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Manly said the Liberals “have no ground game” in the riding and “haven’t elected someone here since 1940.” He also slammed the NDP for failing to “make proportional representation part of their confidence and supply agreement” with the Liberals and mused that it might be regretting that decision with “plummeting” poll numbers.

“There’s quite a large majority in Nanaimo—Ladysmith against the Conservatives, but the Conservatives are currently projected to win, and that wouldn’t happen in another more proportional electoral system,” he said. “If the Conservatives are going to lose in this riding, the non-Conservative vote has to coalesce around one of the candidates, and currently it’s not doing that.”

Both the Green Party and the NDP have long-advocated Canada’s first-past the post system be reformed, with the Greens advocating for a “proportional representation” system and the NDP arguing for a “mixed member proportional” system

Mackenzie, who served as a policy analyst with the citizen’s assembly on electoral reform in Ontario in 2006, said that it’s a “very good way to assess the electoral system” as political parties have vested interests in how elections are conducted and a citizen’s assembly would be a “randomly selected group of people representing the population as a whole.”