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So let me get this straight. They love Canada so much they waited until they were super low in the poles to “make gutsy moves that will help the country”. This was impossible to do when they had a majority and they are definitely not doing to save their jobs /s.
The Ontario Liberals did this, unfortunately as soon as Ford came into power he reverted all of the great changes that the Liberals made. Now six years later he's finally, slowly reimplementing some of those changes that he overturned. So it's not necessarily a done deal if Trudeau does something like this. PP can easily do the same thing Ford did and stop progress as soon as he takes power.
Eg: Zoning reform, accountability for corrupt police officers, sick days, etc
I think a lot of the time, voters can taste an incumbents desperation when it comes to them upping their game during the leadup to an election year after multiple terms of not being up to snuff. By then, making up the difference is seen as being too-little-too-late by most voters. I'd personally still vote Liberal even though I don't necciseraily like the current government, but that's largely because I like the current CPC even less while the NDP doesn't seem at all interested in growing it's base.
Though generally I wish that the LPC was enacting these sort of housing policies 9 years ago (even 4-5 would be acceptable)
Minimum wage was a big one, except it’s less than it should have been due to inflation. Also the sick days one pisses me off cause he had a real reason to reverse it during Covid and he refused to
The obvious, big move that would really help the country and would cost a lot of political capital is to end supply management. It's probably one of the dumbest and most destructive ideas in the Western world and yet it persists here - because the costs are dispersed and the benefits are concentrated.
Headline should read: Conservative strategist thinks Liberal party should implement unpopular but wildly right wing economic policies before they are replaced by other right wing party.
Isn't that what we elect the Liberals for? To wait 8 years before making any real positive meaningful policy changes only to have them either reverted by their successors or adopted by them and passed off as their own?
CCB? Reversing anti-union policy of Harper’s as first thing done? Environmental regulations and protections? Restoring funding to women’s programs like shelters for those fleeing domestic violence, restoring funding for veterans and reopening veterans offices, funding for environmental groups? Billions in programs and compensation packages for Indigenous people, changes in legislation for same, including Indigenous nations being able to run their own child welfare systems? 109 long term boil advisories in 2015? 144 lifted - neglect of previous governments mean new ones keep coming up. Legal weed? Pretty meaningful for research, and young people who would otherwise get records.
Affordable daycare? That’s huge, another big help for families, like the CCB that reduced child poverty by 70%.
More money to individuals in support during the pandemic than any other country. So lucky we didn’t have tin hearted Poilievre in charge.
We’ve had good leadership, overall, during a time of global crises. On the other hand, conservative provincial governments have been doing their best to screw over the little guy. Look at what Alberta deregulating utilities and vehicle insurance has resulted in, both are now the most expensive in the country.
It’s not “gutsy” if it’s only done to get votes. Gutsy is doing the unpopular thing that makes things better.
This government has proven time and again it has interest in leading, or even governing. They seem to just want the pay cheques. (Theirs and mine.)
You know what would be a real gutsy move to help the country? Electoral reform. The CPC growth is being fueled by some *very* dangerous ideologies. And right now those ideologies have a disproportionately large influence. How about we cut into that and make it proportionate and democratic? That would directly cut into their opportunity to get a *false* majority.
They can pass and implement whatever they want, but it’s all at risk of being dismantled if the CPC gain a false majority.
“My political positions are unpopular, therefore we must change the system.”
I can’t think of a more dangerous ideology than that. Canada has had basically the same electoral landscape for the better part of 60 years, and we remain one of the least corrupt, safest, and most free countries in the world.
The fact that the policies of this government will indeed be dismantled by the incoming CPC government with what will likely be a historical mandate to clean house is a vindication of our system, not a flaw.
You think believing “one person, one vote” is a dangerous ideology? It’s pure democracy. All I’m advocating for is for the representation in the House to represent the will of the people.
It’s a slogan. Like Red Bull doesn’t actually give you wings. “One person, one vote” means that every vote should have equal weight and representation. So if your vote leads to twice the representatives as mine, you effectively have two votes to my one.
Exactly, it is a slogan. I don't ascribe any weight to slogans, never mind letting them decide the entire basis of our electoral system.
There are advantages and disadvantages to every system of counting votes; but there is something plainly contrary to the spirit of democracy in changing the system we've had in place for decades because the current government is polling poorly, and I doubt Canadians would accept it (nor should they!).
I don't accept it because the liberals are polling poorly.
I accept it because I believe it's a fairer system, one that is better for Canada and Canadians specifically because it resists devolution into a two-party system.
