From what I remember from Obama 08 organizers, lawn signs while physically visible, are not influencing to undecided or sporadic voters, and so are at the bottom of a campaign priorities.
Phone banking and door knocking take priority
I asked to take part in all of that, only the call about giving a sign to a neighbour came in.
I was just wondering if other volunteers, regardless of party affiliation, were experiencing similar lag between being very clear about wanting to help and days go by without response of any kind or if that might be just a local thing based on being rural rather than urban or sadly a NDP thing. At least I know for certain if I was in a urban location, I could just go into the office and volunteer some time at the phones or computer.
10-15k people at the climate rally (estimate - they don't have firm numbers).
16-20 big rig truckers honking their horns outside.
Good time to remember that history has a right and a wrong side.
That was touch and go. I had a job interview in the core right at the same time all this shit was going down. Managed to just miss the big thrust.
Fucked up the interview though ironically I'm looking for a job since I got laid off from O&G
My wife had a doctors appointment downtown and almost got taken out by the usual downtown dumbasses.
Sorry to hear about the interview I have endless empathy for anyone who got laid off in the bust. I’m lucky enough to be in a recession-resistant industry, but I’ve definitely had moments where I wondered what my employment future held.
Thanks. I actually got laid off recently. I survived the first big bust in 2015, and had to deal with a lot of layoffs.
Luckily I was in an administrative role (IT), so I'm infinitely more employable than someone whose skills are tied to O&G.
I'm also avoiding O&G, since I had a good view of the business side of things, and the writing has kinda been on the wall.
I never finish anyth
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DaimarA Million Feet Tall of AwesomeRegistered Userregular
Scheer is in my city at one of my favorite bars doing a live stream right now telling outright lies that the Liberals are going to raise the gst and impose massive taxes on people buying and selling homes. Like this stuff is all a complete fabrication.
Is there a link for this? Like, a recording? I feel like that's the sort of thing that's very worth sharing instead of just complaining about here?
Combating stupid memes with an unsourced but potentially less stupid meme can hit a stumbling point right out of the blocks.
I’m not expecting that language from the CBC, but it’d help if it wasn’t from, I dunno, MaPlESiRrUp42069.
Not sure where the picture is from (I got it from a friend's facebook), but every one of these items I remember in the news during the campaign or explicitly said during the debates.
I didnt know too much about Warren Kinsella until he started working for Olivia Chow in the Toronto mayor's race a few years ago.
That guy is a goon. A beat you up in the alley and then brag about it to your mother kind of goon.
Kinsella is an opportunistic piece of shit. When May hired him on she lost me completely.
I cannot imagine that this coming out two days before the election will be good news for Scheer, given that Bernier lost the leadership vote for the CPC by so little.
Already seeing people claiming (and again, take it with the big grain of salt that should accompany all social media declarations) that this proves all the parties are the same, and they were going to vote CPC but now they’re just staying home. And Bernier is in a Trumpian tweet storm about it.
It’s rare that the right eats itself at all, so I’m enjoying this.
Bernier has filed a formal complaint about it with the election commission.
EDIT: Bernier is also accusing Kinsella and Scheer of being behind the Rhinoceros Party running a candidate with the same name as him in his riding. Which, on the one hand, sounds like the kind of crazy paranoid rant Bernier would go on against what seems clearly like the kind of prank the RP would pull... but on the other hand sounds exactly like the kind of strategy the CPC would do, since the Republicans have done it in the past.
Bernier has filed a formal complaint about it with the election commission.
EDIT: Bernier is also accusing Kinsella and Scheer of being behind the Rhinoceros Party running a candidate with the same name as him in his riding. Which, on the one hand, sounds like the kind of crazy paranoid rant Bernier would go on against what seems clearly like the kind of prank the RP would pull... but on the other hand sounds exactly like the kind of strategy the CPC would do, since the Republicans have done it in the past.
Republicans funded satirical parties into running a candidate with the same name as a prominent Democrat before?
Bernier has filed a formal complaint about it with the election commission.
EDIT: Bernier is also accusing Kinsella and Scheer of being behind the Rhinoceros Party running a candidate with the same name as him in his riding. Which, on the one hand, sounds like the kind of crazy paranoid rant Bernier would go on against what seems clearly like the kind of prank the RP would pull... but on the other hand sounds exactly like the kind of strategy the CPC would do, since the Republicans have done it in the past.
Republicans funded satirical parties into running a candidate with the same name as a prominent Democrat before?
That seems really far fetched.
Independent candidates.... or at least that's what I had heard, but now that you're asking about it I've triedy to google it for references and I'm coming up empty, and in particular the races I was told they had done this in have nothing about it in their Wikipedia entries. So I guess I was wrong. Sorry about that.
It actually makes a lot of mathematical and dirty politics sense to on the down low fund or encourage more opposing candidates on a riding's ballot.
