections in Vancouver, Victoria, Nelson and five other BC municipalities during the 1917-1922 period. In each case it was dropped not because it did not work - politicians and election officials of the time extolled its fairness - but due to seat-greed of certain voting blocks.
Until 1990 many BC MLAs were elected in MMDs.
From 1916 to 1933 the six Vancouver MLAs were elected in a city-wide district.
Vancouver city elections use a city-wide district to elect city councillors, so a city-wide district is not unknown. Vancouver's 11 MLAs are not too numerous for all of them together to be elected using STV. Eleven is only one more than the ten that Winnipeg elected using STV back in 1920. Some might say this district would be too large, but the mayor of Vancouver alone represents that same district.
Under city-wide STV, each 9 percent of Vancouver voters would elect an MLA. This would produce a very proportional kind of representation, and the wide-ranging representatives elected there would act as spokespeople for a diverse range of voters across the province, if they were unable to elect someone of their choosing in their own district.
Each member's right to a seat should rest on his being the choice of an equal portion of the voters (what may be called a unanimous constituency, a group of voters who are self-sorted into a group of unitary sentiment).
The present use of single-member micro-districts precludes proportional representation, causes high levels of wasted votes, sometimes even prevents majority representation in the district, and splinters the electorate, preventing the election of thinly spread parties and Independent candidates. Candidates are arbitrarily protected from competition with each other by the boundaries of the micro-districts.
FPTP does not use the same number of votes to elect each MLA, and thus a party with more votes than another sometimes takes fewer seats. Or a small party is denied its rightful representation - in 2024 the Greens with 8 percent of the overall votes took 2 seats when it was due 7, while both Liberals and Conservatives took more seats than their proportional share. Dispersed voting blocks such as supporters of Independent candidates were diced and sliced by the 93 separate micro-districts. But in a larger district Independent candidates may collect enough votes to be elected, which would help prevent a repeat of the waste of all of the almost 3.5 percent of votes cast for Independent candidates in the 2024 election.
In the 2024 BC election, due to variance in the manner of vote distribution, the vote tally taken by district winners ranged from 9300 votes (39 percent of Juan de Fuca votes) to 18,000 votes (60 percent of Kamloops-North Thompson votes). Leaving aside the unavoidably-large sparsely-settled districts, voter turnout under FPTP varied from 17,000 in Vancouver South Granv. to Ladysmith’s 34,000.
In the last BC election the winner in 34 districts (almost a full third of BC’s districts) was elected by only a minority of district votes cast. One member was elected with barely more than a third of the votes in the district. FPTP's much-ballyhooed "Local Representation" is actually local misrepresentation in many cases.
part 2 of Monto submission to BC Special Commission july 2025
... District vote counts will always vary from district to district even if districts are exactly the same in population. But with larger MMDs, the variance between winners will be less, and under STV, a consistent 80 to 90 percent of votes elect the winners. A vote initially cast on an unpopular candidate may be transferred to where it might help another candidate preferred by the voter, even if that person is not as preferred as the voter’s first choice.
Under STV, all or almost all those in winning positions in the first round go on to be elected. But already in the first round the front runners are mixed and balanced.
A general provincial election is intended to compose a legislative chamber that will discuss and debate policy. To be democratic, each distinct part of the electorate should have its due share of the seats. Each substantial group should have a voice in the legislature. The legislature elected in an STV election will be balanced and diverse, and more voices will be heard than under FPTP.
An election is also a chance for voters to indicate their wishes. FPTP forces voters to self-censor themselves so does not achieve that purpose. Under STV the voter has liberty to vote for his or her preferred candidate without any need for strategic voting. Voters can have confidence that if their first choice is un-electable, marked back-up preferences will be used if necessary and if possible to direct the vote to where it can be used. About half the votes will stay with the marked first preference and be used to elect those persons. Transfers enable about 30 percent more of the ballots to be effective.
Under STV most voters will see someone elected in their district that they share views with. This is unlike FPTP where if you don't vote for the candidate that happens to get the most votes, you have no one to speak for you from your district.
