Wednesday, June 01, 2005

First Post

This is the first real post of my new blog. Who knows if this is even a hobby I want to undertake, but I'll give it a go. I have 3 main topics that I give a damn about: Family, film and politics. The first is most important but probably least interesting for readers (if I get any readers) so I'll probably focus on the latter 2.

It looks like the CPC is playing hooky today from the parliamentary committee looking into democratic reform. Of course neither the CPC or Liberals want any kind of Proportional Representation because they both need the FPTP system to have any chance at a Majority Government. Now is the time for the NDP to push for this. I don't think it even matters how far it gets in parliament as much as making noise about it. Let's face it, with neither the red team or the blue team on board it won't go anywhere until there is major public outcry for it. And of course the Bloc will be against it because it would make Canada run better.

Much has been made of how complicated the voting system would get under a PR system, but I think the real issue would be how Parliament will perform under a permanent minority situation. People point to the current HofC and say it would never work, but my theory is that the relative stability of a PR system would mean each party could count on a healthy caucus but would have to earn gains over the long haul, thus making for more stability and less political game-playing.

As for the voting sytem, here is one workable model:

The first change I would make is eliminate the local ridings for the party leaders. Instead, any party that gets 1% of the vote should have their leader automatically sent to parilament, but without representing any particular riding. The rest of the MP's should be elected as they are now but each party caucus should get aweighted vote in the house. Thus if the Liberals got 60% of the seats but only 30% of the vote, each members vote would only count as half a vote. Conversely if the NDP got only 8% of the seats but 20% of the vote, each NDP's vote in the House would be worth 2.5 votes. If smaller parties such as the Greens got say, 5% of the vote but no MPs, at least the leader would be in the House with 5% of the votes in the Commons.

OK, I'm a nerd. I probably should have just written about Star Wars.

There's always tomorrow.

1 comment:

Miyoki said...

:) yeah, you are right. That was a typo... Thanks for droppin by!