FPTP encourages these toxic anti-democratic political manipulations through a simple mathematical reality of the system of First Past The Post: It is designed to give minority voting blocks in a riding the choice of who represents them, leaving the other voting blocks that voted against that result out in the disenfranchised cold to be called split, protest, and wasted votes.
Here’s the cold hard math of FPTP: Minimum Thresholds To Win (MT).
A) 2 candidates on a riding’s ballot. MT = 50.1% of the votes. This the only time a majority of the votes is the minimum to win.
3 candidates on a riding’s ballot. MT = 33.4% of the votes. It doesn’t take much to have a majority upwards of 66.6% not be a part of who isn’t voted in.
C) 4 candidates on a riding’s ballot. MT = 25.1% of the votes. Up to 74.9% of us potentially have our political voice ignored.
D) 5 candidates on a riding’s ballot. MT = 20.1% of the votes. Up to 79.9% of us considered protest votes of the winner.
E) 6 candidates on a riding’s ballot. MT = 16.7% of the votes. Up to 83.3% of us could have our votes called split.
F) 7 candidates on a riding’s ballot. MT = 14.4% of the votes. Up to 85.6% of us told we wasted our votes not picking second place.
G) Etc...
Canada has a lot of political candidates on our ballots, we currently have what I would consider 5 major parties (they’ve successfully convinced a riding to elect their candidate to a MP seat under FPTP) running candidates in as many ridings as they can, not even accounting for the independents and smaller party’s candidates each taking a piece of the pie of votes in their riding’s ballots.
This is why political parties in Canada realize they don’t need to appeal to as many of us as possible, they only need to have a loyal and dedicated voting block that meets the MT or better in your riding, everything after that is just convincing the others to not bother showing up or try to peel off a few voters to a 4th, 5th, or 6th place candidate under FPTP.
Its one of the myriad of reasons why FPTP needs to stop being in use in Canada.
It actually makes a lot of mathematical and dirty politics sense to on the down low fund or encourage more opposing candidates on a riding's ballot.
FPTP encourages these toxic anti-democratic political manipulations through a simple mathematical reality of the system of First Past The Post: It is designed to give minority voting blocks in a riding the choice of who represents them, leaving the other voting blocks that voted against that result out in the disenfranchised cold to be called split, protest, and wasted votes.
Here’s the cold hard math of FPTP: Minimum Thresholds To Win (MT).
A) 2 candidates on a riding’s ballot. MT = 50.1% of the votes. This the only time a majority of the votes is the minimum to win.
3 candidates on a riding’s ballot. MT = 33.4% of the votes. It doesn’t take much to have a majority upwards of 66.6% not be a part of who isn’t voted in.
C) 4 candidates on a riding’s ballot. MT = 25.1% of the votes. Up to 74.9% of us potentially have our political voice ignored.
D) 5 candidates on a riding’s ballot. MT = 20.1% of the votes. Up to 79.9% of us considered protest votes of the winner.
E) 6 candidates on a riding’s ballot. MT = 16.7% of the votes. Up to 83.3% of us could have our votes called split.
F) 7 candidates on a riding’s ballot. MT = 14.4% of the votes. Up to 85.6% of us told we wasted our votes not picking second place.
G) Etc...
Canada has a lot of political candidates on our ballots, we currently have what I would consider 5 major parties (they’ve successfully convinced a riding to elect their candidate to a MP seat under FPTP) running candidates in as many ridings as they can, not even accounting for the independents and smaller party’s candidates each taking a piece of the pie of votes in their riding’s ballots.
This is why political parties in Canada realize they don’t need to appeal to as many of us as possible, they only need to have a loyal and dedicated voting block that meets the MT or better in your riding, everything after that is just convincing the others to not bother showing up or try to peel off a few voters to a 4th, 5th, or 6th place candidate under FPTP.
Its one of the myriad of reasons why FPTP needs to stop being in use in Canada.
If your concern is parties realising they only need to appeal to a loyal and dedicated voting block, I hate to tell you but proportionally systems only make this worse. Parties with small but dedicated bases can hold onto seats very tightly and play kingmaker.
The kind of system the Liberals favour is the most conductive to putting parties with broad appeal in power. Which makes sense because that kind of system puts them into power because that's the kind of party they are: one that's very vaguely broadly appealing to more Canadians then basically any other party. They are the vanilla flavour.
If your concern is parties realising they only need to appeal to a loyal and dedicated voting block, I hate to tell you but proportionally systems only make this worse. Parties with small but dedicated bases can hold onto seats very tightly and play kingmaker.
The kind of system the Liberals favour is the most conductive to putting parties with broad appeal in power. Which makes sense because that kind of system puts them into power because that's the kind of party they are: one that's very vaguely broadly appealing to more Canadians then basically any other party. They are the vanilla flavour.
Is it really worse to have Canadians not be called split/waste/protest anymore and playing kingmaker? Since when?
Its basically what makes a parliamentary minority government so appealing. Quite a few people have remarked they would take a Liberal government in coalition or supplied by the NDP and Green to see their policy platforms get more play, so...