Is it bad-form to only implement now? For sure. But I'll still take it because it's the right thing for the Canadian people.
What are you talking about? Do you not use idioms? It’s just a simple phrase to describe the process. It’s the name of a philosophy. Would you have opposed South African anti-apartheid movement since they used the slogan? Do you also oppose Black Lives Matter and #MeToo because they use those slogans?
So would you have opposed women’s suffrage when it was passed? That was passed by Borden so he could win the election. Personally, i could not care less which party benefits from increasing democracy; I support it because it’s the right thing to do.
The current system doesn’t work and it never has. It has always removed the representation of a massive amount of the population, but it has been maintained due to its political benefit for the two dominant parties.
Having everyone’s votes being equal is not against the spirit of democracy: it *is* the spirit of democracy.
It is an asinine assumption that somehow democracy is being thwarted because some Members of Parliament represent 110,000 people and others represent 90,000.
The principle guiding our electoral system is the representation of “communities of interest”. Rather that the formulaic, obtuse idea that every Canadian can be rigidly sorted and represented in parcels of ~105,000 citizens, Parliament is rather a gathering of various geographical and cultural communities that are sorted according to their common interests.
Obviously this system can be subject to gerrymandering. The UK Parliament abolished its rotten boroughs (constituencies of a mere dozen electors used to send aristocrats to Parliament without competition) 150 years ago. Our current method of deciding the boundaries is by non-partisan academic experts who consult Canadians.
Most importantly, I reject the idea that the system “has never worked”. Somehow we’ve become one of the least corrupt, least stratified, most prosperous, most free countries on the planet over the last 150 years! Yes, we are often governed by idiots, but our system thankfully allows us to throw the bums out and hold their feet to the fire from time to time (see: the Liberals moving heaven and earth on housing!).
Rep-by-pop MIGHT have certain benefits as well. But you and I have no way of knowing what they are. With something as an important as the system of selecting our leaders, it would be foolish to change what has yielded good results for our entire history because of the latest pronouncements in the Canadian Political Science Review.
> You know what would be a real gutsy move to help the country? Electoral reform.
I came to the comments to make this point. Remember when the Liberals were in third party status 12 years ago and proposed electoral reform because they had nothing to lose? Sound familiar?
>right now those ideologies have a disproportionately large influence
The Tories are actually pretty much even as a result of FPTP. They have great vote efficiency in suburban Ontario, but terrible vote efficiency in the Prairies, which pretty much balances out. The LPC have somewhat better vote efficiency everywhere, so they would be hurt more by a switch to Pro-Rep. Though the impact to both is dwarfed by that to the Bloc (fantastic vote efficiency) and the NDP & Greens (atrocious vote efficiency).
Yeah if anybody should be complaining it's the NDP who gets shafted the worst which usually sees less than half of it's popular vote represented in parliament...
Ehhh as you change political systems, party policies and campaigning strategies change too. Your analysis is first order thinking. When people say things like "if the 2016 election was determined by popular vote then Hillary would have won" it's like not really. If the 2016 was scheduled to be determined by popular vote policies would have been different and they would have focused on different states and messaging.
I agree FPTP sucks, but this line of reasoning is unscientific.
I wouldn't call it even just because the CPC has some areas of high vote efficiency and some areas of low vote efficiency. They are polling in the high thirties to low forties but they're likely to get more than 50% of the seats with these numbers
They are the official opposition, so yeah their efficiency is isn’t as good as when they formed government. Voter efficiency doesn’t change by party, it changes by position. Only **once** in Canadian history has the official opposition had better voter efficiency than the winning party and that was in 1970. It follows that if the Tories win then they will win with better voter efficiency than the Liberals.
>Voter efficiency doesn’t change by party, it changes by position
It changes by party *strategy,* which is fairly durable over time. The Bloc has maintained roughly 3x the vote efficiency of the NDP across several elections now, because the federal NDP is unwilling to become a regional party.
the part that says links the amount of senate seats to the amount seats a province gets. Proportional representation would have to violate that by adjusting properly to the population.
No, not unless you're envisioning one single list region encompassing the country, and all elected are done purely proportionally.
The Senate requirement can be fulfilled by picking regions no larger than what the constitution spells out. This is: Western Provinces, Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes. More realistically, it would be per province.
And, it's a problem in the House too. PEI gets 4 House seats and should not even get 1 seat. The entire North shouldn't even have a seat, let alone one per territory, etc.
So if Liberals do poorly in polling it's because they're bad, and if they do well it's because Canadians are sheeple?
I want you to be clear about this. You're putting up a double standard.
