Coalition for Electoral Reform

Sixteen Civil Society Organizations Call for Electoral Reform to Be a Major Issue in the 2026 Quebec General Election

On the occasion of International Democracy Day, and one year ahead of the next general election, sixteen (16) civil society organizations are joining forces to demand that electoral reform become one of the key issues in the election campaign, which will conclude on October 5, 2026.

They are calling on all political parties to explain the solutions they intend to propose to the people of Quebec in order to put an end to the democratic deficits caused by the first-past-the-post electoral system.

The results of the 2022 election clearly demonstrated the shortcomings of the current electoral model, which creates serious distortions in representation when seats are allocated in the National Assembly.

But there is more. By grossly distorting the picture of the political will of the people of Quebec, this flawed system creates artificially inflated parliamentary majorities. With their extensive legislative powers, such majorities can enable governments to make serious mistakes or abuse their power, as both current events and our long history have shown.

Rather than delivering the supposed benefit of political stability, the current system often leads to instability in public policies adopted by parliamentary majorities that do not reflect political reality. Governments controlling these parliamentary majorities introduce reforms, often through closure motions, which subsequently overturn previous reforms that were themselves adopted without the support needed to ensure their long-term viability.

The repeated, sweeping and erratic restructuring of Quebec’s public health and social services network is perhaps the most troubling example of this phenomenon in our province, to the point of threatening the system’s very sustainability.

In both the United States and Canada, the increasingly radical successive reversals of environmental policies over the past fifteen years provide other striking examples. Yet, maintaining consistent efforts to combat climate change is absolutely essential to limiting its consequences.

To establish new forms of governance capable of meeting the challenges of our time and to restore public confidence in the political class, which is essential to the preservation of our democracy, we must therefore modernize the process through which our elected representatives are chosen.

Inspired by Bill 39, introduced in 2019 and withdrawn in December 2021 despite the Legault government’s solemn commitments, Bill 499, introduced in the National Assembly in October 2023 by Québec solidaire, in collaboration with the Parti Québécois, and whose principles were supported by the Conservative Party, the Green Party and Climat Québec, is specifically designed to achieve this objective.

It proposes a new mixed-member proportional representation system with regional party lists. Under this system, the representation of the major political parties would much more accurately reflect the popular vote than it does under the current system, and this across all regions of Quebec.

Like many other democracies around the world, Quebec has seen its political landscape fragment in recent years, with several major political parties emerging. We are now a long way from the traditional two-party system that once characterized our political life. Our electoral system must therefore adapt to this new reality.

A recent projection by the QC125 polling aggregator even raised the possibility of a majority government being formed with just 31% of the popular vote. The democratic legitimacy of maintaining the status quo in this regard is no longer sustainable.

The artificial parliamentary majorities produced by the current electoral system are no longer capable of providing lasting solutions to the serious societal challenges that continue to accumulate.

The growing scale and complexity of the challenges facing a modern society like ours now require that the parliamentary majorities responsible for shaping public policy take into account a much broader range of perspectives than those represented by a single political party supported by only a minority of the population.

Turning to coalition governments, as is already the practice in many Western democracies, would require political parties to adopt practices that foster the broadest possible consensus. This would encourage the development of more sustainable public policies, better suited to addressing the increasingly complex challenges and finding solutions to the many new issues facing Quebec.

But all of this begins with the adoption of a new mixed-member proportional representation system with regional party lists, such as the one proposed in Bill 499, so that the National Assembly may finally reflect the true political realities of Quebec.