What I keep coming back to in this Quebec election is that the votes and the seats don’t match.

In a single riding, first-past-the-post (FPTP), where the candidate with the most votes wins, sounds simple enough: whoever comes first goes to the National Assembly to represent the area. But add up the results of all 127 ridings and the Assembly no longer looks like the way Quebecers voted.

Here are Élections Québec’s counts as of 2:32 p.m. on October 7 (results are not yet official; seats are attributed to the candidate leading in each riding):

Party Share of valid votes Seats Share of seats
Parti Québécois (PQ) 28.02% 59 46.46%
Quebec Liberal Party (PLQ) 24.23% 40 31.50%
Conservative Party of Quebec (PCQ) 20.66% 19 14.96%
Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) 13.35% 0 0.00%
Québec solidaire (QS) 12.42% 9 7.09%
Other parties and independents 1.32% 0 0.00%

Calculated from data published by Élections Québec. Vote shares use all valid votes as the denominator; seat shares use 127 seats. Totals may not add up exactly because of rounding.

With 28% of the popular vote, the PQ won nearly 46.5% of the seats, five short of the 64 it needs for a majority on its own. The CAQ, the outgoing government, got 572,000 votes (13.35%) and not a single seat. No party has a majority, but that does not make the rules fair.

Even if you don’t support the CAQ, it is hard to call this result reasonable. More than half a million people voted, and nobody in the Assembly speaks for them. Whether a set of rules is fair should not depend on whether this time’s winner is the party you like.

Now look riding by riding. In 100 of the 127 ridings, the winner got less than half the vote. Taken together, the 127 winners received only 41.73% of all votes cast. The other 58.27%, close to 2.5 million votes, did not translate into a single seat.

Supporters of FPTP often say that once elected, a member represents every voter in the riding, not just one party. That is true. What it leaves out is that on the question of who forms government and who holds power, the rules filter out the choices of more than half the voters. The claim that each area elects the person who best represents it no longer holds up when several parties compete. The current rules only decide who scooped up the most chips in the scramble. Whether the Assembly reflects the range of political opinion across Quebec is not something they deal with.

People often say FPTP is the natural foundation of parliamentary democracy. Yet among developed democracies, few still elect their national legislature by this rule alone, and several countries that share the Commonwealth tradition have moved away from it. Australia dropped FPTP in 1918, switching to preferential (ranked) voting for the House of Representatives, and the Senate moved to the single transferable vote (STV) in 1948. New Zealand, after seeing similar gaps between votes and seats, voted in a referendum in the 1990s to abolish the FPTP system it had inherited from Britain and adopted mixed-member proportional representation (MMP). When the United Kingdom set up the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly in 1999, it also chose a mixed system.

France, the country across the Atlantic whose people Quebecers call their “cousins” (nos cousins), used proportional representation under the Fourth Republic. The National Assembly of the Fifth Republic is elected in two rounds: to win in the first round, a candidate needs more than half the valid votes, and those votes must add up to at least a quarter of registered voters; otherwise voters go back to the polls, and in that second round the candidate with the most votes wins, majority or not. European and regional elections use proportional representation. Quebec’s civil law comes from the French tradition, and Quebecers have long defended their distinctiveness (société distincte) in language, culture and law. So what moral reason does Quebec have to keep its democracy tied to the Westminster rules that British colonial authorities brought over in the 18th century?

Closing the gap means bringing in some degree of proportional representation (PR). Riding representation and proportional representation can coexist. An MMP system keeps riding members, and with them the local connection, while adding compensatory party seats that bring each party’s total close to its share of the vote.

Reform does come with technical hurdles and costs: how large the share of compensatory seats should be, how to handle vast, thinly populated regions, how to keep party lists from being drawn up behind closed doors, and the adjustment to coalition governments becoming the norm. These concerns are reasonable. But these costs weigh less than the legitimacy problem created when nearly 60% of votes win no seats. Public opinion in a modern society is deeply divided. The Assembly’s job is to show those divisions as they are and look for compromise from there. A majority manufactured by the voting rules cannot do that.

On page 15 of its 2026 platform, the PQ did commit in black and white to electoral reform, with a proportional element. But it has just turned 28% of the vote into nearly 46.5% of the seats. How much incentive does a party that has just won big under the current rules have to take apart the ladder it climbed?

In 2019, the CAQ also tabled an electoral reform bill, Bill 39. It was adopted in principle in 2020, then shelved once the party’s hold on power was secure.

Unless citizens and civil society keep up the pressure, the PQ’s promise could well end up as one more scrap of paper. To judge whether the PQ means it, look at two things: whether, once in office, it puts a timeline into law, and whether its proposal includes real compensatory seats or just tinkering.