Canada has elections/politicians/leaders etc?
and a stock market?
Electoral dysfunction, yet again
Greens deserved more than 20 seats - voting system also punished New Democrats, western Liberals and urban Conservatives
Once again, Canada’s antiquated first-past-the-post system wasted millions of votes, distorted results, severely punished large blocks of voters, exaggerated regional differences, created an unrepresentative Parliament and contributed to a record low voter turnout.
[Note: The following commentary is based on returns at 2am ET.]
The chief victims of the October 14 federal election were:
- Green Party: 940,000 voters supporting the Green Party sent no one to Parliament, setting a new record for the most votes cast for any party that gained no parliamentary representation. By comparison, 813,000 Conservative voters in Alberta alone were able to elect 27 MPs.
- Prairie Liberals and New Democrats: In the prairie provinces, Conservatives received roughly twice the vote of the Liberals and NDP, but took seven times as many seats.
- Urban Conservatives: Similar to the last election, a quarter-million Conservative voters in Toronto elected no one and neither did Conservative voters in Montreal.
- New Democrats: The NDP attracted 1.1 million more votes than the Bloc, but the voting system gave the Bloc 50 seats, the NDP 37.
“How can anyone consider this democratic representation?” asked Barbara Odenwald, President of Fair Vote Canada.
Had the votes on October 14 been cast under a fair and proportional voting system, Fair Vote Canada projected that the seats allocation would have been approximately as follows:
Conservatives - 38% of the popular vote: 117 seats (not 143)
Liberals - 26% of the popular vote: 81 seats (not 76)
NDP - 18% of the popular vote: 57 seats (not 37)
Bloc - 10% of the popular vote: 28 seats (not 50)
Greens - 7% of the popular vote: 23 seats (not 0)
Fair Vote Canada also has data for each province on the number of seats won and number of seats actually deserved by each party.
Odenwald emphasized that any projection on the use of other voting systems must be qualified, as specific system features would affect the exact seat allocations.
“With a different voting system, people would also have voted differently,” said Larry Gordon, Executive Director of Fair Vote Canada. “There would have been no need for strategic voting. We would likely have seen higher voter turnout. We would have had different candidates - more women, and more diversity of all kinds. We would have had more real choices.”
Fair Vote Canada (FVC) is a national multi-partisan citizens’ campaign to promote voting system reform. FVC was founded in 2001 and has a National Advisory Board of distinguished Canadians from all points on the political spectrum
Nickel wrote:Central Canada built the railroads that made getting to the west en masse possible. We paid for them. We paid to bring the immigrants over from Britain, Germany, and Ukraine to populate the Prairies, and to sustain the agricultural industry there and get it started. That wasn't cheap, it wasn't free, and it was all done DECADES before the first drop of oil was ever found there. But now that you have to contribute, yeah, YOU wanna separate. Well, you're welcome, Tex.
Nickel wrote:
Central Canada built the railroads that made getting to the west en masse possible. We paid for them. We paid to bring the immigrants over from Britain, Germany, and Ukraine to populate the Prairies, and to sustain the agricultural industry there and get it started. That wasn't cheap, it wasn't free, and it was all done DECADES before the first drop of oil was ever found there. But now that you have to contribute, yeah, YOU wanna separate. Well, you're welcome, Tex.
Blacksmith wrote:We've paid the lions share of of the balance of payment for years.
Blacksmith wrote:We've paid the lions share of of the balance of payment for years.
Maddog78 wrote:More crap from Nickel.
Yes, it was a luck of geology but it took a lot of hard work and development of technology to exploit it.
Maddog78 wrote:Who in the prairies was supposed to pay for them?
There was hardly anybody there.
DaleFromCalgary wrote:Dion shot himself in both feet by proposing the Green Shift carbon tax plan.
Nickel wrote:Maddog78 wrote:More crap from Nickel.
Yes, it was a luck of geology but it took a lot of hard work and development of technology to exploit it.
Do please give us a break. People were hauling this stuff up out of holes in the ground and slopping it in buckets into barrels 150 years ago. The only difference now is how far down you have to go for it and how much money you can rub in the faces of those who don't have it.
Most of the actual work of refining it, you'll notice, is usually done a long way from where the stuff is actually found. Usually in vicinity of places that actually have to use it to DO or MAKE something.
Nice try, though.
Blacksmith wrote:The suggestion that the East paid for the settlement of the WEST is an insult.
DaleFromCalgary wrote:Central Canada did not pay for the trans-continental railroad. Western Canada was surveyed into square mile plots called sections, with 36 sections in a township...
The difficulties of construction and demand for early completion of the line ensured generous provisions to the company, including $25 million in cash, 25 million acres (about 10 million ha) of land in a belt along the railway, the cost of surveys totalling $37 million, monopoly over transportation south to the US for 20 years, etc.
DaleFromCalgary wrote:Central Canada did not pay for the immigrants.
Dreamtwister wrote:DaleFromCalgary wrote:Dion shot himself in both feet by proposing the Green Shift carbon tax plan.
I disagree. I think Dion shot himself in the left foot with the Green Shift. He shot himself in the right foot by phoning in his election campaign.
Seriously, I saw more effort from the Greens.
Blacksmith wrote:See Nickle is a neocolonialist.
Quit bearing the "Whiteman's Burden".
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