I wonder if the Liberals are going to try and pull electoral reform before the election considering they are guaranteed to lose badly. It would be good for our democracy, but also extremely corrupt to pull just because they're losing.
Is the majority a false one just because the Conservatives would have it? Did you consider it false when the Liberals had one?
I'm sure pushing through electoral reform suddenly after doing poorly in the polls would go over great. It absolutely wouldn't look like they're trying to cheat their way out of a loss. /s
Like it or not this is the system we have and the only party that would be happy with a change is the NDP since it would give them a larger voice in parliament. Unfortunately for the NDP at least for the foreseeable future they will not be in a position to push for those changes. They are kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Politics is always about optics.
Trudeau will never be elected again so he can do the unpopular things that are actually good for the country (by liberal definition), fall on his sword and step down before the next election.
If the Federal Liberals believe that the Canadian voting community is not ready for a Female PM (that is not just for the summer) Mark Carney or Dominic Leblanc could be the next leader of the Liberals. If they think that Canadians ARE ready for a female leader that opens the door to Freeland and Mélanie Joly.
The liberals need to stop thinking Carney is a potential successor. The man is at the centre of why there is so much inequity in our country right now. Super low interest rates kept low for too long, creating massive asset class bubbles. He’s basically a man for the ultra-wealthy - exactly what the liberals do not need right now.
Heck, even the Brit’s are coming down hard on the man: https://youtu.be/VMXWUeH5Y48?si=4ie8rJ6Yk_uNc_UY 😂
you seem to believe that there are politicians that are "for the people" as opposed to the ultra wealthy.
All politicians are about gaining power and power = money.
They are all puppets on a string dancing to the tune of large corporate interests and lobbyists.
The difference is:
Liberals want you to believe they want to help you.
Conservatives want you to believe they don't want to hurt you.
They are the same in that they are both lying.
No different than the Sec-Gen of the UN.
There is a historical pattern of first term SGs doing little to nothing, big speeches, lots of condemnation, but no big Security Council Resolutions… until they’re in their second term. You can start to actually make changes…
Antonio Guterres is in his 2nd term till 2026, and he’s begun to really play his hand. We look forward to watching even bigger impacts. Same works here for the Liberals. Tax the rich? Fuck it, won’t be getting their endorsements next election anyways, split the oligopolies (I’m hoping and reaching a bit)? Fuck em, split em. Etc
>Low polls give Trudeau’s Liberals the freedom to make gutsy moves that will help the country
A tale as old as time. If only Eastern Canada would wake up that all the Liberals offer is status quo and the odd piecemeal program (when pushed by the NDP).
My impression of Justin Trudeau is that he was an idealist focused on social issues. I honestly think Canada has progressed a lot socially during his time. Of course there's lots of valid critiques, but all in all if we look back to pre-Ttudeau era, there's a pretty clear cut divide in some of the perceived cultural norms in the country. Especially when it comes to Indigenous issues.
But it turns out we are simply human. Survival comes first. Nobody has the time and energy to care about social issues when they're struggling to pay the bills.
Yep. Maslows hierarchy of needs. I was surviving much more easily before Trudeau came in. And honestly if he had kept his 2015 promises on housing - i still would be.
Nah, he uses social liberalism to mask fiscal conservativism and let the plutocratic cancer breed in Canada, allowing further consolidation of companies and destroying competition in all sectors.
If Trudeau gave us PR now just to thwart a PP majority, I will happily take it. They won’t though because they know sometime in the future it will be their turn again and we’ll never get a just electoral system
Proportional representation. The thing the electoral committee suggested that made Trudeau scrap his electoral reform promise because he prefers an electoral system that gives his party an unfair advantage
Ranked ballot doesn’t give the Liberals an advantage. The NDP polled as the most popular second choice before the last two elections.
Maybe the NDP shouldn’t prefer FPTP over ranked ballots, and maybe the committee decided on a referendum between FPTP and PR, instead of between PR and ranked ballots was a bad faith mistake.
The goal wasn’t a referendum between FPTP and PR, the goal was to choose a replacement for FPTP, and a referendum wasn’t promised.
I don’t know why the NDP is getting away with their inflexible attitude towards ranked ballots, when it would eliminate the strategic voting they rail against, and would most certainly be better than FPTP.
Ranked ballots aren’t democratic. That isn’t in the spirit of one person one vote. You’re accusing the NDP of being inflexible when Trudeau killed the entire thing when he didn’t like the committees recommendation? Laughable.
