cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/24368090
The seat make up would look more like the left if we had a more fair and accountable proportional representation over the obsolete first past the post.
this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
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We repeat that every time this chart looks like this. Which is almost every election. We even elected a guy on the promise to change it. 🥹
Yup, and now it will bite him in the ass. Imagine if we had coalition governments in Canada that actually represented the Canadian voice. The parties will have to make concessions and actually talk to each other like in a marriage.
It's plausible that Trudeau could want to push through voting reform as one last move to salvage something since him losing the next election likely spells the end of his political career.
The problem is the Liberals as a whole. It pretty predictable Conservatives are going to do a horrible job and by the 2029ish election the tables will be flipped and Liberal will only need to campaign on not being a disaster of a party like the incumbents.
As much as I hate to pin hopes on a hail mary like that, this is likely the only scenario where we will get voting reform to happen. The party in power has no incentive to change the system that brought them to power in the first place, so we're basically gambling on an outgoing party using their last days of holding onto power to make it happen. Just writing this out makes me wonder how we ever got here in the first place. Who thought first-past-the-post was anywhere near a functional system to begin with?
FPTP was fine when elections were held within a riding, and results were delivered by horseback. You were voting based on a local candidate, not the national party.
Then the railroad, telegraph, telephone, and internet were invented, politics became national, and we're still using FPTP.
Thanks, that does actually help out of into context and explains how we got here. I think the better question (and the one I should've asked) is why are we still using a system that predates the railroad?
I don't think the Liberal are willing to sacrifice their entire future as the one of the two alternating parties in order to gain a few more seats.
338 on a federal level projects them for 67 seats and 24% ± 3% on the popular vote. That translates to 85-91 seats which is a decent gain.
However this would mean the Liberal will likely never get anything close to majority again. I would also believe they would slowly dwindle in popularity with a rise of smaller parties. That's a lot give up for 24 more seats for 4 years.
Proportional representation isn’t the only alternative to FPTP.
Something like STV or even just IRV tends to put centrist parties in charge which would likely benefit the liberals.
We can build up the pressure further on the prime minister if we can continue educating others about this.
Its the same "power corrupts" story again and again. Karina Gould gave an impassioned speech on electoral reform (http://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/42-1/house/sitting-64/hansard#Int-8963139). But after replacing Maryam Monsef as Minister of Democratic Institutions, her views suddenly became far more simplistic. In a 2017 interview on CBC's Metro Morning, she was asked "Why is it important that people at the very least believe every vote counts?". She replies "Because they do. … We literally count them: 1, 2, 3, 4, up to the majority that wins."
The people have the power not the conservatives or the liberals and research has shown the Canadian public wants proportional representation however we’re currently not putting enough pressure about the unfair system of first past the post. There was a vote on national citizen’s assembly that went like this
“On February 7, Parliament voted on Motion M-86 for a National Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. The result was: YES 101 NO 220 In addition to the support of the NDP, Green Party and Bloc MPs, 40 Liberals and 3 Conservatives voted for the motion. To see how your MP voted, scroll to the bottom of this email.”
Source: https://www.fairvote.ca/21/02/2024/vote-result-mps-from-all-parties-vote-for-motion-m-86-for-a-citizens-assembly-but-not-enough-to-win/