Dalhousie University political scientist Lori Turnbull has a short answer for why Tim Houston’s Nova Scotia government, despite promises to the contrary, still does what it wants and doesn’t always tell us. It’s because they can.

The Conservatives have a supermajority, having won 43 out of 55 seats in the last election, so they can pass any law they’d like and can even change the rules of the Nova Scotia legislature.

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Which raises a central question: does our first-past-the-post electoral system work?

There has been on-and-off support for changes to the system, which sometimes manages to keep the party with the most votes out of power, and in Houston’s case gives complete control to one who got just 53 per cent of the vote.

There have been provincial referendums on electoral reform.

Prince Edward Island, for example, voted no in 2005 on a plebiscite on switching to a system where a party’s number of seats in the legislature would reflect the percentage of the popular vote it received. Islanders voted for change in 2016 – but with low-enough voter turnout that the government ignored it – and three years later again, narrowly voted to hold onto the FPTP system.

During the last Nova Scotia election both the Liberal and Green parties had........

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