BC has 27 Regional Districts, plus Stikine and Northern Rockies. I suggest five MMDs in Metro Vancouver. Capital, Fraser and Fraser-Fort George are each populous enough to be MMDs on their own. The 25 remaining areas would be building blocks, combined to form 7 Multi-Member Districts.
Suggested 15 electoral Districts:
-Metro Vancouver 36 MLAs in five MMDs (73,000 per seat) – Vanc 11; Surrey 7; the rest of Metro Vanc. 18 MLAs in 3 MMDs
-Capital (Victoria) (397,000 population) 8 MLAs (50,000 per seat)
-Vanc. Island outside Capital/West Coast Mainland (RDs - Alberni, Comox, Cowichan, Mount Waddington, Nanaimo, Strathcona) (424,000 pop.) 11 MLAs
-Kootenay - RDs - Central Kootenay; East Koot.; Koot. Boundary (160,000 pop.) - 4 MLAs
-The Okanagan (RDs - Central Okanagan, North Ok., and Ok.-Similkameen) (390,000 pop.) - 10 MLAs
STV in such districts as these would be much more fair than the present FPTP, while still preserving district representation. See my blogsite Montopedia wix.site for more information.
I've always thought that an advantage of PR is that candidates for a district's multiple seats could appeal to particular communities of interest within the district that they have an affinity to. If a constituent was having a problem with LGBTQ discrimination, for instance, they might have an LGBTQ rep to talk to, or at least could pick the one that they think would be most sympathetic. You alluded to this factor in this piece ("specialization"), although I don't quite see it reflected in your four 'Possibilities.'
Yes, having multiple members vying to serve a constituent and having one of them with particular interest in the subject of the constituent's concern is very different from say the position of an environmentalist-minded voter in Alberta trying to get his or her Conservative MLA to vote agsint fossil fuel usage.
because multi-member district are so critical they from the base of my submission to the BC special Committee on Electoral reform sent in in July 2025.
This was my submission:
Tom Monto (Author of When Canada Had PR; blogger Montopedia wix.site)
I recommend that BC switch to using Multi-Member Districts and Single Transferable Voting (STV).
MMDs should be drawn to conform to existing geographic units - cities, Regional Districts and regions like the Okanagan and the Coast. Currently electoral districts include portions of two, three or more Regional Districts, which is un-necessary. Regional Districts work as local identifiers so should be preserved in the electoral Districts by being used outright or as building blocks to compose Districts made up of multiple whole Regional Districts.
Metro Vancouver now gets one seat per 72,000 pop. and most of the rest of the province one seat per 38,000 (using 2021 census figures for Regional Districts). Under my proposal, District Magnitude (number of seats in the district) would vary and be determined based on population figures of the new MMDs using those same ratios.
The present Vancouver-to-nonVancouver disparity can be retained if desired. With MMDs of varying District Magnitude, addressing this disparity would be easy in the future with no need for redrawing boundaries, simply by adding or subtracting seats in the MMDs. Periodic redistribution of seats could also be achieved easily, by adding or subtracting seats in the MMDs. As well, the use of existing cities and BC’s Regional Districts, solely or as building blocks for Districts, means little possibility of gerrymandering, intentional or otherwise.
My proposal carries on the existing disparity, with Metro Vancouver getting one seat per 72,000 pop. and most of the rest of the province one seat per 38,000 (using 2021 census figures for Regional Districts). The Capital Regional District would have an intermediate pop.-to-seat ratio. The legislature would still have 93 MLAs.
Each District should be drawn to have a population of at least 75,000, to allow a minimum of two seats, with a maximum of 11 seats to start. This would allow room to grow - STV can work with DM of 21 or more.
In most cases Regional Districts would be grouped to compose electoral Districts. The proposed system would ensure representation of voters living in just a section of a larger MMD if voters there mark their ballots that way and if they compose a quota. This is assured because each voter would have just one vote, preferential ballots (ranked votes) would be used, and STV elects any candidate that accumulates a quota (roughly 20,000 votes).