Besides, you are completely missing the point of how FPTP encourages bad behaviour right across the political spectrum but in particular this thread has noticed the bad behavior by the CPC and PPC - they do these things because FPTP lets them win by doing things like their talking points endlessly calling Trudeau the worst ever and other lies, it does very little to dissuade them from just relying on their loyalists in ridings rather than seek broader appeal.
If your concern is parties realising they only need to appeal to a loyal and dedicated voting block, I hate to tell you but proportionally systems only make this worse. Parties with small but dedicated bases can hold onto seats very tightly and play kingmaker.
The kind of system the Liberals favour is the most conductive to putting parties with broad appeal in power. Which makes sense because that kind of system puts them into power because that's the kind of party they are: one that's very vaguely broadly appealing to more Canadians then basically any other party. They are the vanilla flavour.
Is it really worse to have Canadians not be called split/waste/protest anymore and playing kingmaker? Since when?
Its basically what makes a parliamentary minority government so appealing. Quite a few people have remarked they would take a Liberal government in coalition or supplied by the NDP and Green to see their policy platforms get more play, so...
So that's not how it necessarily works. Instead you get a Con government supported by a tiny PPC minority that gets specific legislative concessions in order to prop them up.
That's the basic problem with proportional systems. They allow more parties to be present but that means any individual party often only needs to appeal to a small minority and then just use the fact that the larger parties need them to form governments to extract policy concessions only supported by very small numbers of voters.
Which is why I'm pointing this out in the context of your complaint about FPTP. FPTP naturally tends towards two-party setups. Not splitting your vote is always rewarded. This can lead to situations where the basic question to voters is "What are you gonna do, vote for the other guy?". But it's not as effective as it sounds because that kind of shit kills enthusiasm and you can get murdered on turn-out.
But more importantly and more directly at what you said, if your concern is that parties right now "only need to have a loyal and dedicated voting block that meets the MT or better in your riding", then proportional systems are only going to make that worse because they encourage this kind of behaviour. That's what system that encourage a lot more parties do by definition. More niche parties that get by appealing to a loyal non-majority chunk of the electorate.
Besides, you are completely missing the point of how FPTP encourages bad behaviour right across the political spectrum but in particular this thread has noticed the bad behavior by the CPC and PPC - they do these things because FPTP lets them win by doing things like their talking points endlessly calling Trudeau the worst ever and other lies, it does very little to dissuade them from just relying on their loyalists in ridings rather than seek broader appeal.
That's not a function of FPTP, that's a function of the fact that propaganda is effective. They'd be running the same ads under any system.
So that's not how it necessarily works. Instead you get a Con government supported by a tiny PPC minority that gets specific legislative concessions in order to prop them up.
That's the basic problem with proportional systems. They allow more parties to be present but that means any individual party often only needs to appeal to a small minority and then just use the fact that the larger parties need them to form governments to extract policy concessions only supported by very small numbers of voters.
Which is why I'm pointing this out in the context of your complaint about FPTP. FPTP naturally tends towards two-party setups. Not splitting your vote is always rewarded. This can lead to situations where the basic question to voters is "What are you gonna do, vote for the other guy?". But it's not as effective as it sounds because that kind of shit kills enthusiasm and you can get murdered on turn-out.
But more importantly and more directly at what you said, if your concern is that parties right now "only need to have a loyal and dedicated voting block that meets the MT or better in your riding", then proportional systems are only going to make that worse because they encourage this kind of behaviour. That's what system that encourage a lot more parties do by definition. More niche parties that get by appealing to a loyal non-majority chunk of the electorate.
Besides, you are completely missing the point of how FPTP encourages bad behaviour right across the political spectrum but in particular this thread has noticed the bad behavior by the CPC and PPC - they do these things because FPTP lets them win by doing things like their talking points endlessly calling Trudeau the worst ever and other lies, it does very little to dissuade them from just relying on their loyalists in ridings rather than seek broader appeal.
That's not a function of FPTP, that's a function of the fact that propaganda is effective. They'd be running the same ads under any system.
You see problem, I see feature, we're probably just going to have to agree to disagree with regards to policy that needs attention because the evidence is pretty clear in my estimation that PR ignores less of the electorate's policy concerns. I would hope you would review the evidence yourself and realize your characterization of PR doesn't match what the experts are saying (see: References).
Thing is, we may be using FPTP, but Canada is not a two party setup, not even close. With our multi-party setup, FPTP is definitely encouraging bad behavior to win on small margins well beyond just the effectiveness of propaganda, its also pushing the strategic vote narrative which as you admit kills enthusiasm or as I would put it, encourages apathy and disenfranchisement of your opposition's supporters. Its why the Conservatives even previously tried Robocalls that spread disinformation on polling stations to those they had listed as supporters for others in Ridings too close to call but the call for a strategic vote is just as much an attempt at the suppression of voter's aspirations for representation in also close races, it even says as much in the pitch to vote against (either ABC or ABL which I have noticed pop up in comments for the first time this election).
