IRV would actually improve the current system of people 'strategically' voting for Liberal instead of Green and NDP because they don't want their votes not to count. Also could improve voter turnout since no matter what, your vote will eventually count.
Multi-winners per riding would double the number of MPs, which is way too much overhead to have a bunch of people being entirely partisan. Plus until we have more than 2 or 3 parties likely to come in first or second, makes no sense because it'll pretty much be an even split of Liberal and PC, with NDP being the swing vote that you want to avoid.
IRV is also a significantly smaller change to the total reworking of the system you're suggesting which means it might have a chance in our lifetimes of actually being enacted.
IRV could still prevent a large percent of people from having someone they would vote for in parliament. Also, if you are going to to say IRV would increase voter turnout than STV would too.
No, the number of MP's would either stay the same, or change slightly. The current ridings would be combined with 2 or 3 others to make larger ridings. There may be a few more seats because you can't combine a chunk of Winnipeg with a rural district, or part of Nova Scotia with New Brunswick, but the added cost would be negligible in terms of the budget and would be worth it to have a better electoral system. For example, looking at Alberta in the next election there will be 34 seats, 10 in Calgary, 9 in Edmonton, and 2 that encompass part of Red Deer and other parts of the province. Under STV we might see 3 Calgary ridings returning 3 MPs each (with one returning four), 3 Edmonton ridings returning 3 MPs each, 1 riding encompassing Red Deer (and a larger chunk of the surrounding area then the two current ridings do) returning three candidates. The remaining 23 candidates would come from about 7 ridings with most returning 3, and a couple returning 4. The same process would than be done in each province.
Why does it matter how many parties have a chance at coming in first? The point of a representative democracy is that the populations views are represented in parliament. What better way to due that than having most citizens having a representative they voted for, without undermining the citizens who voted for someone else.
I have no problem if it is just an even split of Conservatives and Liberals with the NDP being the "swing vote", (I think you misinterpreted what I meant by swing voters, I meant voters who don't always vote for the same party) if that is an accurate representation of the Canadian population. I also might add that STV would also greatly increase the number of Green MPs.
I don't care if STV is a more significant change. FPTP is a terrible system, and IRV does little to improve it (IRV basically makes every riding a two party FPTP). If we had a referendum on FPTP vs STV I would consider it to likely be the most important vote I will ever cast in my life. Also, the biggest advocate in Canada for voting reform, Fair Vote Canada, supports some kind of PR (ie not IRV) with the two most discussed being MMP and STV (of which I find STV much superior, but would still take MMP over FPTP or IRV) so if electoral reform ever did become a big issue in Canada (which it might under a NDP government, which isn't unrealistic anymore) there would be a big vocal presence for STV/PR.
Also, IRE still has many problems such as failing all the criterion:
Condorcet winner:
The Condorcet candidate or Condorcet winner of an election is the candidate who, when compared with every other candidate, is preferred by more voters. Informally, the Condorcet winner is the person who would win a two-candidate election against each of the other candidates.
Smith Criterion:
The Smith criterion is a voting systems criterion defined such that its satisfaction by a voting system occurs when the system always elects a candidate that is in the Smith set, which is the smallest non-empty subset of the candidates such that every candidate in the subset is majority-preferred over every candidate not in the subset. (A candidate X is said to be majority-preferred over another candidate Y if, in a one-on-one competition between X & Y, the number of voters who prefer X over Y exceeds the number of voters who prefer Y over X.)
Monotonicity Criterion:
The monotonicity criterion is a voting system criterion used to analyze both single and multiple winner ranked voting systems. A ranked voting system is monotonic if it is neither possible to circumvent the election of a candidate by raising him on some of the ballots, nor possible to elect an otherwise unelected candidate by lowering him on some of the ballots (nothing else is altered on any ballot). In single winner elections that is to say no winner is harmed by up-ranking and no loser can win by down-ranking.
Participation Criterion:
The participation criterion is a voting system criterion. It is also known as the "no show paradox". It has been defined as follows:
In a deterministic framework, the participation criterion says that the addition of a ballot, where candidate A is strictly preferred to candidate B, to an existing tally of votes should not change the winner from candidate A to candidate B.
In a probabilistic framework, the participation criterion says that the addition of a ballot, where each candidate of the set X is strictly preferred to each other candidate, to an existing tally of votes should not reduce the probability that the winner is chosen from the set X.
Reversal Symmetry:
Reversal symmetry is a voting system criterion which requires that if candidate A is the unique winner, and each voter's individual preferences are inverted, then A must not be elected