The change to STV would improve the fairness of BC elections. The winning party's "seat bonus" would be much less than happens under FPTP, where it is common for a party with only 40 percent to form majority government, producing minority rule.
STV allocates seats fairly to each party. Under STV, each MLA is elected by the same or about the same number of votes in each district but also pretty much the same number from district to district. Districts will vary in District Magnitude, but if Districts are drawn with the same ratio of population-to-seats, the quota will be approximately the same in each District. Thus any voting block with about 1/100th of the province-wide votes (about 20,000 in the 2024 election) will elect one MLA, as long as those voters are all within one District.
Under STV each District will elect a variety of members (as voters vote in diverse ways and STV elects fairly). This would address artificially-created polarized regionalism.
Under STV, a party’s seat share in the district reflects its vote share in the district, with more-popular parties getting the same or more seats than less-popular parties.
The form of STV chosen should not be complicated. Marking of back-up preferences should be optional - the voter should not be required to mark more preferences than he or she desires. Transfer of surplus votes of winners, where necessary, should be done using the whole-vote “exact method” of transfer used from the 1920s to the 1950s in STV elections of Winnipeg, Edmonton and Calgary MLAs.
STV in many respects is the same as the FPTP system used in the 2024 BC election. No more work is required of the voter than under FPTP. When marking back-up preferences is optional as it should be, the voter can mark just one candidate, same as under FPTP. But still under STV a vote even without marked back-up preferences would be much more likely to be used to actually elect someone, and the make-up of the legislature would be much more fair and diverse, than under FPTP.
With STV the full results would not be known on election night. But the official results in the last BC election were not announced until nine days after E-day, which could easily be done under STV. In 2022, Scotland's local authorities election used STV. More than 1200 members were elected in more than 300 districts by 1.9M voters, not much less than the number who voted in the 2024 BC election, and the final result was announced within three days. Having a strong deadline for mail-in ballots helped achieve this quick result.
STV has three elements - each voter casts one vote; preferential ballots (AKA ranked votes) (most ballots would bear back-up preferences marked by the voter); and Multiple-Member Districts (MMDs) -- all things that BC has now or has used in the past:
Each voter today casts just one vote in provincial elections.
The 1952 and 1953 provincial elections used preferential ballots.
STV was used for city elections in Vancouver, Victoria, Nelson and five other BC municipalities during the 1917-1922 period. In each case it was dropped not because it did not work - politicians and election officials of the time extolled its fairness - but due to seat-greed of certain voting blocks.
Until 1990 many BC MLAs were elected in MMDs.
From 1916 to 1933 the six Vancouver MLAs were elected in a city-wide district.
Vancouver city elections use a city-wide district to elect city councillors, so a city-wide district is not unknown. Vancouver's 11 MLAs are not too numerous for all of them together to be elected using STV. Eleven is only one more than the ten that Winnipeg elected using STV back in 1920. Some might say this district would be too large, but the mayor of Vancouver alone represents that same district.
Under city-wide STV, each 9 percent of Vancouver voters would elect an MLA. This would produce a very proportional kind of representation, and the wide-ranging representatives elected there would act as spokespeople for a diverse range of voters across the province, if they were unable to elect someone of their choosing in their own district.
Each member's right to a seat should rest on his being the choice of an equal portion of the voters (what may be called a unanimous constituency, a group of voters who are self-sorted into a group of unitary sentiment).
The present use of single-member micro-districts precludes proportional representation, causes high levels of wasted votes, sometimes even prevents majority representation in the district, and splinters the electorate, preventing the election of thinly spread parties and Independent candidates. Candidates are arbitrarily protected from competition with each other by the boundaries of the micro-districts.
FPTP does not use the same number of votes to elect each MLA, and thus a party with more votes than another sometimes takes fewer seats. Or a small party is denied its rightful representation - in 2024 the Greens with 8 percent of the overall votes took 2 seats when it was due 7, while both Liberals and Conservatives took more seats than their proportional share. Dispersed voting blocks such as supporters of Independent candidates were diced and sliced by the 93 separate micro-districts. But in a larger district Independent candidates may collect enough votes to be elected, which would help prevent a repeat of the waste of all of the almost 3.5 percent of votes cast for Independent candidates in the 2024 election.