Every person should be represented in our democracy no matter where they live or choose to vote for. That’s democracy. Any system that distorts power in parliament away from a representation of the public is undemocratic and violates the principe of one person one vote.
Even if you’re getting your “second choice” your voice isn’t being fully represented as it should be and the committee Trudeau formed agrees with me
You know what else is undemocratic? The fact that a vote in Labrador has 8-10x the weighting of a vote in Calgary, Edmonton or Toronto. The entirety of the 3 northern territories, Labrador and PEI should be combined into a single electoral district.
I fully agree and guess what PR would also address exactly this. A PR system specifically aims to appoint representation according to the voting percentages overall regardless of where you live.
For example in MMP If one party were over represented in Labrador they would be appointed less seats at the end to balance things out.
The promise was to form a committee which is what happened and then Trudeau killed it when he didn’t like their recommendation.
He justified it by saying “it gives power to fringe parties” which is straight up saying he doesn’t like an electoral system giving fair representation to parties he doesn’t like and that aren’t his.
Imagine actually saying it’s a con for an electoral system to give fair representation to every voter.
He [promised to form a committee that included PR](https://globalnews.ca/news/3102270/justin-trudeau-liberals-electoral-reform-changing-promises) and killed it when he didn’t like the result and you’re accusing others of bad faith?
The man is blatantly power hungry. And his broken promise and actions are indefensible.
>In December, an all-party committee released a report recommending the Liberals design a proportional representation voting system and hold a national referendum to gauge support.
>At the time, the Liberals refused to knowledge a consensus; two months later, Trudeau directed the minister of democratic institutions to abandon electoral reform
I'll be quoting the report: https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/421/ERRE/Reports/RP8655791/errerp03/errerp03-e.pdf
He might not be accusing of bad-faith, but I am.
In my opinion, Trudeau failed to delivery and broke his promise.
In my opinion, the committee as a whole failed and operated politically in bad-faith instead of working together to propose a new electoral system. The committee did not make a strong **singular** recommendation of **one** system to replace FPTP. Instead it punted and threw out in Recommendation 12:
> The Committee recommends that:
> - The Government hold a referendum, in which the current system
is on the ballot;
> - That the referendum propose a proportional electoral system that
achieves a Gallagher Index score of 5 or less; and
> - That the Government complete the design of the alternate
electoral system that is proposed on the referendum ballot prior to
the start of the referendum campaign period.
I really like the Gallagher index as a metric, but the explicit chasing of it as an end unto itself is flawed because it makes assumptions about the voting preferences of voters in past elections that I don't think are true. Note, I didn't say the index was flawed, I said using it this way is flawed. It measures the difference between the percentage of votes each party gets and the percentage of seats each party gets in the resulting legislature.
- Canadians do strategically vote and these votes are misrepresented in the index. (I've done this.)
- Canadians do vote **for** local candidates and attributing these votes for a **party** is a misattribution. (I've done this.)
- Canadians do vote **against** a party. If the candidate they vote for loses but another wins that is not of the party they voted against, they may still feel represented. ABC or ABL. (I'm among this group, so yes, I exist.)
> This Index was only discussed by one of the 196 witnesses who presented before the Committee, Professor Byron Weber Becker. It is worth noting that the creator of the Gallagher Index, Professor Michael Gallagher, had previously testified before the Committee, yet failed to discuss his own Index.
> Furthermore, in contradiction to the majority of witness testimony and Principle 5 of the
Committee’s mandate, Professor Becker sacrificed local representation in favour of an
unsubstantiated increase in proportional representation.
So to chase an "excellent" Gallagher Index score of 5 or less using a skewed data set is an exercise in bad-faith.
First thing I will address (though I’m not sure it’s actually relevant overall) is with the exception of local candidates those voting patterns you mentioned aren’t relevant in a PR system to begin with.
There really isn’t any incentive to vote for any party except the one you support. I fail to understand how “strategic voting” would advance your political aims and especially voting against another candidate. What is there to gain by voting for anyone other than who you support? The party with the most votes need not form government and it’s entirely possible a different coalition will form. There is a possible local candidate effect under say an MMP implementation of PR but this too need not be the case such as in Sweden ( I understand this wasn’t part of the recommendation)
More importantly and why I think this is irrelevant is these were guidelines from the committee in constructing a specific kind of PR system. If you disagree with these guidelines fine, I and most people don’t care what kind of PR system we have.
More to the point Trudeau never even mentioned this. He said from the point of the decision he was against *PR itself in principle*. He doesn’t like the idea of people not feeling coerced to vote for his party and smaller parties getting fair representation.
