The seat make up would look more like the left if we had a more fair and accountable proportional representation over the obsolete first past the post.
The Atlantic provinces and Quebec are probably the biggest reason we won’t see PR actually take affect. They currently have massive over representation constitutionally guaranteed and I highly doubt they are gonna give that up without a massive fight.
The closest we will ever get is a different way to count votes within the current riding system, which is still not PR at the end of the day.
(And aside from the fact that PR doesn’t solve the issue of more populace regions fucking over less populace ones without regard)
Israel and the EU are prop rep and they went hard right.
Prop rep only looks good on a spreadsheet, it’s terrible when you consider power dynamics.
First of all the parties have all of the power in a prop rep system. There really isn’t any point in even having seats other than to make it appear like a legislature instead of what it really is. A coalition formed in a backroom in when the parties in that coalition hold all of the power and the parties outside of it may as well not be there.
The seats belong to the party, not individuals representing communities. Which means the MP can’t cross the floor if their party is going to screw over their community. They can resign but then the Party appoints someone else to sit in the seat and that person votes the way the party tells them to.
The biggest problem with First Past the Post is the name. If you call it a Community Representation system (which is what it is) it sounds a lot nicer doesn’t it? You vote for a person to represent your community you put pressure on them to put pressure on their party and on Parliament to make the necessary compromises and concessions in the best interests of the community.
Minority interests can more easily be ignored in a Prop Rep system than in a Community representation system. In a community representation system, a thousand votes in a riding can swing it and that means any party can lose seats if they ignore minority interests. In a Prop Rep system even an million votes from minorities are meaningless if the party they vote for isn’t part of the ruling coalition.
Would you really want Canada being run by a coalition between the CPC and PPC where all power rests in the ruling coalition? Where the CPC has to give the PPC what they ask for to maintain power? This is the situation in Israel right now, and it may soon be how it is in the EU.
If you want electoral reform maybe push for ranked choice voting instead of a Prop Rep system that’s currently failing in some very high profile ways in other parts of the world.
Proportional representation isn’t the cure-all everyone thinks it is. Vote-splitting goes away, sure, but then you get lots of small parties forming coalitions. If you want to see that in action, look no further than Israel’s government.
If that’s the batshit crazy we’d release to the rest of the country then I’m good with FPTP. We can keep our elitist “i’ve got mine so fuck you” conservative asshats to ourselves while we learn from that mistake. If we can. Holy fuck I wasn’t aware the ignorant hillbillies were that enraged at actually getting services despite a pandemic that they want to elect the absolute worst group to ever manage something, ever.
Yup, and now it will bite him in the ass. Imagine if we had coalition governments in Canada that actually represented the Canadian voice. The parties will have to make concessions and actually talk to each other like in a marriage.
It’s plausible that Trudeau could want to push through voting reform as one last move to salvage something since him losing the next election likely spells the end of his political career.
The problem is the Liberals as a whole. It pretty predictable Conservatives are going to do a horrible job and by the 2029ish election the tables will be flipped and Liberal will only need to campaign on not being a disaster of a party like the incumbents.
As much as I hate to pin hopes on a hail mary like that, this is likely the only scenario where we will get voting reform to happen. The party in power has no incentive to change the system that brought them to power in the first place, so we’re basically gambling on an outgoing party using their last days of holding onto power to make it happen. Just writing this out makes me wonder how we ever got here in the first place. Who thought first-past-the-post was anywhere near a functional system to begin with?
I don’t think the Liberal are willing to sacrifice their entire future as the one of the two alternating parties in order to gain a few more seats.
338 on a federal level projects them for 67 seats and 24% ± 3% on the popular vote. That translates to 85-91 seats which is a decent gain.
However this would mean the Liberal will likely never get anything close to majority again. I would also believe they would slowly dwindle in popularity with a rise of smaller parties. That’s a lot give up for 24 more seats for 4 years.
FPTP was fine when elections were held within a riding, and results were delivered by horseback. You were voting based on a local candidate, not the national party.
Then the railroad, telegraph, telephone, and internet were invented, politics became national, and we’re still using FPTP.
Thanks, that does actually help out of into context and explains how we got here. I think the better question (and the one I should’ve asked) is why are we still using a system that predates the railroad?
The people have the power not the conservatives or the liberals and research has shown the Canadian public wants proportional representation however we’re currently not putting enough pressure about the unfair system of first past the post. There was a vote on national citizen’s assembly that went like this
“On February 7, Parliament voted on Motion M-86 for a National Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. The result was: YES 101 NO 220 In addition to the support of the NDP, Green Party and Bloc MPs, 40 Liberals and 3 Conservatives voted for the motion. To see how your MP voted, scroll to the bottom of this email.”
Its the same “power corrupts” story again and again. Karina Gould gave an impassioned speech on electoral reform (www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/…/hansard#Int…). But after replacing Maryam Monsef as Minister of Democratic Institutions, her views suddenly became far more simplistic. In a 2017 interview on CBC’s Metro Morning, she was asked “Why is it important that people at the very least believe every vote counts?”. She replies “Because they do. … We literally count them: 1, 2, 3, 4, up to the majority that wins.”
Not sure why this is down voted. This is exactly what happened. Trudeau ran on electoral reform in 2015. That was gonna be the last FPTP election, he said. Then they did some consultations with the public and said that not enough people wanted it. Shortly after, they threw the whole thing down the garbage chute.
Then they did some consultations with the public and said that not enough people wanted it.
Worse than that, Trudeau straight up said “People wanted electoral reform because they were unsatisfied under the Harper government, now that we’re in power everything is fine and people don’t care about electoral reform anymore.”
« Sous M. [Stephen] Harper, il y avait tellement de gens mécontents du gouvernement et de son approche que les gens disaient “ça prend une réforme électorale pour ne plus avoir de gouvernement qu’on n’aime pas”. Or, sous le système actuel, ils ont maintenant un gouvernement avec lequel ils sont plus satisfaits. Et la motivation de vouloir changer le système électoral est moins percutante [ou moins criante] »
Well the fact that other parties wouldn’t agree with the Liberals’ solution didn’t help (even though it would have been better than what we have at the moment).
You’re giving the liberals too much slack here when they need more pressure to do the right thing. The smaller parties and independents only want a fairer system that the most democracies use such as Norway or Sweden, which is proportional representation.
People don’t want to be forced into two camps they don’t like.
Interesting to see the charts there showing a steady 25% against. Even when asked if a majority government should have the support of a majority of voters!
Who are these guys! Its hard to believe that a quarter of people surveyed appear to not want our democracy to function.
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