Splitdipless
That’s why there’s a difference in riding sizes… 1 vote per person shouldn’t mean that Windsor-Québec should decide fishery issues for Newfoundland… So a riding on the rock has less people, because it has unique needs based on its location and geography that might be better served by giving them more of a say than ridings in London Ontario, which might have very similar needs across the city. In essence, more people don’t necessarily mean more unique issues. There’s a limit to that of course - but the general ‘needs’ are outlined by law and adjusted without gerrymandering - which is not terrible, but maybe could be improved with more representation in the dense ridings - after all, there’s increase concerns within the cities these days.
Well, MMP breaks down when you realize you need to define geographic areas of ridings that you need to lump together so that you can get the ratios right. An example elsewhere in the post points out lumping Victoria’s 4 seats and the rest of Vancouver Island’s 3 seats. If all lumped together, you can get the ratios of actual votes to match the representations of the MPs pretty good - but ultimately someone has to sort of ‘fix it in post.’ If 80% vote for party X in all 7 ridings (which, without looking at the data, I will concede in advanced has never bloody happened) you’re going to take one of those ridings and hand it off to an MP that didn’t win to represent the collective 15-20% that voted the second place party that might be popular there. Which riding gets the MP not elected in the riding? Of course, we need to keep ridings because the population density is very skewed in Canada. If you take a look where people live, you’d realize without ridings, in a true PR setting, the Windsor-Québec City corridor would forever run the rest of Canada. Why try to get votes anywhere else? Do you really want to give Alberta another reason to say that Ottawa has no mandate in their province?
Another option is to drastically increase MPs (that seems like a terrible idea) so that if the riding is 55% for party X and 45% for party Y, you can have 2 MPs from both parties and not add any advantage to anyone to help in forming government. It would almost be a better idea to have a run-off vote until you reach a true majority instead of a plurality in a riding.
I’d argue the opposite for one reason only - so that I can identify idiots, bigots and terrible people on sight. Any person in government that is causing me problems and showing religious garb? Kick it up to a supervisor if I think I can tie it to poor decision making based on goat-herder values from over 2000 years ago.
People see this as a Conservative vs. ‘Left’ fight, but I think this is a mischaracterization because of the parties representing the true divide, and the real reason why the parties champion the forms that they do - it’s a rural vs. urban fight. If you looked at the GTA from satellite image at night, it’s all continuous population from Ajax to Hamilton around Burlington Bay. That area makes sense for PR, but the fact of the matter is that no-one would care about chasing votes in Newmarket if they can go down to Lake Ontario and just chase the ‘bang for the buck’ down there. Repeat across Canada and you see the parties representing rural (mostly CON) are anti-PR, and ultimately, Lib will support that too with some of the less population dense seats they have too. Break the problem with PR favoring density, and that’ll be the only way everyone agrees to it…
offensive. Next year another huge initiative to change something else. This type of thing is literally endless as everything is changing all the time. Sounds like a waste of tax $ to me.
Changing a name isn’t stupid, unless done for stupid reasons. If you have the money - get it done. It also doesn’t have to be done all at once. Start small with new document templates, create a reasonable budget for replacing signs…
Speaking as someone that resides in what was once the Province of Canada (Upper Canada or Canada West) and renamed themselves something else native - we named ourselves after the Huron word for ‘Great Lake’ and that ignores the fact that we’re only talking one of the 4 great lakes that border us on one side of the province… There’s way more to the province than the Hurons and way more than just that one lake. Seriously, get a huge list of place names that are underutilized by all the different nations out there, find something that is easier to spell than Saskatchewan, and send it around for approval.
The ONLY downside is that you’re throwing out a lot of ‘brand recognition.’ I made the argument that the Law Society of Ontario should not have renamed themselves from the Law Society of Upper Canada because they have been called the LSUC for over 200 years. It’s like if The Bay decided to go close all their stores under that banner and exclusively work under the name Saks Fifth Avenue - I don’t think it would work out well for them, and it might not work well for BC.
Conflict of interest? Say it ain’t so…
There’s listings for some pretty intensely expensive properties at 550 Park Avenue. I saw one for over $10M with its own gym. I don’t know - maybe we’re getting a deal out of this. Tough to say with Sask Today putting together such a terrible article.