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Half of Canadians favour joining the EU (www.canadianaffairs.news)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/buyeuropean@feddit.uk
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In the Abacus poll, 46 per cent of respondents said they would support Canada becoming a member state of the EU, and 44 per cent said the Canadian government should definitely or probably look into joining it.

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[โ€“] 6 points 1 year ago* (8 children)

I appreciate the thought and the vote of confidence. Unity against the US would be nice. But, I'm afraid of the US influence in Canada. It's bad enough in the EU, but Canada probably is worse.

My conditions in order of importance, if I had any power at all, would be (and maybe Canada already has these):

  • no "winner takes all" or first past the post anywhere - single transferable vote or ranked choice voting
  • separation of church and state
  • wealth tax aka "tax wealth, not work", it'll pay for a bunch of the below
  • free public education
  • universal healthcare without stupid deductibles
  • the ability to live without a car in any place with more than 5k people i.e public transport FTW, high speed trains, buses, metros and trams, fuck cars
  • opensource in all public services
  • no deals with the US defence industry (although the EU council just made idiotic concessions)
  • house the homeless
  • state funded TV

Those are off the top of my head. Given more time, I'd probably come up with more, but I think those are the basic things I'd care about.

Edit: Yes, I'm aware most EU members don't have this, but Canada could be a lighthouse, guiding the rest of the members. It would probably see a huge influx of Europeans if those things were to be implemented.

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  • [โ€“] 4 points 1 year ago

    Canada is well on our way. Lots of support for proportional representation voting, separation of church and state yes (Canada is much less religious than the states except maybe Alberta), ways of taxing the wealthy through capital gains tax etc, education so free up until university and then tuition is lower for Canadians and federal student loans are at 0% lending, universal health care no dedications already in place. I think Europe might not understand how vast and far Canada is so public transportation can be really challenging but yes cityโ€™s have ok public transportation and better would be great. I donโ€™t know about opensource or defence contracts so I wonโ€™t speak to those. Better housing options for homeless would be great. And we have state funded TV, CBC which weโ€™re very proud of!

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  • [โ€“] [S] -1 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    I agree with your suggestions however ranked choice aka the alternative vote funnels everyoneโ€™s votes to the 2 big parties thus causing less political competition in our politics.

    The winner-take-all ranked ballot system that was being pushed by Justin Trudeau can distort results even more than first past the post.

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  • [โ€“] 3 points 1 year ago* (5 children)

    Versus FPTP, which funnels votes to 2 big parties, forces strategic voting and discards everyone else's opinions?

    Ranked choice allows the politicians in a country to see what people actually want. There's been countless elections in my country where I'd have voted Green if I knew that vote would then be transferred to the party of my preference, rather than effectively being a vote for the party I like least (as a third party vote is in FPTP).

    If the incoming government knows the only reason they got in was down to a load of transferred green votes, they would be pressured to push for a policy agenda more skewed in that direction and in theory should result in a government more representative of the people that voted for it

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  • [โ€“] 2 points 1 year ago

    I would recommend looking at the Norwegian system, where each region elects multiple candidates proportionately to the local votes, and all parties above a certain percentage nationwide shares a pool proportionally as well. It's not perfect, but it gives a sane amount of different parties without the inevitable deadlocks of 100-party systems. The national pool limit can tune the approximate number of viable parties.

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  • [โ€“] [S] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Iโ€™m advocating for the single transferable vote not first-past-the-post. The results show that with the alternative vote the big parties are much more overrepresented in the makeup of the seats in parliament meaning that they will be less likely to listen to you. We need to have the seat makeup match up with the percentage of the votes.

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