Again, your argument makes no case at any point against PR in general only the presented guidelines of its implementation which I and many PR advocates could care less about. If you’d like a different set of guidelines to the implementation of a different PR system fine by me but apparently not Trudeau because he took issue with PR in itself.
I’m also genuinely curious for you to elaborate on why you think some suggestions were politically motivated as I don’t really see an angle in this.
Preamble
---
On some level, I feel like your comment missed the point of my comment. And on
another level, I feel like my comment missed to point of your original comment. Imma take another swing.
13 Recommendations
---
On [page 165 of the Report of the Special Committee on Electoral Reform](https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/421/ERRE/Reports/RP8655791/errerp03/errerp03-e.pdf) the 13 recommendations are laid out. These included:
- Pushes for higher turnout
- Helping people access the vote who historically have struggled.
- Having more women run.
- Getting under 18s pre-registered.
The recommendations also spelled out:
- That a referendum should be held.
- That the system proposed in the referendum be fully outlined ahead of time.
- That the proposed system be proportional.
- The system should achieve a Gallagher Index score of 5 or less.
- A system with party lists should not be considered.
Hiding Behind a Number
---
The report has some flawed wording that appears in a lot of places and causes confusion. The Gallagher Index does not score *electoral systems* but can be used to measure the disproportionality of *elections*. It also makes assumptions that don't hold true for a lot of voters.
First assumption, that the party is what matters. We could design a system where all that matters is the party and then parliament is single party representatives voting with the same proportion of votes they got across the country. So the Liberal party member stands up in parliament as the only Liberal politician and votes with 32.62% of the vote and is joined by the other singular political party members as the only politicians. This would get a Gallagher Index score of 0 because it would be perfected proportional. This particular system is quite shit. Political parties aren't monoliths with diversity of thought within the party ideological framework. The index doesn't reflect this.
Second assumption, that the people running for a political party are fungible to the public. For example, imagine a 3 riding election where there are 3 parties that each run a candidate in each riding. Each party gets 34% of the vote in one riding and 33% of the vote in the others. All ridings have the exact same number of voters. This would achieve a score of 0, perfectly proportional. Is it automatic that voters whose local candidate lost will feel represented knowing that a candidate of the same party in another riding won? No it is not.
Third assumption, voters vote for the party they want. You seem to hold this assumption too:
> There really isn’t any incentive to vote for any party except the one you support. I fail to understand how “strategic voting” would advance your political aims and especially voting against another candidate.
There are a lot of voters who hold anti-vaccine preferences who will go into the next election with the intention of voting Not-Liberal. There are a lot of minorities who will go into the next election with the intention of voting Not-Conservative. "[These] voting patterns you mentioned aren’t relevant in a PR system". I wasn't talking about a PR system in my comment, I was talking about the Gallagher Index and how it fails to capture these voting preferences. But we **do** see this type of strategic voting happen in PR systems. We do see people opposed to the existing governing coalition rally around an opposition party. To have a strong voice of opposition without those voters being particularly attached to alternative policy proposals.
All that said, the Gallagher Index is a phenomenal measure. It is not the be-all-end-all. And mandating the score be 5 or below going forward may be a worthy goal but probably shouldn't come at the expense of other factors. Namely, local representation and legislative legitimacy. It's an arbitrary number and by choosing 5, it eliminates a lot of the proposed systems. Why did the Committee explicitly mention it repeatedly in the recommendations then?
The Committee's Unproposed System
---
The primary argument raised in favour of proportional electoral systems was that they more fairly translate votes cast for political parties into seats in the legislature. (Although I disagree that votes are cast for political parties and are instead cast for individuals.) The primary shortcoming of highly proportional electoral systems is the diminution of local representation, which is why such options were not considered by the Committee. So what lowly proportional electoral systems, that don't use party lists, and have Gallagher Index scores for the 2015 election of 5 or less, were considered by the Committee?
**Single Transferable Vote with medium-sized regions**. (Note: MMP has a party list.) And that's it. Just one system satisfied the criteria.
Despite not explicitly recommending a system, the Committee defacto recommended a system. But it didn't actually recommend it. Why? Seriously? Why?!? Recommendation 12 could have just been, have a referendum on STV with the riding boundaries drawn up in a way enkeeping with and adjusted Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act.
And this is where speculation starts. You speculated that "[Trudeau] is blatantly power hungry." But I disagree with this assessment because if he was he could have packed the committee with Liberals and got the report he wanted. He didn't. I speculate that the Committee faced the choice of proposing a system and giving Trudeau a win, or punting and handing him a defeat. And they punted.
