this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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Agh. Truly. Is there any way to reform the electoral system without relying on an elected party to make it happen?
There are ways but the most common methods of political reform in history are rather violent, unfortunately.
I do think we need youth more involved in politics and a less apathetic population. I think vote reform should come from the local/municipal level and move up from there once a good chunk of cities have it, but unfortunately in Ontario the Progressive Conservatives stopped making it legal for municipalities to change their system.
I mean we elected a party that promised Electoral Reform and that this would be the last FPTP election. That should've been enough. They just changed their minds after they won.
This is not accurate, the majority on the electoral reform committee on the house was the NDP, Greens, CPC and BLoc. They passed from committee reccomendations that ensured electoral reform wouldn't pass the house. They should wear this as much as anyone.
The ER committee laid out options for the Government and made the following recommendation:
That means that STV (which is multi-member ranked-ballot with large ridings), MMP (local ridings with a regional proportional fallback), and the urban-rural hybrid (cities get STV, rural areas get MMP) were all on the table as options. The Liberals just flipped the chessboard because the committee didn't recommend their preferred ranked-ballot-instant-runoff-single-member system.
Open-list MMP with ~12-member regions would be an excellent solution for Canada.
I'd oppose any system that doesn't tie members to single seat ridings. "Councillors at large" are the bane of any system they're in: they float in the background beholden to none of the voters, almost impossible to remove, and loyal only to the party. More than one member per district and you end up with two or more people playing hot potato and pointing at each other claiming the other was supposed to handle it, whatever the "it" happens to be.
The Gallagher Index is not the be-all, end-all of fairness. The last Canadian election had an index of 12, the last US election had an index of 5. I don't think very many would say the US system is better.
The CPC were going to oppose any change, and got their way on having a referendum which was absolutely going to fail, especially with the CPC framing it as a Liberal power grab, regardless of the eventual method chosen.
Internal polling, not the dog and pony online poll, showed that while 50ish% of voters might support a change, support fractured once the different options entered the mix. A high number of voters were absolutely tied to their preferred method and would oppose the others.
The Liberals read the writing on the wall, cut their losses and abandoned the project. If nothing else, it's killed any chance of electoral reform for the foreseeable future.
This is FUD. An open-list MMP system has nobody whose name was not on a ballot - the idea is that the backfill-seats go to the most popular people (by ballots) within the backfilling party. So if there's some loathed backbencher within a party, they can't squeeze in by the list because voters who like that party can still vote for somebody else.
And STV is even more direct in that every person on the ballot is ranked individually by voters, it's just STV includes multiple members of the same party on the same ballot because there's more than 1 seat up for grabs in the riding.
We have parachute MP candidates today. We have PCPO candidates who don't even show up for debates. Jack Layton managed to get Brosseau a seat in Quebec, when was a college student who spent the election in Vegas and didn't speak French. I doubt half of Canadian voters could even name their current MP.
Celebrating an absurdly disproportionate system in order to preserve something that is already a sham and with attacks that aren't even relevant to the systems on the table is ridiculous. nobody is proposing a closed-list system.
Many countries have switched from FPTP systems to proportional systems. Many more have campaigns to do so. How many countries have the reverse? How many campaigns are out there to go back to FPTP? None, because it's a dumb system.
We have absolutely no idea if the system will be STV, MMP, the bastardised STV-Urban/MMP-Rural system, open or closed party lists or something else entirely, because everyone and their dog has their preferred system. With the pols making the final decisions, it's safe to assume that the parties will do what they must to benefit the respective parties. Also Germany, Portugal, Spain, Italy, NZ, etc use closed lists, so it's hardly unheard of.
Fortunately, it's not something we'll have to deal with for a very long time. The Liberals are feeling hard done by for the backlash they got, the CPC were absolutely not on board from the beginning and were going to fight it tooth and nail, the beleaguered NDP are as close to power as they'll likely ever be, but nowhere close enough to force the issue. The Bloc will continue to be agents of chaos and do what they can to be disruptive.
Random polling of the electorate over the years has satisfaction with the current system bouncing between 50 and 70%, mostly dependent on the state of the economy. When asked whether is should be changed from FPTP, you can get up to 60% support, but as soon as you put forward specific systems, support fragments, and FPTP becomes the default. That's been born out by the numerous aborted attempts for change at the provincial level.
As far as what other countries are doing, uh, so what? Are they better run? Most of Eastern Europe is dominated by fascist or fascist adjacent governments. Much of Western Europe is leaning in that direction. Much of Germany is still beholden to the friggen coal industry of all things. And Italy, basically in constant political turmoil, has outdone themselves by putting the actual fascists back in power.
Yes, of course. Canada and its provinces stand as a democracy. The population at large are in charge. They can do whatever they want. The only thing that can get in their way is themselves.
And that population has tested the electoral reform waters numerous times, especially provincially where referendums have been hosted on multiple occasions to gauge opinion, but interest in change has struggled to present itself.