I'm not interested in PR because I'd rather not become Israel with 9000 parties each with their own fiefdoms fighting each other.
I'm interested in PR because I'd rather become New Zealand, where they have seen stable minority governments for 23 years, plus better representation for women and Maori.
Some impressions of the switch from FPTP to MMP and the last 20-22 years from New Zealanders:
There is more than one way to do PR than the hotbed of cross roads that is Israel. Canada wouldn't be like Israel, it would be a lot more like New Zealand.
I'm not interested in PR because I'd rather not become Israel with 9000 parties each with their own fiefdoms fighting each other.
I'm interested in PR because I'd rather become New Zealand, where they have seen stable minority governments for 23 years, plus better representation for women and Maori.
Some impressions of the switch from FPTP to MMP and the last 20-22 years from New Zealanders:
There is more than one way to do PR than the hotbed of cross roads that is Israel. Canada wouldn't be like Israel, it would be a lot more like New Zealand.
I don't agree. I think we would not be like new Zealand but rather a very fractured nation.
We have a lot of different views in this country including separatists, insanely remote places, indigenous communities, white nationalists, environmental extremists, etc...
I'm not interested in PR because I'd rather not become Israel with 9000 parties each with their own fiefdoms fighting each other.
I'm interested in PR because I'd rather become New Zealand, where they have seen stable minority governments for 23 years, plus better representation for women and Maori.
Some impressions of the switch from FPTP to MMP and the last 20-22 years from New Zealanders:
There is more than one way to do PR than the hotbed of cross roads that is Israel. Canada wouldn't be like Israel, it would be a lot more like New Zealand.
If Canada adopts New Zealand's results in addition to its system voters will have the deluxe choice of a) Liberal-led coalition or b) Conservative-led coalition. You'd still be stuck with Trudeau.
So that's not how it necessarily works. Instead you get a Con government supported by a tiny PPC minority that gets specific legislative concessions in order to prop them up.
That's the basic problem with proportional systems. They allow more parties to be present but that means any individual party often only needs to appeal to a small minority and then just use the fact that the larger parties need them to form governments to extract policy concessions only supported by very small numbers of voters.
Which is why I'm pointing this out in the context of your complaint about FPTP. FPTP naturally tends towards two-party setups. Not splitting your vote is always rewarded. This can lead to situations where the basic question to voters is "What are you gonna do, vote for the other guy?". But it's not as effective as it sounds because that kind of shit kills enthusiasm and you can get murdered on turn-out.
But more importantly and more directly at what you said, if your concern is that parties right now "only need to have a loyal and dedicated voting block that meets the MT or better in your riding", then proportional systems are only going to make that worse because they encourage this kind of behaviour. That's what system that encourage a lot more parties do by definition. More niche parties that get by appealing to a loyal non-majority chunk of the electorate.
Besides, you are completely missing the point of how FPTP encourages bad behaviour right across the political spectrum but in particular this thread has noticed the bad behavior by the CPC and PPC - they do these things because FPTP lets them win by doing things like their talking points endlessly calling Trudeau the worst ever and other lies, it does very little to dissuade them from just relying on their loyalists in ridings rather than seek broader appeal.
That's not a function of FPTP, that's a function of the fact that propaganda is effective. They'd be running the same ads under any system.
You see problem, I see feature, we're probably just going to have to agree to disagree with regards to policy that needs attention because the evidence is pretty clear in my estimation that PR ignores less of the electorate's policy concerns. I would hope you would review the evidence yourself and realize your characterization of PR doesn't match what the experts are saying (see: References).
Thing is, we may be using FPTP, but Canada is not a two party setup, not even close. With our multi-party setup, FPTP is definitely encouraging bad behavior to win on small margins well beyond just the effectiveness of propaganda, its also pushing the strategic vote narrative which as you admit kills enthusiasm or as I would put it, encourages apathy and disenfranchisement of your opposition's supporters. Its why the Conservatives even previously tried Robocalls that spread disinformation on polling stations to those they had listed as supporters for others in Ridings too close to call but the call for a strategic vote is just as much an attempt at the suppression of voter's aspirations for representation in also close races, it even says as much in the pitch to vote against (either ABC or ABL which I have noticed pop up in comments for the first time this election).
Again, nothing you are complaining about with the Conservatives is because of FPTP. It's because they are conservatives and so have no real interest in the democratic process. They are always willing to cheat, lie, steal, repress votes, and any other crime or violation of democratic ideals in order to secure power. Frankly your continued attempts to bring robocalls and shit into this suggests you view proportional representation as some sort of magical panacea that will fix our politics and that's just not credible.
I think it's fine to prefer a proportional system. I'm just pointing out that you are kidding yourself about the result if your complaint is that parties "only need to have a loyal and dedicated voting block that meets the MT or better in your riding". That's the kind of thing proportional systems encourage. That's how they create stable 3rd parties within the system. It's why the NDP wants that kind of system. That's what those systems do.