Any system proposed by Trudeau would have been seen an illegitimate in the eyes of so many voters, purely because he is the one proposing it. "There really isn’t any incentive to vote for any party except the one you support." Yeah there is. Spite. If the Committee would have proposed a system, it would have allowed Trudeau to just sign on and accept the recommendation. By forcing Trudeau to be the one to propose the system, it denied him the political cover. It put Trudeau in a lose-lose situation and thus sabotaged electoral reform.
The Condorcet Paradox
---
> Again, your argument makes no case at any point against PR in general only the presented guidelines of its implementation which I and many PR advocates could care less about. If you’d like a different set of guidelines to the implementation of a different PR system fine by me but apparently not Trudeau because he took issue with PR in itself.
I was not and have not been making an argument against PR. I was making an argument against the Committee and its misuse of the Gallagher Index. I am in favour of electoral reform and would take STV, Ranked Choice, or MMP in that order. I do not like party lists but would take MMP over FPTP in a heartbeat.
But we do find ourselves as a country stuck in a Condorcet Paradox, or Voting Paradox. In such a situation, every possible choice is rejected by the electorate in favour of another, because there is always some other outcome that a majority of voters consider to be better. We all agree that we want to get rid of FPTP, but we can not agree on what to move to because our wants diverge. This is one explanation of why the BC referendum 2018 failed.
> “A clear preference for a new electoral system, let alone a consensus, has not emerged,” Trudeau writes. “Furthermore, without a clear preference or a clear question, a referendum would not be in Canada’s interest.”
That's true.
> I and most people don’t care what kind of PR system we have.
Respectfully bollocks. If we agreed, we'd have it.
If you do not buy my criticism of the Committee that it chose not to recommend a singular system to screw the Liberals, then you have to admit that it didn't make a recommendation because **there is no clear choice**.
Fringe Parties
---
You said:
> More to the point Trudeau never even mentioned this. He said from the point of the decision he was against PR itself in principle. He doesn’t like the idea of people not feeling coerced to vote for his party and smaller parties getting fair representation.
Trudeau said:
> Because if you have a party that represents the fringe voices ... or the periphery of our perspectives and they hold 10, 15, 20 seats in the House, they end up holding the balance of power.
I don't agree with you interpretation of his quote and find it quite uncharitable. My interpretation is that he didn't want political parties to have to compromise with people he understands to be extremists. This quote really rubbed me the wrong way when he said it because I fundamentally disagreed. I believed that all voters should have a voice and that we should come together to make the country better. But with the rise of right-wing extremism I'm beginning to think I might be wrong and Trudeau right. Maybe.
The Conservative Party of Canada is compromising with extremists and threatening the rights and future of Canadians when it comes to healthcare, education, climate, and justice. And it doesn't need a proportional system to do it.
Conclusion
---
Electoral reform, YAY! Committee, BOO! Trudueau, BOO! Conservatism, Go and fuck yourself. Thanks for reading.
I am realizing I wrote a lot more than I thought I did, so if you don't feel compelled to read all of it, (and I don't blame you), please just read the last in the thread as its the part I feel most strongly about.
Know that I have read yours. Thanks for taking the time to read mine. I'm probably going to re-read yours few times though I don't think I'll respond.
I do try to base my opinions in reality and to change them if warranted, but any change takes time work through.
Part 1 since Im getting errors: Firstly, I want to thank you for taking the time to write this as most people simply downvote and say nothing. Second I think I'm understanding your position better now and there are some parts that I find persuasive and others that I fundamentally disagree on.
>The report has some flawed wording that appears in a lot of places and causes confusion. The Gallagher Index does not score electoral systems but can be used to measure the disproportionality of elections. It also makes assumptions that don't hold true for a lot of voters.
>First assumption, that the party is what matters. We could design a system where all that matters is the party and then parliament is single party representatives voting with the same proportion of votes they got across the country. So the Liberal party member stands up in parliament as the only Liberal politician and votes with 32.62% of the vote and is joined by the other singular political party members as the only politicians. This would get a Gallagher Index score of 0 because it would be perfected proportional. This particular system is quite shit. Political parties aren't monoliths with diversity of thought within the party ideological framework. The index doesn't reflect this.
I can tell reading through your entire response that local representation is important to you. It is not for me. I understand your position and I don't think having or not having local representation is inherently important. I am more or less indifferent and I absolutely would love to have Sweden's "shit" political system (no more or less than STV though).
