I’m saying that he probably wouldn’t go for that particular bill. It’s dubiously constitutional as it is, and he was the man who brought the constitution into being (as something other than the BNA Act in Westminster).
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I’m not really concerned about whether it helps the Conservative Party form the government or not, but rather with what the Conservative Party that forms the government will be like. It would make it harder to win by pushing wedge issues, harder to win by attacking an opponent without offering anything of substance yourself, harder to win by making voting seem pointless in general so that only the hardcore ideologues come out to vote (knowing that you have more hardcore ideologues). It would have made it a lot harder for the Stephen Harper Party to win, and it will make it harder for the Kellie Leitch Party to win, but I don’t think it necessarily hurts the Conservative Party, it just forces them to get out of the cult-of-personality business.
I know people think it will create a rush to the center, but that’s not a stable strategy. Ranked ballot can help a boring party win by being everyone’s second choice, but it can also help more interesting parties win because people won’t feel they are throwing away their vote. If you look at the actual votes from last election, the Liberal party would have done even better than they did if we used ranked ballots, but that assumes that people wouldn’t have voted differently. If everyone who went into the ballot box thinking, “I’d rather have NDP, but I have to vote Liberal to beat Harper” instead voted NDP, knowing their second choice would mean Harper couldn’t win their riding anyway, the Liberals might have actually don’t quite a bit worse than they did.
I assume it will be decades before the issue is raised again one way or another. I just think that if the committee recommends ranked ballot we have a good chance of having ranked ballots during those decades and if they recommend proportional representation then those decades will be spent with FPTP.
I agree. I just think that the opposition to election reform is incredibly strong, that the Liberals could easily get away with not doing it without having a popular revolt over the broken promise, and that I want something to happen rather than nothing.
I don’t see how ranked ballot makes your vote worth less. It’s very hard to compare across countries but I don’t see the case that ranked voting systems have lower voter turnout then FPTP. In the English-speaking world, Ireland and New Zealand both seem to get better turnout than the UK, Canada and America. That’s way to confounded to draw conclusions, but it sure doesn’t support the conclusion you are coming to.
To me the main purpose of voting reform isn’t to get the best system in the world*, it’s to take the vast number of politicians and political analysts who are thoroughly entrenched in gaming the current system and kick them out on their asses. If it were up to me, I’d simply change the voting method regularly, because the biggest problem is people vying for votes instead of doing their best to try to run the country. I just want something to happen, because otherwise I’d say more likely than not we’re going to have a hotline to report “barbaric cultural practices” in the next decade and I’m going to have to figure out how seasteading works.
* Best system in the world, by the way, is random ballot. Everyone casts their vote and then one is chosen at random, that’s the winner. Why won’t anyone listen to me?!?
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I disagree. If I prefer the Greens, but really just want the Cons to stay out of power, in the past, I’d just have to vote Lib. And with this, the true support of the Greens are hidden since people are too scared to vote for them. At least with ranked ballots, I could make my first choice Green and still not risk the Cons winning. The Green vote share would increase, the party would get more federal funding.
The true support of the Greens would be reflected in the vote share (even if not reflected in the number of seats they won). Not great, but at least better than what we have now.
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The end result is the same though - this is from the FairVote.ca website:
Ranked ballot is not a voting system
“All winner-take-all voting systems create false majorities, including the Alternative Vote. That’s the point of these systems – manufactured majorities.”
A ranked ballot doesn’t account for enthusiasm - it assumes that a voter’s first and second choice are a close shave.
Canada’s guns per 100 residents: 30.8
USA guns per 100 residents: 112.6
We’d have to get all the other top 20 countries in on it to equal the number of firepower our friends to the south have, but I agree with your sentiment. Though I do think more than half of them would be fighting along with us.
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Ireland has Single Transferable Vote, a form of proportional representation combined with a ranked ballot. New Zealand is mixed member proportional with a ranked ballot.
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I’m not disagreeing with that. Ranked ballots will not solve the problem of false majorities, but it will solve two other problems (problems that a true proportional system would also solve):
- voters don’t need to make strategic decisions on who to vote for based on incomplete or faulty data.
- it is possible to accurately gauge the true popularity of smaller parties (because people do not need to vote strategically).
If it’s a choice between ranked ballots and proportional representation, the choice is easy. If it’s a choice between FPTP and ranked ballots, the choice is also easy.
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I will grant you the second point. As for the first point, FPTP doesn’t force anyone to vote strategically. And whatever order you choose to rank candidates, that is a strategy.
But I wonder why everyone who supports proportional representation is giving up on it so easily? This chance ain’t coming around again for a long time.
Whoops, I sure misread that chart.
Countries that have an instant runoff ranked ballot have voter turnouts ranging from very poor to very good, but there appear to be few of them and I’d feel very awkward trying to compare Canada to Hong Kong or Papua New Guinea since I have no idea what the culture surrounding voting is like (not that I’m that familiar with Ireland or New Zealand either, but at least I’ve consumed media from them on occasion).
