getting rid of First-Past-The-Post alleviates the drive toward a 2-party system. The author mentions this (they have written extensively on it).
I remember when 2015 was going to be the last election under FPTP 🤦
I not only still remember, I will never forget. I am an NDP supporter for life now, until and unless they betray us too.
Obligatory !fairvote@lemmy.ca
first past the post? that’s an actual thing? that’s crazy :/
It’s already a 1.5 party system. Our liberal party is just conservatives who aren’t openly racist or bigoted.
They’re so unracist they tripled what the UN defined as modern slaves to prop up Canada’s GDP. Would a racist bring non-white wage slaves into an existing housing shortage just to serve them cheaper Tim Hortons?
It’s not racist if they were doing it to prop up the GDP, it’s just a practical way to suppress wages and get cheap labour. If they openly said it was a way to avoid having our precious whites sully themselves by performing menial tasks, then it would be racist.
Ignoring the lack of basic living standards of those brownies sure isn’t, and I’m an expert in racism.
Basic living standards are very expensive, you see. We would like to do something but we can’t
Pretty much.
We should absolutely get rid of FPTP in favour of proportional representation, however, I don’t know that the current polling situation is actually a result of FPTP. I’m a pretty consistent NDP voter, but I’ve voted Liberal twice - Trudeau once (to bring in proportional rep… lol), and Carney this last time. I know this is unpopular but I didn’t “lend” my vote to Carney to beat the CPC, I genuinely think he’s doing great and will happily vote for Liberals again so long as he’s at the helm.
Proportional Representation is what you need for multi-seat bodies like parliament. It’s absolutely the best method for such bodies, imo. For single seat elections, proportional doesn’t work as their are no proportions for a single seat and generally you don’t want to just vote for party for such roles, but individuals themselves. You’ll need something like Ranked Choice or (my preference) Approval voting for those seats to avoid the two party inevitability.
CGP Grey did this excellent video on FPTP a number of years ago. Worth a watch.
It explains why a FPTP electoral system will almost certainly gravitate toward a two party system.
It is a feature, not a bug. The NDP is an anomaly. As is the BQ but that’s more about regionalism.
We need a strong and vibrant NDP party at the very least. It would definitely be nicer to have a bigger spread.
Maybe the NDP should focus on being a labor party with some basic common sense around housing shortage, wage supression, and mass immigration?
Clearly running as a duplicate Liberal party isnt working out.
There’s a good chance the NDP will be back with a vengeance.
This and how hard it would be to ever amend the constitution (y’know, to move away from FPTP, for example) are the biggest problems for Canadian democracy going forwards.
It won’t sink us in the next 10 years, but past that who knows. History has a way of turning heroes into villains, and vice-verse.
Every time the constitution is on the table the country nearly implodes.
Will all the provinces agree on a new constitution this time? It only led to two referendum the few last times we tried.
Except the Constitution doesn’t stipulate FPTP. It defines how seats are allocated based on population and provinces and all but doesn’t say how to decide what MPs go in what seats. It doesn’t mention parties either.
What? Really? I guess it’s in the Elections Act, then.
Yup, checks out. There’s certain ridings and they all have to produce one member, but it doesn’t say how. Wonders of living in a country that wasn’t really a democracy originally, I guess. One member representing each riding limits options quite a bit, but there are proportional systems that could be made to work that way.
It doesn’t mention parties either.
Which isn’t necessarily unusual. It wasn’t a designed part of the US system, for example - if anything it undercuts the original intention of it. Proportional systems have to recognise them at least a bit, though.
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Important. Katherine Hayhoe suggests that climate change is the hole in the bottom of the buckets that represent our other major issues. We can pour as much resources in the top but climate change is causing it to run out the bottom.
In my opinion, First Past the Post is the rust that is making the buckets unmanageable in the first place. Highly polarized, flip-floping policy isn’t solving the big problems.
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Some of that blame belongs to Harper, for consolidating conservative parties, and sidelining progressive conservatives who are and have shifted to Liberals. But he has also long had a goal of single party state, like Alberta has essentially been. That is not going well
If the NDP grows too strong they’ll just consolidate the Liberals and Conservatives into the Canada Party or some bullshit. The problem with democracy isn’t democratic in nature, it’s corruption from the power structures that form and become self-protective. Democracy is just the game we play, the veneer of choice that makes what’s going on look nice and legitimate. These power structures and the people in them are playing meta-games above and beyond it. We can’t fix these things by modifying the game itself, it may help, it may disrupt them for a bit but they will just find new and probably more powerful ways to metagame the system and entrench themselves at the top.
Things like party politics, strategic voting, media bias, these are just tactics they use. How do we fight against them? I don’t know, but I know we can’t use the game itself, we have to play the metagame against them. Or at least prevent them from using it against us.
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