‘A Civil Rights Issue’: Groups Hope Courts Will Toss Out Canada's First-Past-the-Post Voting System

With Canada's federal election happening right now a big topic in left-leaning online spaces (and I suppose in real life too if you like talking about politics in person) is strategic voting. Canada has one major conservative party which consolidates right-wing votes but left-wing votes are divided among 2–4 parties. The upshot of this is that Canada could get a Conservative government with only about a third of Canadians voting for it, so there's a lot of pressure to vote "strategically" for whatever non-Conservative party has a chance of winning your local riding. In practice, this typically means telling people to vote for the Liberals, the main centre/centre-left party, and it contributes to the idea that votes for any other parties are wasted. In fact the main third party, the NDP, are sometimes called "the dippers" partly because of the idea that they "dip" into rightful Liberal votes.

Reading (and taking party in) some of the debates I started to think of the issue in terms of voting rights: even if there's no 'clear majority' of support for electoral reform, why should the support of the majority be required when the issue at hand is a minority of voters being disenfranchised? (Beyond just the pressures of strategic voting, if your vote doesn't elect someone in your riding it essentially doesn't count. Tough luck if your riding is a 'safe seat' for a party you don't support.) And why should we depend on political parties for change when the parties that form government are the ones that benefit from the current system? (In fact, the Liberals had promised electoral reform when they were at risk of becoming a 3rd party themselves but they reneged on that after winning a majority government.)

So, I did a search for more information on this topic and it turns out that a court case had just been filed arguing that the current voting system is unconstitutional. Obviously this is too late to affect next week's election but I'll be very interested to see where this goes. However it happens I look forward to the day when every Canadian vote counts.