The Politics of Fear

[Reverend Jim]

The election is over and it looks like fear loses, at least for now. Our former Conservative government, led by Stephen Harper, went down in flames to the Liberals, led by Justin Trudeau. Thus ends a decade of Conservative rule that was slowly turning Canada into the US. One of Trudeau's campaign promises was to replace Canada's first-past-the-post electoral system with some sort of proportional voting. This would prevent what has so frequently happened - a splitting of the left/central vote between the Liberals and the NDP (social democrats) allowing the Conservatives to win (sometimes big) with less than 50% of the votes. There were other promises but this is the one I want to see fulfilled first.

Not knowing much on Canadian politics, but can sympathize with the unfairness of the FPTP system. We still have it in the UK Parliament, although the Welsh Government has a PR element attached. Mind you, in the grand scheme of things wrt UK systems, it's pretty moot, as national views cannot be represented when one country has a huge majority of seats compared to all the other countries put together.

All that said, we have a pretty horrible right-wing party called UKIP which won about 13% of the total electorate vote and only got 1 seat, compared to the Conservatives (winners) with 36% and 331 seats. Sometimes we have to be careful what we wish for! But, democracy is not served by FPTP.

[Reverend Jim]

Our problem is/was that we have one right-wing party (Conservatives) and two alternatives jockeying for the middle/left. In typical fashion, all the Conservatives have to do is see the vote split between the other two. Theoretically, if every riding split 33-33-34 with the 34 going to the right, they could take all of the seats with only 34% of the vote. We have had Conservative majorities where they received less than 50%.

[Agilemind]

We have had Conservative majorities where they received less than 50%.

Most majority governments in Canada are based on far less than 50% popular support. Indeed the journalists' rule of thumb is that 40% popular vote will get you a majority gov't in Canada. Though recently there have been several majorities based on 38-40% of the popular vote.

The UK system is double fucked because the national gov't is also the regional gov't for England where as Scotland, Wales & NIreland have separate regional gov't PLUS the House of Lords is an obscene old-boys club for party donors/former MP with way more members than other countries' equivalents (no limit on number of members) and no regional representation.

Yep. UK system is doomed to fail. Can.t come too early for me. Shake off the yoke of foreign governance which even pollutes regional politics. The lack of democracy in UK politics would be laughable if it wasn.t so tragic. It.ll be interesting when we have the EU vote. If the biggest country votes to leave but the other three vote to stay. He he, we may all be forced to leave. Then see fireworks.

[Agilemind]

If England votes to leave the UK then my money is on Scotland leaving the UK. 'Course it would also be a beaucratic nightmare for the UK to leave the EU because there are tons of EU citizens working in the UK who would have to be given some kind of work-visa plus lots of universities & research institutes have EU grants and EU funded student which would be a massive headache to deal with. At least in the short term leaving the EU will be very expensive.

Well, all the more excuse for them to eject Johnny Foreigner and close down the borders. Wonder how many people would have to return home from the continent. Probably more than would be chucked out of the UK. Then you'd have a country full of people who don't want to be there. Heh heh. Hilarious.