It should be made clear that Trudeau still rejects proportional representation—a system where parties get seats based on their vote percentage—and continues to partially blame opposition parties for his own inaction. He still prefers a ranked ballot system—where you number your preferred candidates in order on your ballot—which would not have made “every vote count” as he pledged in 2015. A recent article from NDP MP Matthew Green and Joseph Gubbels showcases Trudeau’s flawed approach to reform.
I can’t for the life of me understand why the NDP and the Greens don’t team up and aggressively campaign for electoral reform.
Because every time the NDP has tried to push electoral reform, voters tell them they don’t care about the party’s pet project. It comes across as tone deaf and academic when they push it.
Basically, the electorate does not like the NDP, and they cannot push any idea that actually makes the country structurally better without being burried in bad faith arguments. And they’ve become very responsive to bad faith arguments in the last 15 - 20 years or so.
I would assert that the best the NDP have done has been through influencing a minority red government toward a goal that helps us all. The beginnings of the dental plan was awesome, for instance.
… which makes the current abandonment of the only coat-tails they can ride seem pretty stupid. Why, if you have only the play where you make the reds be kind because you’ll never have the PM seat nor the opposition seat yourself, do you then kill your golden goose?
Because when everyone knows that your only play is to support the reds, then the reds themselves know that they can abuse that desperation, renege on deals with you, etc. After all, what other plays do you have?
Dropping the deal is short-term disadvantageous, but by establishing a reputation for punishing allies who don’t uphold their end of a bargain, they can be more influential in the future.
There are countries that have elected leftist governments so you can’t say it will never happen.
I am agree
NDP will never win because their party color is orange and its one of the least liked colors. People are that simple.
Although Trump seems popular… hmm…
“Ranked ballot” is the best IMO. You still end up with a representative that you have a small amount of influence over instead of an unaccountable electoral slate. It’s unclear who you would bribe to get your corporatist agenda advanced, but the oligarchs would just bribe them all.
Take Green party as an example that gets 1-2% of seats now. It or similar party could adopt a single issue platform that gets 10% of votes, but it could be a RFK Jr extremist position. Current/recent Green platforms could win 30%+ of seats if CIA Canadian media didn’t tell you that you are wasting your vote on them.
At any rate, ranked ballot is a massive positive with 0 “unintended consequences” from a radical change in representation system. Can push for alternate voting systems after.
Ranked is definitely better than FPTP, but not the best. Here is a quick and entertaining video on ranked voting (aka alternative ballot)
And this disagreement was one of the main reasons Trudeau abandoned the attempt. (Noting that the attempt was started then abandoned as a failed effort, which I see as different from a cynically broken promise)
There was no clear path to a consensus, even among experts, on which other system to adopt.
Couple that with the reality that the majority of Canadians don’t really care about the minutae of the voting system.
Sure highly politically engaged people in discussion forums might care deeply, but the average person really doesn’t.
The main reason Trudeau abandoned the attempt is that any method that would offer better representation for voters would ensure no more Liberal majorities with ~35% of the vote.
That’s it. He had a majority in parliament. He could have rammed it through. Instead, he assigned his most junior minister to the portfolio and let it die in committee. Constrast it with buying the TMX pipeline, which happened lickety-split.
Winning the popular vote is vanishing rare in Canada, but curiously we’ve had a number of Liberal and Conservative majority governments with weak pluralities. Neither the LPC nor the CPC will change a system that benefits them, but if I were the NDP, I’d make common cause with the BQ and Greens and, if I won, I’d ram PR through on day two.
If you believe Ranked is the best that’s fine, but suggesting we can push for alternative voting systems after is just not realistic. The temporary solution almost always becomes the permanent one.
FPTP sucks. Media amplifies its suckitude by not polling districts and letting you be informed on which candidate is a wasted vote if you are ABC for example.
One of Trump’s more corrupt than average acts was telling his party to vote against an anti-immigrant bill. Politicians making things worse so you stay angry and hateful so that you turn out to vote for the politician who keeps you angry and hateful, is a weakness of democracy and the corruption we are stuck in.
There is no actual impediment to improving anything in society. Instead of collapsing society first, it is actually easier to make small optimizations if you don’t live in a dumpster fire. You are acknowledging broken corrupt system if you need the dumpster fire to get bigger for progressive views to take hold.
Joseph Gubbels? That is comically close to Joseph Goebbels lol
Hear hear
Relinking this one that I found in a different thread from yesterday - https://youtu.be/laUPeXZlPEg?si=9S4bFYNCbQ-ciOLT
I’m going to call out that biased host once again as a weasel.
Yeah, I don’t know why he wanted to dig into semantics when there was such a more salient point being presented. Weasel is applicable
This is why I left.
Add 62 seats to the Parliament to make it a nice 400 seats
Distribute the new seats based on the % of votes each party got to make the results as proportional as possible, they’re distributed to the party leader first (if they didn’t get elected in their riding) then to the candidates with the highest % of vote in their riding.
Ta-fucking-da, no need to change the way people vote, it’s all done behind the scene!
Isn’t this basically how MMP works?
Most MMP systems have two separate votes, one local, one for a party, but yes it’s a form of MMP but it doesn’t involve changing the way people vote at the moment.
You’re hired!
The only positive about this idea is that strictly as a thought experiment you could look back at any given election and see how it would’ve turned out differently. As a real system this doesn’t account for regional representation.
In a certain way it does by over representing districts where the election was close, which can vary every election, but in general all districts are supposed to have about the same number of electors.
The more seats/capita the is the more representative things get so we could keep FPTP and increase the number of seats to make it 80k citizens/districts instead of about 120k as it is now and things would already be much more representative of the population’s will but it wouldn’t account for minor parties getting enough votes at the national level that they should have seats (like my suggestion does).
That’s not really what I meant. Most of the similar proposed proportional systems break down the proportional “evening out” to provinces or smaller regions. Theoretically (although extremely unlikely) if the Bloq lost with 50%-1 votes in every riding they’d have about 12.5% of the overall vote with 0 seats. They’d get 50 of the 62 seats regardless of anything else that happens anywhere else in the country.
Bloc, not Bloq.
If that means they get a proportional representation of their party based on the number of Canadians that voted for them, I don’t see the issue, it’s the federal election, using a purely proportional system it would be based on the vote of Canadians as a whole, so yes the Bloc could end up with more seats than they traditionally get with FPTP. That’s why you do it for the whole country instead of creating more disproportion like you can see with Quebec getting a higher % of seats than its population should let it have.
Distributing it based on who was the closest to winning their seat also removes the power from the parties to choose who gets the extra seats, it also increases the odds that seats will swing during the next election because people are now represented by two MPs, so the alternative have a chance to prove they’re the better candidate.
