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.
Hear hear
Relinking this one that I found in a different thread from yesterday - https://youtu.be/laUPeXZlPEg?si=9S4bFYNCbQ-ciOLT
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.
This is why I left.
Joseph Gubbels? That is comically close to Joseph Goebbels lol
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!
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.
