Preface
I’m writing this on the eve of Ontario’s 2025 election. I know that this is unfortunately another election that is not held under a proportional representation (PR) electoral system.
I am just an ordinary Canadian citizen – I don’t consider myself an activist, yet I can recognize an unfair and abusive system.
But now is not the time to let pessimism dissuade us from the democracy we deserve. With Duverger’s Law (i.e., in non-PR electoral systems, a trend towards a two-parties), we are running out of time to act. Canada’s 2021 effective number of parties is 2.76 - this number will decrease over time, and will eventually end Canadian democracy as we know it today.
I’m not writing this to get donation money (although here is the Fair Vote Canada donation site), but this is just the reality with live with and the future we are fighting for.
Proposed 2025 objective
- to be in the top 100 most subscribed communities for lemmy.ca.
- As of writing this post (2025-02-26), [email protected] is currently 111th rank with 261 subscribers.
- To be in the top 100, this would technically mean having >= 296 subscribers, but for simplicity, let’s set the goal to be >= 300 subscribers before 2026. That’s just ~40 new subscribers by the end of the year.
- Where we currently are https://lemmy.ca/communities?listingType=Local&sort=TopAll&page=3, and where we want to be https://lemmy.ca/communities?listingType=Local&sort=TopAll&page=2 (or on page=1, of course)
While I love a good, yeasty, loaf of bread 🍞, [email protected] has 638 subscribers, which is 144.4% more than our 261. I suppose you could say I’m jealous.
Next steps
Before the end of March 2025, please comment on whether:
- this is a good objective to have
- if it’s not a good objective, what other objectives should we pursue
- Ideas on how to achieve our objectives
I think these two separate objectives are good, but at the end of the day subscriber count is just a number. The real objective is having an actual representative democracy in Canada at all levels of government.
Even with 261 subs, posts from this comm can reach “all” (that’s how I found this place). That’s the way to reach people who aren’t too engaged with this topic. We just need to have a critical mass of people upvoting.
Good luck voting fellow Ontarians!!! May the 45th Parliament be proportionally representative!
Thanks for your feedback! I was unaware ‘all’ was a mean to find this fairvote community.
Overall, I agree, but in the meanwhile, we should make a conscious and concerted effort towards a goal.
A sort of sub task leading up to the goal of proportional representation.
Increasing the subscriber count helps towards that (at least in my opinion).
I can see this place with 1k subs one day!