The problem is not proportional systems, it's that you have strange ideas about what those systems do and what problems they solve and how.
I'm not interested in PR because I'd rather not become Israel with 9000 parties each with their own fiefdoms fighting each other.
I'm interested in PR because I'd rather become New Zealand, where they have seen stable minority governments for 23 years, plus better representation for women and Maori.
Some impressions of the switch from FPTP to MMP and the last 20-22 years from New Zealanders:
There is more than one way to do PR than the hotbed of cross roads that is Israel. Canada wouldn't be like Israel, it would be a lot more like New Zealand.
I don't agree. I think we would not be like new Zealand but rather a very fractured nation.
We have a lot of different views in this country including separatists, insanely remote places, indigenous communities, white nationalists, environmental extremists, etc...
We are very unlike new Zealand as a populace.
That argument has already been done to death and put to rest by better scholars than I:
As well, Brian Tanguay did not share the view that introducing proportionality would lead to the fragmentation of national political parties, or favour the proliferation of extremist political parties:
I'm not as convinced as Professor Carty that it would be the death knell for national political parties. I don't see Canada being as riven by what political scientists call cleavages, as, say, Belgium is. The model proposed by the law reform commission would have a built-in kind of threshold. You'd need, probably, at least 10% of votes in a region to get one of those list seats.
To me, the worry that there would be a proliferation of fringe or extremist parties and that the national parties would fall apart seems exaggerated. I just don't see—and I share, actually, your views so eloquently stated in the preamble to the question—that we grew up or lived through the near death of the country, all under first past the post. I don't think that a mixed member proportional system would exacerbate regionalism. I don't think it would be any worse than it is now.[273]
I'm not interested in PR because I'd rather not become Israel with 9000 parties each with their own fiefdoms fighting each other.
I'm interested in PR because I'd rather become New Zealand, where they have seen stable minority governments for 23 years, plus better representation for women and Maori.
Some impressions of the switch from FPTP to MMP and the last 20-22 years from New Zealanders:
There is more than one way to do PR than the hotbed of cross roads that is Israel. Canada wouldn't be like Israel, it would be a lot more like New Zealand.
If Canada adopts New Zealand's results in addition to its system voters will have the deluxe choice of a) Liberal-led coalition or b) Conservative-led coalition. You'd still be stuck with Trudeau.
Key word here: Coalition.
So yes, I would still be stuck with Trudeau and I would be fine with that. The point was never to exclude Trudeau's point of view, but to include more Canadian views, coalitions do that.
Let's be very clear, despite sourcing my comments on this topic, I've had words put in my mouth that I think this solves all our problems. I never said that. Let's not have perfect be the enemy of good, Proportional Representation such as Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) only has to be better than what we have been getting from FPTP.
I'm not interested in PR because I'd rather not become Israel with 9000 parties each with their own fiefdoms fighting each other.
I'm interested in PR because I'd rather become New Zealand, where they have seen stable minority governments for 23 years, plus better representation for women and Maori.
Some impressions of the switch from FPTP to MMP and the last 20-22 years from New Zealanders:
There is more than one way to do PR than the hotbed of cross roads that is Israel. Canada wouldn't be like Israel, it would be a lot more like New Zealand.
I don't agree. I think we would not be like new Zealand but rather a very fractured nation.
We have a lot of different views in this country including separatists, insanely remote places, indigenous communities, white nationalists, environmental extremists, etc...
We are very unlike new Zealand as a populace.
That argument has already been done to death and put to rest by better scholars than I:
As well, Brian Tanguay did not share the view that introducing proportionality would lead to the fragmentation of national political parties, or favour the proliferation of extremist political parties:
I'm not as convinced as Professor Carty that it would be the death knell for national political parties. I don't see Canada being as riven by what political scientists call cleavages, as, say, Belgium is. The model proposed by the law reform commission would have a built-in kind of threshold. You'd need, probably, at least 10% of votes in a region to get one of those list seats.
To me, the worry that there would be a proliferation of fringe or extremist parties and that the national parties would fall apart seems exaggerated. I just don't see—and I share, actually, your views so eloquently stated in the preamble to the question—that we grew up or lived through the near death of the country, all under first past the post. I don't think that a mixed member proportional system would exacerbate regionalism. I don't think it would be any worse than it is now.[273]
I'm not interested in PR because I'd rather not become Israel with 9000 parties each with their own fiefdoms fighting each other.
I'm interested in PR because I'd rather become New Zealand, where they have seen stable minority governments for 23 years, plus better representation for women and Maori.
Some impressions of the switch from FPTP to MMP and the last 20-22 years from New Zealanders:
There is more than one way to do PR than the hotbed of cross roads that is Israel. Canada wouldn't be like Israel, it would be a lot more like New Zealand.
If Canada adopts New Zealand's results in addition to its system voters will have the deluxe choice of a) Liberal-led coalition or b) Conservative-led coalition. You'd still be stuck with Trudeau.
Key word here: Coalition.
