This isn't true at all. Liberals are much closer to social democrats than they are to fiscal and social conservatism.

There's a difference between "formed with a minority" and "no chance at a majority ever again".

The LPC (and CPC) are quite happy with the current system. The LPC would accept AFV or ranked-ballot, but only because they're everyone's second choice, where the Conservatives are the first choice of ~35% of the population, but almost no one's second.

I have trouble believing that petition matters since it reads like business as usual for the CPC. The only thing that stands out is that it doesn't specifically call out the carbon tax.

I fully acknowledge the intricacy of what went on but also "Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau vowed that the upcoming general election will be the last one using the first-past-the-post voting system."

It's also clear wants a system that favours large parties: Trudeau says, however, that he would not favour proportional representation as an alternative, because it "gives more weight to smaller parties that are perhaps fringe parties."

I know parliamentary procedure is boring, and most people don’t follow it, but I do and I saw what happened here.

I'm not certain you intended for this to sound condescending like you're the only here that pays attentions to what's happening. The person you're replying to has practically single handily held up most of the Lemmy Canadian content for a while.

Even if it had passed the house it wouldn’t have got past the Senate and the committee delayed their report so long nothing could be done before the next election.

And that was 2 elections ago.

This is interesting, and I've never heard about this before. That's really disappointing, but from a game-theoretic sense it makes sense it played out like that. If Trudeau did in fact opted for a popular vote instead of using his majority power, I can respect that, even if it blew up in all our faces.

Like everything these days, I realize it's too difficult for me to understand and keep up with the complexities of modern life 😩

uhh.. no? We would keep the parliamentary system that we currently have, but the riding level elections would be ranked choice (or some other method) vs FPTP. It would actually lead to more minority and coalition governments as smaller parties would be able to have more representation in parliament.

You’re mistaken in thinking the Liberals, or the NDP for that matter, care about advancing causes. They don’t. They care about getting elected.

As a registered member of one of those parties, I actually do. However, when it comes to the politicians, you're either partly or completely right. Getting elected butters their bread, caring about the issues is optional, although at least some do as a hobby.

As for professional staffers, I don't have as much experience. Mostly they just seem very busy when I interact with them.

Especially the Liberals: they’d rather go down in flames than risk losing political leverage by forming a coalition.

I mean, the Liberals have been in a not-technically-a-coalition with the NDP for some time now. Some of them don't seem to like it (of course, having all the power would be better for them personally), but from the outside it seems to be going well.

They saw, quite clearly, what happened to the Progressive Conservatives when they merged with Reform.

They continued being a highly relevant political party?

They care about getting elected.

Psst. When you're done "both sides" -ing the issue, I bet you can find one of the two that is better than the other and cares more about Canadian happiness.

Vote for them. Then it's a win for them (election)and a win for us (least-worse party in power). If everyone did that, there'd be no blue left.

You see how your both-sides assertion isn't even relevant?

I love STV but imho it just doesn't work for Canada. We have too many massive wilderness ridings. If you had a heavily-urbanized province like if Southern Ontario was its own province, I'd say it would be the perfect system for that area.

Here's why: The northern areas of every province are extremely low-population and are enormous. For example, if BC had 5-seat-riding STV federally, the entire province north of Kamloops would be one massive riding. It's possible all their MPs would be from the populated end of the riding, so that people in the ass-end of the riding live over 1000km from their "representative". Ontario would look similar - Northern Ontario is probably the most sparsely-populated area outside of the Territories. That's not an acceptable outcome -- being 1000km from your MP means you are not represented.

Contrast this vs Mixed Member Proportional, where local ridings still exist - under MMP, 2/3 of the seats are normal-ass ridings that work exactly like we do today. Then we group them together in "regions" and back-fill the most popular party-members within that region to make it proportional. A lot of people get upset about non-local representatives, or "unelected party staffer MPs" in MMP, but it doesn't have to be that way.

The plan that was floated for BC is actually really awesome -- imho it should be applied Canada-wide. It's basically a vanilla MMP plan but there are details that do great work to mitigate the main complaints about MMP:

1. Take the map of Canada and carve it up into regions of 14 ridings (obviously for provinces with less than 14 ridings, just take the whole province). These are our "regions". So, for example:

   • Saskatchewan is one "region"
   • Peel Region (Mississauga + Brampton + nearby towns & exurbs) is one "region".
   • Niagara Peninsula (including Hamilton) is one "region".
   • A big city like Montreal would probably be 3 different electoral "regions".

2. Within each Region we have 9 ridings (or 2/3 of the total number of Seats if the Region is smaller than 14 seats). Those are normal-ass elections. So Calgary Centre still has its own MP, and so do more remote areas like Gaspésie—Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine. These ridings are only about 50% larger then our current ridings.

3. The other 5 Seats within the Region are backfill seats, that are used to fill up the Region until the proportion of party-members roughly matches their % of the vote within the Region. So even though the back-fill people don't represent a riding, they're still somewhat local. Flin Flon's non-riding members are still from Manitoba. People in Markham will still have a local MP, but also will have regional MPs from the rest of York. So locality is still good for the regional representatives, and we have a proper local riding MP, we're not losing that guarantee of locality.

4. Avoid the "nobody elected this asshole" problem with open-lists. The ballot is simple, it has 2 sections:

   1. A section to pick your local MP, which is exactly as it is today. Pick 1 person here.
   2. A section to vote for your regional MP, grouped by party, which has multiple options per-party. Pick 1 person here. As a side-effect the person you select here is also your party PR vote.

5. So, we figure out how many seats to back-fill by % of votes per-party (on the regional section) - so if there are 14 seats in a Region, and one party gets half of the regional MP votes, got 5 local seats? They'll get 2 Regional seats. And which of their Regional candidates get those 2 seats? The 2 that got the most votes.

So it's not like they're unelected. They still have to be the most popular people within their party and within the region.

So let's think a concrete example - imagine Southeastern Quebec region, which includes Quebec City. Generally not a very Red area except for the city itself. The Liberals continue to run Steven Guilbeault in Quebec City itself as a local MP, but to drum up interest they also run Stephane Dion and Joël Lightbound as regional candidates in the Quebec City regional area, including a massive amount of rural and suburban area they expect to get a little support from but generally lose. To pad out the rest of the list, they also run Ricky the Pigfucker as a regional candidate. Now, this is an open list - if the Liberal voters outside of Quebec City really hate Dion, they can still vote for Ricky. And so instead of the expected three MPs for the Quebec region being Guilbuealt (elected directly by Quebec City), Dion, and Lightbound, it's an upset and they get Guilbeault, Dion, and Ricky the Pigfucker.

And Independants "I don't want to run as a party" types? They can still run as a local riding MP. They're not frozen out like most people think of about in "Proportional systems" that are very "party-oriented".

It's not a perfect system. It's very party-oriented in the way that STV isn't. It's weirdly complicated. But it works. It's used IRL in real first-world countries like Germany and New Zealand and Scotland. There's lots of fiddly knobs to argue about like whether it's okay to add more top-up MPs beyond the fixed size to preserve proportionality (true-MMP vs AMS - personally I'm on the fixed-size side AKA AMS) But with Canada's geographic considerations, I strongly think it's our best option.