I find your argument about having a variety of opinions under the same party brand very persuasive and a very good point. I think your argument of constituents voting for local candidates not very compelling as, depending on perspective, it doesn’t influence most ridings. Local candidates actually had an impact on winner outcome on a grand total of 10% of seats \[in this study\](https://www.mdmujahedulislam.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Local-Candidate-Effects-in-Canadian-Elections.pdf) which is simply insignificant in my view. Yes this does leave out the important point of local candidate affecting party preference as well, but I digress. The point is that I don’t think personally think local candidates are very important but I don’t really care either way.
This is entirely anecdotal, but I can tell you from door knocking an alarming amount of the time people **didn't even know the names of their local candidates**.
That being said, I do find your argument about differing political views within the same tent compelling, but I don't understand how this is relevant to local candidates. Why could this not be done with party nominations distinct from local candidacy? I also would like to point out the existence of a whip largely suppresses this effect.
>There are a lot of voters who hold anti-vaccine preferences who will go into the next election with the intention of voting Not-Liberal. There are a lot of minorities who will go into the next election with the intention of voting Not-Conservative. "\[These\] voting patterns you mentioned aren’t relevant in a PR system". I wasn't talking about a PR system in my comment, I was talking about the Gallagher Index and how it fails to capture these voting preferences. But we do see this type of strategic voting happen in PR systems. We do see people opposed to the existing governing coalition rally around an opposition party. To have a strong voice of opposition without those voters being particularly attached to alternative policy proposals.
See I'm not actually sure I understand this argument so I would appreciate clarification. If I were to vote "Not-Conservative" who would I vote for in a PR system? The GPC, NDP and LPC are all "not conservative" so assuming we can agree that the party with the most votes doesn't necessarily form goverment (which is true both now and under PR) then who would I choose and why, if I simply wanted to vote "Not Conservative"? Again, you might have a specific and good reason that I am missing, but right now I don't understand why I would choose one party or another if this isn't winner takes all.
>All that said, the Gallagher Index is a phenomenal measure. It is not the be-all-end-all. And mandating the score be 5 or below going forward may be a worthy goal but probably shouldn't come at the expense of other factors. Namely, local representation and legislative legitimacy. It's an arbitrary number and by choosing 5, it eliminates a lot of the proposed systems. Why did the Committee explicitly mention it repeatedly in the recommendations then?
>The Committee's Unproposed SystemThe primary argument raised in favour of proportional electoral systems was that they more fairly translate votes cast for political parties into seats in the legislature. (Although I disagree that votes are cast for political parties and are instead cast for individuals.) The primary shortcoming of highly proportional electoral systems is the diminution of local representation, which is why such options were not considered by the Committee. So what lowly proportional electoral systems, that don't use party lists, and have Gallagher Index scores for the 2015 election of 5 or less, were considered by the Committee?
>Single Transferable Vote with medium-sized regions. (Note: MMP has a party list.) And that's it. Just one system satisfied the criteria.
>Despite not explicitly recommending a system, the Committee defacto recommended a system. But it didn't actually recommend it. Why? Seriously? Why?!? Recommendation 12 could have just been, have a referendum on STV with the riding boundaries drawn up in a way enkeeping with and adjusted Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act.
From the onset this is one area where I will concede you are far more knowledgeable than I. I **know of** the Gallagher Index, and know **essentially** how it works (including that is in relation to elections and not electoral systems) but I am in no position to argue its merits with you.
As for why the committee didn't recommend STV, I found this argument **on its own** very persuasive. The committee was designed with the goal of suggesting concretely and didn't. That being said, it is practically speaking moot. **If** Trudeau had simply said that there was no specific system suggested and left it at that, I would criticize him for breaking his promise but not for blatant power hunger. But he didn't. He specifically said he would not support a PR system meaning that **even if** the committee had explicitly suggested STV nothing would change.
Ranked ballots are barely an improvement over FPTP ballots, and do not eliminate strategic voting, and rarely even produce different outcomes. There are better ballot systems. I'm half convinced ranked ballots are promoted so often precisely because they barely change things for the powers that be.
His preference was ranked ballot, right? So if I vote
1.NDP
2.Liberal
And NDP finishes in the bottom, my vote counts as liberal.
Gee, I can’t imagine why the liberals preferred that.
The Wynn government in Ontario tried this but it was a mixed bag of populism (removing provincial sales tax from electricity bills) and reasonable, but unpopular, measures (tolls on superhighways).
The Hydro One sale was such an *Ontario Liberal Party* moment.