In the 2024 BC election, due to variance in the manner of vote distribution, the vote tally taken by district winners ranged from 9300 votes (39 percent of Juan de Fuca votes) to 18,000 votes (60 percent of Kamloops-North Thompson votes). Leaving aside the unavoidably-large sparsely-settled districts, voter turnout under FPTP varied from 17,000 in Vancouver South Granv. to Ladysmith’s 34,000.
In the last BC election the winner in 34 districts (almost a full third of BC’s districts) was elected by only a minority of district votes cast. One member was elected with barely more than a third of the votes in the district. FPTP's much-ballyhooed "Local Representation" is actually local misrepresentation in many cases.
... continued as reply
part 2 of Monto submission to BC Special Commission july 2025
... District vote counts will always vary from district to district even if districts are exactly the same in population. But with larger MMDs, the variance between winners will be less, and under STV, a consistent 80 to 90 percent of votes elect the winners. A vote initially cast on an unpopular candidate may be transferred to where it might help another candidate preferred by the voter, even if that person is not as preferred as the voter’s first choice.
Under STV, all or almost all those in winning positions in the first round go on to be elected. But already in the first round the front runners are mixed and balanced.
A general provincial election is intended to compose a legislative chamber that will discuss and debate policy. To be democratic, each distinct part of the electorate should have its due share of the seats. Each substantial group should have a voice in the legislature. The legislature elected in an STV election will be balanced and diverse, and more voices will be heard than under FPTP.
An election is also a chance for voters to indicate their wishes. FPTP forces voters to self-censor themselves so does not achieve that purpose. Under STV the voter has liberty to vote for his or her preferred candidate without any need for strategic voting. Voters can have confidence that if their first choice is un-electable, marked back-up preferences will be used if necessary and if possible to direct the vote to where it can be used. About half the votes will stay with the marked first preference and be used to elect those persons. Transfers enable about 30 percent more of the ballots to be effective.
Under STV most voters will see someone elected in their district that they share views with. This is unlike FPTP where if you don't vote for the candidate that happens to get the most votes, you have no one to speak for you from your district.
BC has 27 Regional Districts, plus Stikine and Northern Rockies. I suggest five MMDs in Metro Vancouver. Capital, Fraser and Fraser-Fort George are each populous enough to be MMDs on their own. The 25 remaining areas would be building blocks, combined to form 7 Multi-Member Districts.
Suggested 15 electoral Districts:
-Metro Vancouver 36 MLAs in five MMDs (73,000 per seat) – Vanc 11; Surrey 7; the rest of Metro Vanc. 18 MLAs in 3 MMDs
-Capital (Victoria) (397,000 population) 8 MLAs (50,000 per seat)
-Vanc. Island outside Capital/West Coast Mainland (RDs - Alberni, Comox, Cowichan, Mount Waddington, Nanaimo, Strathcona) (424,000 pop.) 11 MLAs
-Coast - RDs qathet; Squamish; Sunshine Ct. (107,000 pop.) - 3 MLAs
-RD Fraser Valley (pop. 324,000) - 8 MLAs
-RD Fraser-Fort George (pop 96,000) - 2 MLAs (48,000 per seat)
-Central - RDs - (RDs - Columbia-Shuswap; Cariboo; Thompson-Nicola) (260,000 pop.) 7 MLAs
-Northwest RDs Kitimat-Stik.; Central Coast; North Coast; Bulkley-Nech.; Stikine (98,000 pop.) 2 MLAs
-North - RDs Peace River; Northern Rockies - 2 MLAs
-Kootenay - RDs - Central Kootenay; East Koot.; Koot. Boundary (160,000 pop.) - 4 MLAs
-The Okanagan (RDs - Central Okanagan, North Ok., and Ok.-Similkameen) (390,000 pop.) - 10 MLAs
STV in such districts as these would be much more fair than the present FPTP, while still preserving district representation. See my blogsite Montopedia wix.site for more information.
END