Back to the firewall. That was Ted Morton’s conclusion after his party’s latest election loss, just as it was after the last. In the view of Alberta’s senator- in-waiting, this was not just a defeat for his party, but for his province and his region. Nothing to do but pull out of the Canada Pension Plan, kick the Mounties out, withdraw from federal-provincial tax collection agreements and so on.

It’s not entirely clear how any of these would help to elect Conservatives federally, or even protect against the depredations of a federal government in the clutches of the perfidious Liberals. But never mind: The notion that the West was done in again, betrayed by Ontario’s unshakeable disdain for all things Western, is on its way to becoming common wisdom. And not only in the West.

“I confess to underestimating the prejudices of many Canadians about [Alberta],” writes Norman Spector from British Columbia. “The election results demonstrate that we are a divided country, and we risk becoming more so.” In the Calgary Sun, managing editor Jose Rodriguez observes that “the distance between Calgary and Toronto is roughly the same as the distance between Rome and Baghdad … They’re not like us, and when it comes to politics, most of them don’t really like us.”

From Ontario, Adam Radwanski replies: Don’t blame us. If Ontarians are hesitant to vote for the West’s preferred political vehicle, maybe it’s because you’ve never really tried to woo us. “From the Reform days onward,” he writes, “our primarily Western-based right-of-centre parties have never stopped conveying their resentment and confusion over Ontarians’ unwillingness to buy into their agenda.”

What a heart-rending story. Divided country. Irreconcilable differences. Nothing to do but retreat into our solitudes. After all, the evidence is incontrovertible. For whereas in Ontario the Conservatives were rejected by 68% of the voters, in the West they were rejected by just 54%. And look at the trend: In sheeplike Ontario, support for the Liberals dropped by seven percentage points. Whereas in rock-ribbed Alberta, Liberal support actually increased. As it did in B.C., Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

Huh? What happened to that inevitable conflict between Liberal Ontario and the Conservative West? Answer: it never was. It’s a myth, a phantasm, the consequence of viewing our politics through the distorting lens of our increasingly insupportable electoral system. Canada has real enough regional fault lines. But the first-past-the-post formula for representation widens and exacerbates these into a caricature of reality. It has bedevilled us for decades, deepening divisions and poisoning relations between the regions. It has already caused us incalculable harm. If it is not soon changed, one day it will kill us.

As it stands, the Liberals will govern the country based largely on the support of one province: Ontario, where 75 of the party’s 135 seats were won. Correction—make that the support of 45% of Ontario. Yet with less than half the vote, the Liberals can scoop up nearly three-quarters of the province’s seats, and so create the illusion of “Liberal Ontario.” The same phenomenon has long been at work in Quebec, with especially pernicious results. The Bloc Quebecois “triumph” this time out was on the strength of 49% of the vote—the 15th consecutive time, by my count, through two referendums, four federal elections and nine provincial elections that the separatist side has failed to win the support of a majority of Quebecers. Yet that entitled it to two-thirds of the seats, sustaining the myth that it speaks for Quebec.

Across the West, the Liberals took 27% of the vote, yet emerged with just 14 out of 92 seats. The Conservatives had the support of one voter in three in Ontario, but were rewarded with less than a quarter of the seats. That’s at least an improvement on the 2000 campaign, when the Alliance and the Tories took 38% of the Ontario vote between them—and just two of the seats.

In a less distortionary system, the representation of the parties in Parliament would be spread more evenly across the country. There would be more Tories from Ontario and Atlantic Canada, more Liberals from the West, more federalist MPs from Quebec—and fewer Bloquistes. In short, we would have a Parliament that looked more like Canada, and less like, I don’t know, the European Union. Our politics would split more on questions of ideology and less on regional or linguistic lines.

That, to me, is the clinching argument for moving to some form of proportional representation, along the lines of the hybrid model recently recommended by the Law Reform Commission of Canada. There are other distortions associated with first-past-the-post—its tendency to discriminate against smaller parties, or the ability of a party to win a majority, not only with fewer than than half the votes, but with fewer votes than its nearest rival—which is why several of the provinces are looking seriously at reform.

But it’s at the federal level that it’s most needed. The present system rewards regionalism and grievance-mongering, which is why we now have a Parliament dominated by what are, in essence, three regional parties. We need a system that encourages the growth of national parties, with national visions.