> I don’t like governments elected on Tuesday. I’d prefer Wednesday.

FPTP vs. good election systems is not a trivial distinction like this, so your analogy is invalid.

If people could vote as they truly wanted without fear of throwing away their votes, the center would almost certainly move.

As to the back and forth between two major parties, that's hardly surprising. I'm not sure that indicates much in terms of what people actually want.

Systems with ranked choice or similar measures to encourage smaller parties end up with a similar situation, but with less stability. Since those parties appeal to narrower bands of society, they are unable to form a government. Eventually they are forced into coalition, which brings them to the same place as the major parties in FPTP: compromise. Yet, since coalitions are inherently more fragile than parties, you get less stability, and less institutional pressure on individuals in government and cabinet to represent wider interests.

Your comparison to North Korea casts doubt on your sense of proportion.

I don’t think this is true outside the English-speaking countries. Most “Western” countries are in Europe and have systems with some degree of proportionality where coalition governments are the norm.

> Your comparison to North Korea casts doubt on your sense of proportion.

It was an intentionally extreme comparison to show that “operates according to the rules” is not sufficient for a system to count as democratic. Of course Canada is much closer to counting as a liberal democracy than North Korea is, but for reasons other than “it operates according to its own internal rules”.

Perhaps a better analogy would have been Hong Kong a few years ago (before the situation there became worse and things became more directly controlled by the central Chinese state). Hong Kong has never been a democracy by any reasonable definition, but did have robust rule of law and liberal rights, despite elections being basically rigged due to the functional constituencies system.