Once again, Canada's antiquated first-past-the-post system wasted millions of votes, distorted results, severely punished large blocks of voters, exaggerated regional differences, created an unrepresentative Parliament and may possibly have even given us the wrong government.

The chief victims of the January 23 Federal Election were:

• Western Liberals: In the prairie provinces, Conservatives got three times as many votes as Liberals did, but won nearly ten times as many seats.

“If Canada had been using some type of proportional representation, like most other major democracies, the election results would have been very different,” said Larry Gordon, executive director of Fair Vote Canada.

If seats had been awarded to parties on the basis of the votes they received, the Liberals, Bloc and Conservatives would have had fewer seats and the NDP and Green Party more seats. For example, rather than 135 seats, the Liberals would have received about 113.