A special all-party committee is recommending that the Trudeau government design a new proportional voting system and hold a national referendum to gauge how much Canadians would support it.
The long-awaited report of the electoral reform committee also recommends that the government not proceed at this time with mandatory voting or online voting.
The report, the product of a hard-won consensus among members of the committee, on which the four opposition parties held a majority, does not recommend a specific proportional voting model.
But it says whatever model the government designs should score no more than 5 on the so-called Gallagher Index, a formula for measuring the degree of disproportion between the share of votes received by parties and their share of seats in the legislature.
Canada's existing first-past-the-post system, in which the ruling party routinely wins more than 50 per cent of the House of Commons seats with less than 40 per cent of the popular vote, scores a 17.
The report does not recommend precisely how a referendum should be conducted or how many electoral options Canadians should be asked to choose among, other than to say that the existing system should also be on the ballot, along with the government's proposed new model.
More to come...