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How do we get electoral reform done federally and provincially? (vargar.org)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/canada@lemmy.ca
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We desperately need proportional representation at the federal and provincial levels of government. What can we do to get it passed?

From what I understand, a coalition between the Liberals and the NDP (and more parties if the libs have that poor of a performance), where the Liberals aren't really strong electorally speaking is probably how we would get PR federally (right?).

How do we do it provincially though? Ontario seems to be moving towards that direction, with opinion polls being in favor of PR, and the Liberals and the NDP being wiped out due to a lack of PR.

What about the other provinces? Eby's being a little bitch in BC about this. Same goes with the Alberta NDP. There is no strong third party with enough leverage in either of these provinces to ram this demand through using a coalition. Not so familiar with the politics of other provinces and territories, so no idea what the status there looks like.

What do you think we should do instead? Fairvote's "email a sternly worded letter to your MP/MLA" sounds woefully ineffective.

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[–] -4 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Proportional representation is a bad idea, and in every case where it's been examined on a provincial level when the voters take a long hard look they walk away from it

Would be better for sure to look at the reasons why you want it and then find other ways to achieve that which would be more acceptable to the public. If the public isn't on board then you're going to have a tough time making it happen and there's been nothing to stop someone in the future from going back to first past the post

And you had a coalition between the liberals and NDP for 4 years, and that didn't help.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    You're being disingenuous saying voters walk away every time. There are over half a dozen different ways of implementing PR. Show me an example for each type of PR where the voters walked away.

    Also, out of the 74 democratic countries in the world, 2/3rds of them use some type of PR voting, so how about you show the reasons why these Canadian voters walked away from PR when 2/3rds of the world's democracies have it and want it.

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  • [–] -1 points 3 months ago

    There's nothing disingenuous about it, voters walked away from it every time. That's entirely a fact and you can do your own research on the various models that were proposed, I'm not here to compile a book for you. It's a matter of public record, these were voted on. We've seen mixed proportional proportional and a few others.

    And every flavor that gets proposed gets shot down. British Columbia itself alone had three freaking referendums on it and launched a citizens committee to study it before one of them and it still got shot down

    When people take a look at it they don't like it. It's a bad idea

    And who cares how many other countries use pR? Israel's one of them and they've been constantly criticized as having a horrible government. PR is a crappy system

    But it's an especially crappy system for a country as large and as diverse as ours is. The problems with PR are minimized when you have a smaller more homogeneous population. You have a population like ours it Magnifies all of the problems with PR 100 fold

    As for the reasons why Canadians walked away from it it doesn't really matter. The records are there and you can look it up if you want but the fact is they did walk away from it. Ontario, the Atlantic provinces, british Columbia, all toll groups that represent more than half of our population and they all shot it down some of them multiple times

    You sold yourself on the idea that it's good and you're not looking at the problems that come along with it. But when people give it serious consideration they see those problems and they say no

    The best you would ever sell in Canada is some form of limited proportional representation where the majority of the MPS are elected first pass the post but then a small number of seats are awarded to each party based on their percentage of vote to try and balance things a little bit and even that's a bad idea. But it's an idea that at least some people might accept. But it doesn't actually address any of the issues people who support PR reportedly claim to care about

    There are other ways to improve representation in our democracy that would be effective. PR is not one of them

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