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- cross-posted to:
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As progress on some measures in the Liberal-NDP confidence-and-supply agreement continue to play out publicly, the two parties have quietly been in talks to table electoral reform legislation before the next federal vote.
Oh, so Trudeau’s interested in electoral reform again is he? Funny how just after he first got elected all those promises and commitees to look at alternatives to FPTP just faded… but now that he might lose it’s suddenly back on the table?
Never forget, the promise was broken.
I wish he was even considering changing FPTP though. According to the article, the changes they’re exploring are pretty lackluster.
I wish they’d see the writing on the wall and just throw together a ranked ballot system before we end up with Premier PP. The last thing we need is that fucking capital-fascist in charge. I’d still be pissed that it took being directly in Trudeau’s interest before he finally followed through, but I’d still rather it done than not.
That was the problem the first go-around, the Liberals favoured ranked ballot but would consider STV, the NDP wouldn’t support anything other than MMP, the CPC wouldn’t support any change, and the Bloc just wanted to play spoiler. The Liberals were in a minority on the committee. The only system they could get agreement on was MMP, which is what was recommended.
MMP is good for proportionality, but it can have issues with party lists, members not tied to geographic areas can be difficult to remove, and responsibility for geographic areas is shared, making it easier to dodge. The biggest drawback is explaining the system to a general public who only have known a one vote, one member, one riding system. Ranked or STV are much easier to explain and the current riding system doesn’t need to change.
Anyway, the Bloc and CPC were going to campaign hard on calling any change a Liberal power grab. Internal polling (not the dog and pony show web poll) showed that most voters didn’t care about the issue, but the “Liberal Power Grab” would gain traction. With the CPC promising to roll back any changes, the whole thing looked more and more like an effort in futility.
In the end, they decided to take their lumps and move on. After all the heat they took for trying, as far as the Liberals are concerned, the issue is dead.
Go read the article and you’ll realize it’s the journalist calling it a reform, it isn’t, it’s improvement to the current system.
Various failures in proportional representation systems elsewhere in the world indicated those systems are fundamentally flawed.
Proportional representation is the system Israel has. A guy like Benjamin Netanyahu can just cut some deals with far right whack jobs and form a coalition to be PM of Israel.
Are you saying you like how that worked out?
Also the EU has a proportional representation system and people in Britain didn’t feel the EU parliament represented them. Do we like how that worked out?
The biggest problem with FPTP is the name. Let’s rebrand it as Community Representation (because that’s what it is) and move on from spreadsheet warriors being triggered by some numbers in one column not matching the other column.
Bottom line is community representation systems represents minority interest better than proportional representation systems. Just because you can’t put power dynamics on a spreadsheet doesn’t mean they don’t exist. In fact power dynamics is the most important thing in politics and the power dynamics in a proportional representation system is completely terrible.
Right now we have a system where a party can have a majority of the seats with as little as 35% of the vote (and technically even less) and you’re saying it’s worse when the parties have to form alliancess so they represent a majority of the vote in order to hold the reigns?
It’s funny because at the moment we are moving towards elections that will put our own right wing/social conservative party in power with a majority while about 60% of the population votes center left to center right, with a proportional system the NDP and Liberals would just form an alliance and represent the majority of the population.