So yes, I would still be stuck with Trudeau and I would be fine with that. The point was never to exclude Trudeau's point of view, but to include more Canadian views, coalitions do that.
Let's be very clear, despite sourcing my comments on this topic, I've had words put in my mouth that I think this solves all our problems. I never said that. Let's not have perfect be the enemy of good, Proportional Representation such as Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) only has to be better than what we have been getting from FPTP.
If minor parties aren't able to extract major concessions from their coalition partners it's not much of a coalition. If they are you're back to empowering extremists, with a side option of "your party leader took the other side's offer".
IRV nerfs the strategic voting problem and still requires the parties to try to appeal to a large number of people. MMP isn't the only option on the table.
If minor parties aren't able to extract major concessions from their coalition partners it's not much of a coalition. If they are you're back to empowering extremists, with a side option of "your party leader took the other side's offer".
IRV nerfs the strategic voting problem and still requires the parties to try to appeal to a large number of people. MMP isn't the only option on the table.
If IRV with a sunset clause was on the LPC's campaign platform, then I would agree with you, but currently given the various parties platforms, everyone else this election is sticking with FPTP, only the NDP is offering anything different than FPTP.
Effectively, MMP and FPTP are the only options on the table this election, it was the 2015 election where a lot more options like IRV, STV, and Rural-Urban were on the table.
Man, being on a political party's mailing list during a federal election's a bit of a ride. I've gotten ten(10) emails today, eight of which are fundraising emails.
If minor parties aren't able to extract major concessions from their coalition partners it's not much of a coalition. If they are you're back to empowering extremists, with a side option of "your party leader took the other side's offer".
IRV nerfs the strategic voting problem and still requires the parties to try to appeal to a large number of people. MMP isn't the only option on the table.
If IRV with a sunset clause was on the LPC's campaign platform, then I would agree with you, but currently given the various parties platforms, everyone else this election is sticking with FPTP, only the NDP is offering anything different than FPTP.
Effectively, MMP and FPTP are the only options on the table this election, it was the 2015 election where a lot more options like IRV, STV, and Rural-Urban were on the table.
After what happened last time I'm not exactly shocked it's not in the Liberal platform. I guess the NDP are free to offer it up in minority negotiations. (MMP would be a non-starter, though.)
Man, being on a political party's mailing list during a federal election's a bit of a ride. I've gotten ten(10) emails today, eight of which are fundraising emails.
My dad donated to Harper's conservatives once and spent the next decade getting constantly harassed via phone calls.
If minor parties aren't able to extract major concessions from their coalition partners it's not much of a coalition. If they are you're back to empowering extremists, with a side option of "your party leader took the other side's offer".
IRV nerfs the strategic voting problem and still requires the parties to try to appeal to a large number of people. MMP isn't the only option on the table.
If IRV with a sunset clause was on the LPC's campaign platform, then I would agree with you, but currently given the various parties platforms, everyone else this election is sticking with FPTP, only the NDP is offering anything different than FPTP.
Effectively, MMP and FPTP are the only options on the table this election, it was the 2015 election where a lot more options like IRV, STV, and Rural-Urban were on the table.
After what happened last time I'm not exactly shocked it's not in the Liberal platform. I guess the NDP are free to offer it up in minority negotiations. (MMP would be a non-starter, though.)
The NDP already had it's shot at "anything but FPTP" and decided that wasn't for them too. I'm basically unmoved by their stance as compared to the other parties. No party wants any kind of reform except that which advantages themselves.
Posts
I asked to take part in all of that, only the call about giving a sign to a neighbour came in.
I was just wondering if other volunteers, regardless of party affiliation, were experiencing similar lag between being very clear about wanting to help and days go by without response of any kind or if that might be just a local thing based on being rural rather than urban or sadly a NDP thing. At least I know for certain if I was in a urban location, I could just go into the office and volunteer some time at the phones or computer.
That was touch and go. I had a job interview in the core right at the same time all this shit was going down. Managed to just miss the big thrust.
Fucked up the interview though
I never finish anyth
My wife had a doctors appointment downtown and almost got taken out by the usual downtown dumbasses.
Sorry to hear about the interview
Luckily I was in an administrative role (IT), so I'm infinitely more employable than someone whose skills are tied to O&G.
I'm also avoiding O&G, since I had a good view of the business side of things, and the writing has kinda been on the wall.
I never finish anyth
https://election.ctvnews.ca/truth-tracker-scheer-s-claims-of-liberal-ndp-gst-hike-unfounded-1.4645668
http://steamcommunity.com/id/BretonBrawler
Combating stupid memes with an unsourced but potentially less stupid meme can hit a stumbling point right out of the blocks.
I’m not expecting that language from the CBC, but it’d help if it wasn’t from, I dunno, MaPlESiRrUp42069.
Not sure where the picture is from (I got it from a friend's facebook), but every one of these items I remember in the news during the campaign or explicitly said during the debates.
