Fair Vote Canada 🗳️🍁 (@fairvote.ca)
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What’s more chilling than Trump’s presidency? The fact that we use the same system that just handed him total control. First-past-the-post fuels a hyper-partisan two-party system. If we want to protect democracy in Canada, we need proportional representation. #cdnpoli

Fair Vote Canada on Bluesky

What’s more chilling than Trump’s presidency? The fact that we use the same system that just handed him total control.

First-past-the-post fuels a hyper-partisan two-party system.

If we want to protect democracy in Canada, we need proportional representation.

#cdnpoli

  • AlolanVulpixOPMEnglish
    6·
    18 hours ago

    The overall democratic systems are different, that’s right. But the electoral systems are the same in the sense that both US and Canada both use winner-take-all systems (e.g, FPTP).

    In fact I think electoral reform is a bad idea until the USA is more stable, I think it would create an opportunity for them to coup us

    Bad electoral systems cause citizens to disengage from society:

    Ontario and Germany just had elections. The contrast between those elections couldn’t be greater.

    In Germany, 82.5% of the electorate turned out to vote.

    In Ontario, a mere 45% showed up.

    In Germany, voters got what they voted for. Almost every vote counted. The seats in the Bundestag (Parliament) fairly reflected what voters said with their ballots.

    Ontario’s election, on the other hand, was a stark example of how winner-take-all voting is failing voters.

    In Ontario, with first-past-the-post, 43% of the vote gave Doug Ford’s PCs 65% of the seats and 100% of the power.

    • m0darn
      1·
      7 hours ago

      Yeah I agree that FPTP is bad. I wrote to Justin Trudeau to criticize the liberals decision to mothball electoral reform.

      But if we change systems while facing annexation from south of the border, and it results in conservative “under performance” (by which I mean the conservative party loses the structural advantage that’s baked into the current system) conservatives in Canada and the USA will cry foul and insist we be “liberated”.

      • AlolanVulpixOPMEnglish
        2·
        6 hours ago

        I suppose the way people think about this is so distorted that we should be concerned about “underperformance” of Conservatives under PR?

        What about the under performance of the general population? Winner-take-all regularly rewards majority governments to minority of the population.

        Me and the general populace are crying foul now, for legitimate reasons.

        • m0darn
          1·
          5 hours ago

          Totally, FPTP is bad.

          On further consideration I think the best move for Canada is to explore membership in the EU, which I believe would entail some level of PR and would be more difficult to criticize from a legitimacy stand point, and would be beneficial in terms of reducing our economic dependence on a now notoriously fickle trading partner.