Election night in Quebec.

First-past-the-post/district-based electoral systems produce distortions in many places, including the US. But yesterday's Quebec election takes the cake. The ruling right-wing nationalist CAQ party converted 41% of the vote into an overwhelming 72% of the seats. 23 of the remaining 35 seats were taken by the Liberal Party, which finished 4th in the popular vote, but had their support more efficiently distributed than the other opposition parties.

While this is an extreme case, major disjunctions between popular vote and seat outcomes are not unusual in Canada. In the recent Ontario election, the ruling Progressive Conservative Party converted 41% of the vote into 2/3 of the seats. In the last 2 Canadian federal elections, Justin Trudeau's liberals managed stay in power and form "minority" governments, despite not even getting a plurality of the popular vote (they got about 1/3 of the vote each time, both times slightly less than the Conservatives).

This makes the impact of the GOP skew in the US Senate and gerrymandering in the House seem modest by comparison!

Of course, in all of these cases, you can argue the strategy of the election would have been different with a different electoral system. And you can also argue that electoral system skewing benefits groups that are disadvantaged in other ways (e.g. - the CAQ, like the GOP in the US, disproportionately gets the support of rural people and lesser-educated members of the ethnic majority, who arguably have lower nonelectoral political influence than more educated urbanites). Republicans in the US love to make these kinds of arguments!

But if you think electoral systems should ensure that representation doesn't diverge too much from the distribution of public opinion, and that each vote has as equal an impact as possible, then these Canadian electoral systems look pretty awful - probably worse than anything in the US, at least not in any major state (Ontario and Quebec are Canada's two biggest provinces, by population).