Anyway, we’re all in agreement that ranked ballot is better than FPTP, and proportional is better than ranked ballot (and random ballot is the best of all!). I think we disagree how large those steps are (Is PR 1st, Ranked a distant 2nd and FPTP 3rd; or is PR 1st, Ranked 2nd and FPTP a distance third?). I’ve written letters to the Prime Minister, the Minister Responsible for Democratic Institutions and my own MP telling them that we need voting reform.
Right now I just want to make sure that we don’t give autocratic power to aggressive racists in the next election or two because 36% of the country wants to while 64% of the country howls in dissent. I’m way more concerned about fighting against having a referendum* on the issue than I am about what voting system it is.
* I don’t know if that makes me sound awful to some people, but I’m really tired of the combined “why would we do this, it doesn’t matter” and “to do something this important we need a referendum even though we didn’t need one to dismantle our independent election officials under Harper!” It’s nonsense. I’d be happy to have a referendum on scrapping FPTP but it should pass if it gets 35% of the vote. If that sounds unfair then they ought to be against FPTP.
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Don’t even joke about that. We don’t need a slightly more business savvy, slightly less misogynistic Trump as PM.
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I would be fine with either, but I think PR is a bad solution for Canada specifically. It makes sense at the provincial level, somewhat, but not really federally.
- I think a ranked ballot would help smooth out the regional issues that might come up with a PR system. Like it or not, Canada is a country of regions. And Quebec, in particular, will NEVER support a system that relegates them to a trivial sideshow. In a PR system it would be very easy to have a perpetual majority of Anglophones, and we could very well see Quebec separatism recur (and justifiably so). Yes, the parties would probably ensure that some of the safe seats on their list were QC, but that might not be enough. The North would cease to exist as a political factor as well.
Similarly, we could see a perpetual ‘Not Western Canada’ majority, and that would also not be a good result. The best governments in Canada need to incorporate the entire country, and a preferred ballot would do that better (not perfectly, but better).
- PR has a way of creating permanent party leaderships. Depending on what system is used, you can be pretty certain that the top people on the list will get a seat in Parliament (e.g. the top 20 NDP on the list will be elected, the top 100 conservatives etc). So the real campaigning happens within the party prior to the election to get up into the safe zone. And corruption can be an issue…
I would be in favour of some kind of mixed system, which seems unlikely at this point. Maybe 75% of Parliament is preferred ballots, with the remainder alotted to make the seat counts reflect the popular vote.
I’d take O’Leary over “barbaric cultural practices tip line was a good idea not properly sold to the public” Leitch or “ban the niqab because from watching Leitch it looks like the only way to separate yourself from the pack is being racist” Blaney. I’d have to deeply consider him compared to Bernier or Raitt. Those are four of the seven candidates I know anything about (I’d count Clement as 8, but he dropped out). I actually think O’Leary might be top half in terms of quality, though I’m inclined to think that people I’ve never heard of are probably better than him (not just in terms of the current race for Conservative leader, but just in general).
ETA: Did a little light reading. Lemieux and Trost are anti-abortion, anti-same-sex marriage candidates (Trost wants a NC style bathroom bill). A few others are just terrible (Obrhai said he’d drop out if MacKay ran? So your slogan is, “Not as good as Peter MacKay”?) This is just the sort of field that Trump ran through, and exactly why I’m afraid Leitch will be our next prime minister.
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I disagree that PR is better than a ranked, MMP or STV system in Canada. However, I strongly agree that having a goddamn referendum on the topic is just a bullshit way to make sure that nothing changes. Because it is a given that the opposition will use it as a platform to attack the current party in power, and there will be a ton of interference about how it is ‘too complicated’ and the end result will be NO CHANGE for another generation.
I am pissed about it because of course the committee has said it is going to call for a referendum, which will preserve the status quo.
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Stand on guard, my Canadian friend. These truly are interesting times we live in.
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Sorry, I really didn’t mean to speak for everyone. That was dumb.
Praise it!
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Yep. Just ask the UK. Nobody wants AV, so put that on a referendum, let it lose, and stay with FPTP for another generation, keeping with clear majorities for parties with 35% of the vote.
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Ontario did the same thing a decade ago with MMP. People had this big, “This is too complicated” campaign when the system would require voters to select 1) a candidate for their riding; 2) a party. Yeah, way fucking complicated.
I’m just hoping that people don’t forget the 10 years of Harper that quickly. We had 10 years of over 50% of the country hating the government and a good 25% of the country gloating. And they didn’t lose because they went full racist in the last election, they lost because people got sick the same old same old. Odds are good that under FPTP people are going to vote in the Conservatives 3 to 7 years from now regardless of what their platform is. That’s just how the system works.
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I guess I’m just jaded. I helped out with the ‘Yes’ side of the 2007 referendum in BC and we lost pretty badly because the ‘No’ side used FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) whereas we were using facts and logical arguments. In retrospect, it’s obvious that facts and logic don’t win an election. Emotions do, especially FUD. So, I’d rather see some movement than none. And if this goes to referendum, we will almost certainly lose.
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I agree with pretty much everything you said. My point, however, was that O’Leary stands a much better chance of leading the Conservatives back into power now that we are all living in a celebrities-as-politicians world. Besides, I can’t stand listening to the smug bastard talk.
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