So it seems that Scheer and the CPC hired Warren Kinsella’s firm to destroy the PPC.
It’s just like AVP, except whoever loses, we win.
That guy is a goon. A beat you up in the alley and then brag about it to your mother kind of goon.
Kinsella is an opportunistic piece of shit. When May hired him on she lost me completely.
I cannot imagine that this coming out two days before the election will be good news for Scheer, given that Bernier lost the leadership vote for the CPC by so little.
Already seeing people claiming (and again, take it with the big grain of salt that should accompany all social media declarations) that this proves all the parties are the same, and they were going to vote CPC but now they’re just staying home. And Bernier is in a Trumpian tweet storm about it.
It’s rare that the right eats itself at all, so I’m enjoying this.
EDIT: Bernier is also accusing Kinsella and Scheer of being behind the Rhinoceros Party running a candidate with the same name as him in his riding. Which, on the one hand, sounds like the kind of crazy paranoid rant Bernier would go on against what seems clearly like the kind of prank the RP would pull... but on the other hand sounds exactly like the kind of strategy the CPC would do, since the Republicans have done it in the past.
Republicans funded satirical parties into running a candidate with the same name as a prominent Democrat before?
That seems really far fetched.
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Independent candidates.... or at least that's what I had heard, but now that you're asking about it I've triedy to google it for references and I'm coming up empty, and in particular the races I was told they had done this in have nothing about it in their Wikipedia entries. So I guess I was wrong. Sorry about that.
FPTP encourages these toxic anti-democratic political manipulations through a simple mathematical reality of the system of First Past The Post: It is designed to give minority voting blocks in a riding the choice of who represents them, leaving the other voting blocks that voted against that result out in the disenfranchised cold to be called split, protest, and wasted votes.
Here’s the cold hard math of FPTP: Minimum Thresholds To Win (MT).
A) 2 candidates on a riding’s ballot. MT = 50.1% of the votes. This the only time a majority of the votes is the minimum to win.
C) 4 candidates on a riding’s ballot. MT = 25.1% of the votes. Up to 74.9% of us potentially have our political voice ignored.
D) 5 candidates on a riding’s ballot. MT = 20.1% of the votes. Up to 79.9% of us considered protest votes of the winner.
E) 6 candidates on a riding’s ballot. MT = 16.7% of the votes. Up to 83.3% of us could have our votes called split.
F) 7 candidates on a riding’s ballot. MT = 14.4% of the votes. Up to 85.6% of us told we wasted our votes not picking second place.
G) Etc...
Canada has a lot of political candidates on our ballots, we currently have what I would consider 5 major parties (they’ve successfully convinced a riding to elect their candidate to a MP seat under FPTP) running candidates in as many ridings as they can, not even accounting for the independents and smaller party’s candidates each taking a piece of the pie of votes in their riding’s ballots.
This is why political parties in Canada realize they don’t need to appeal to as many of us as possible, they only need to have a loyal and dedicated voting block that meets the MT or better in your riding, everything after that is just convincing the others to not bother showing up or try to peel off a few voters to a 4th, 5th, or 6th place candidate under FPTP.
Its one of the myriad of reasons why FPTP needs to stop being in use in Canada.
If your concern is parties realising they only need to appeal to a loyal and dedicated voting block, I hate to tell you but proportionally systems only make this worse. Parties with small but dedicated bases can hold onto seats very tightly and play kingmaker.
The kind of system the Liberals favour is the most conductive to putting parties with broad appeal in power. Which makes sense because that kind of system puts them into power because that's the kind of party they are: one that's very vaguely broadly appealing to more Canadians then basically any other party. They are the vanilla flavour.
Is it really worse to have Canadians not be called split/waste/protest anymore and playing kingmaker? Since when?
Its basically what makes a parliamentary minority government so appealing. Quite a few people have remarked they would take a Liberal government in coalition or supplied by the NDP and Green to see their policy platforms get more play, so...
Besides, you are completely missing the point of how FPTP encourages bad behaviour right across the political spectrum but in particular this thread has noticed the bad behavior by the CPC and PPC - they do these things because FPTP lets them win by doing things like their talking points endlessly calling Trudeau the worst ever and other lies, it does very little to dissuade them from just relying on their loyalists in ridings rather than seek broader appeal.
So that's not how it necessarily works. Instead you get a Con government supported by a tiny PPC minority that gets specific legislative concessions in order to prop them up.
That's the basic problem with proportional systems. They allow more parties to be present but that means any individual party often only needs to appeal to a small minority and then just use the fact that the larger parties need them to form governments to extract policy concessions only supported by very small numbers of voters.
Which is why I'm pointing this out in the context of your complaint about FPTP. FPTP naturally tends towards two-party setups. Not splitting your vote is always rewarded. This can lead to situations where the basic question to voters is "What are you gonna do, vote for the other guy?". But it's not as effective as it sounds because that kind of shit kills enthusiasm and you can get murdered on turn-out.
But more importantly and more directly at what you said, if your concern is that parties right now "only need to have a loyal and dedicated voting block that meets the MT or better in your riding", then proportional systems are only going to make that worse because they encourage this kind of behaviour. That's what system that encourage a lot more parties do by definition. More niche parties that get by appealing to a loyal non-majority chunk of the electorate.
That's not a function of FPTP, that's a function of the fact that propaganda is effective. They'd be running the same ads under any system.
You see problem, I see feature, we're probably just going to have to agree to disagree with regards to policy that needs attention because the evidence is pretty clear in my estimation that PR ignores less of the electorate's policy concerns. I would hope you would review the evidence yourself and realize your characterization of PR doesn't match what the experts are saying (see: References).
https://www.fairvote.ca/2018/10/24/evidence/
Thing is, we may be using FPTP, but Canada is not a two party setup, not even close. With our multi-party setup, FPTP is definitely encouraging bad behavior to win on small margins well beyond just the effectiveness of propaganda, its also pushing the strategic vote narrative which as you admit kills enthusiasm or as I would put it, encourages apathy and disenfranchisement of your opposition's supporters. Its why the Conservatives even previously tried Robocalls that spread disinformation on polling stations to those they had listed as supporters for others in Ridings too close to call but the call for a strategic vote is just as much an attempt at the suppression of voter's aspirations for representation in also close races, it even says as much in the pitch to vote against (either ABC or ABL which I have noticed pop up in comments for the first time this election).
I'm interested in PR because I'd rather become New Zealand, where they have seen stable minority governments for 23 years, plus better representation for women and Maori.
Some impressions of the switch from FPTP to MMP and the last 20-22 years from New Zealanders:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/new-zealand-democracy-1.4720787
https://thespinoff.co.nz/featured/12-10-2016/it-was-new-zealands-brexit-weighing-up-mmp-on-its-20th-birthday/
There is more than one way to do PR than the hotbed of cross roads that is Israel. Canada wouldn't be like Israel, it would be a lot more like New Zealand.
I don't agree. I think we would not be like new Zealand but rather a very fractured nation.
We have a lot of different views in this country including separatists, insanely remote places, indigenous communities, white nationalists, environmental extremists, etc...
We are very unlike new Zealand as a populace.
If Canada adopts New Zealand's results in addition to its system voters will have the deluxe choice of a) Liberal-led coalition or b) Conservative-led coalition. You'd still be stuck with Trudeau.
Again, nothing you are complaining about with the Conservatives is because of FPTP. It's because they are conservatives and so have no real interest in the democratic process. They are always willing to cheat, lie, steal, repress votes, and any other crime or violation of democratic ideals in order to secure power. Frankly your continued attempts to bring robocalls and shit into this suggests you view proportional representation as some sort of magical panacea that will fix our politics and that's just not credible.
I think it's fine to prefer a proportional system. I'm just pointing out that you are kidding yourself about the result if your complaint is that parties "only need to have a loyal and dedicated voting block that meets the MT or better in your riding". That's the kind of thing proportional systems encourage. That's how they create stable 3rd parties within the system. It's why the NDP wants that kind of system. That's what those systems do.
The problem is not proportional systems, it's that you have strange ideas about what those systems do and what problems they solve and how.
That argument has already been done to death and put to rest by better scholars than I:
https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/42-1/ERRE/report-3/page-183#52
New Zealand has remote places, separatists, indigenous communities, white nationalists, environmentalists, etc.
New Zealand is a lot more like us than you realize.
Key word here: Coalition.
So yes, I would still be stuck with Trudeau and I would be fine with that. The point was never to exclude Trudeau's point of view, but to include more Canadian views, coalitions do that.
Let's be very clear, despite sourcing my comments on this topic, I've had words put in my mouth that I think this solves all our problems. I never said that. Let's not have perfect be the enemy of good, Proportional Representation such as Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) only has to be better than what we have been getting from FPTP.
If minor parties aren't able to extract major concessions from their coalition partners it's not much of a coalition. If they are you're back to empowering extremists, with a side option of "your party leader took the other side's offer".
IRV nerfs the strategic voting problem and still requires the parties to try to appeal to a large number of people. MMP isn't the only option on the table.
If IRV with a sunset clause was on the LPC's campaign platform, then I would agree with you, but currently given the various parties platforms, everyone else this election is sticking with FPTP, only the NDP is offering anything different than FPTP.
Effectively, MMP and FPTP are the only options on the table this election, it was the 2015 election where a lot more options like IRV, STV, and Rural-Urban were on the table.
After what happened last time I'm not exactly shocked it's not in the Liberal platform. I guess the NDP are free to offer it up in minority negotiations. (MMP would be a non-starter, though.)
My dad donated to Harper's conservatives once and spent the next decade getting constantly harassed via phone calls.
I felt no pity.
The NDP already had it's shot at "anything but FPTP" and decided that wasn't for them too. I'm basically unmoved by their stance as compared to the other parties. No party wants any kind of reform except that which advantages themselves.