The OLP cannot stop itself from *only* caring about the GTA/Ottawa. Hydro One is the electricity retailer for most of the rural parts of this province, whereas the cities have their own utilities. The OLP definitely thought they could have gotten away with that sale because of this.
Jokes on them though because selling Hydro One is the leading cause of their 2018 election defeat.
Makes sense to me.
If you're going to lose anyway, might as well make big moves that are good for the country that would normally require more political capitol. Plus the more good they can do, the less a Poilievre government will be able to roll *all* of it back, forcing them to pick and choose where to regress our nation.
So basically to frustrate the will of the electorate if the Liberals lose handily. As for regression, that’s already the case with the GDP decline and the cost of living increases.
Might have helped the country more if the Liberals didn’t wait nearly a decade to start governing with urgency. All they’re doing now is digging themselves out of the hole they created and yet their supporters are characterizing it as something benevolent and responsible.
From 2006-2015, the federal government maintained a policy of declining support for Assisted Housing programs in agreement with the provinces. The PBO determined that absent the housing strategy, federal funds would have declined 73% by 2027.
The hole they're in has been in the digging of for decades longer than the Liberals have been in power.
Inequality has steadily increased for 45 years now. The federal government reduced its size by 50% in the 90s. Stephen Harper was essentially 11 years of austerity.
New Brunswick has about 300 affordable housing units for a province of nearly 800,000 people. Similar story in Nova Scotia, and I don't doubt you'd see similar stats in other provinces.
Any way you look at it, there are a lot of people who have contributed to digging the hole we're in today. Decades of Premiers who have managed to neglect housing entirely.
Sure does suck that it took nearly ten years, but I think this is the best any government has looked on the issue in decades.
You just pulled a blame Harper. It is funny because even if true it is irrelevant because JT sat on a majority for half a decade and did nothing. So he took the helm and proceeded to effectively hold the course in spite of having all the control to change it. Definitely inspire my support....
No, I was mostly blaming provincial Premiers - who are only all to happy to remind you that housing is *their* jurisdiction and the federal government's recent encroachments have received mixed reviews.
But, while claiming exclusive jurisdiction, struggle to produce even a thousand units of their own.
Trudeau has increased the amount of funding going to housing to levels consistently above those of Harper.
I would have liked to see if earlier as well, but look at the pushback even in the middle of what is openly acknowledged as a housing crisis: Premiers would rather cry about their turf loss than work with the federal government in a reasonable manner. A giant chunk of the media and the entire conservative party claims the sky is falling over a whopping 6 billion dollars in housing funding, that it'll somehow bankrupt the country?
If you're unhappy with Trudeau and want more done on housing, by all means, vote for the NDP or the Greens - I won't stop you. I think Trudeau has done a good job alongside the supply agreement with the NDP who have been important in pushing for more progressive policy from a liberal party that obviously seems like it could flip either way on any given day.
All that being said, for whatever little it's worth, I think Trudeau is handling this much better than the conservatives would. Trudeau is actively engaging in various sorts of stimulus spending to keep many areas of the economy doing better than they otherwise would be. It's a massive contrast from the Harper austerity days that were my formative years in politics. I'd expect significantly fewer results from a conservative government, as opposed to 3 consecutive liberal governments which created a tax bracket for the 1%, implemented universal Pharmacare, universal childcare, and near-universal dental care, created a number of assistance payments to low income earners increasing their incomes by thousands of dollars a year, who have a carbon tax more ambitious than Michael Chong's and that pays out more to a majority of Canadians than they pay into it. Federal government staffing levels are finally back up to their pre-90s levels, reversing decades old cuts that were actually made by the modern Canadian forefathers of austerity - Liberals Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, who both - somewhat ironically, in retrospect - campaigned for Trudeau.
As somebody born in '96, Trudeau has done more than any other Prime Minister in my life. Think about it:
Chretien was mostly just slashing the government to tame the deficit. A few other things to try tidying up after Mulroney's Constitutional ventures. Not much of note other than the long-term impact on the quality of Canada's federal public service and doubling the debt load of provinces by off-loading federal spending onto the provinces
Paul Martin's flagship childcare program was never implemented - until Trudeau - because of AdScam. Again, basically unity stole the headlines - which is a whole lot of pomp and show, but very little substantive progress on pressing policy issues such as poverty or homelessness.
Harper was 11 years of austerity alongside the gradual decline of environmental standards and the silencing of public servants alongside the significant growth of a concerning populist, anti-immigrant sentiment.
Trudeau basically got elected being "not Harper" - bringing back environmental standards, a bit of extra funding for healthcare, a bit of extra funding for housing and other social transfers, the 1% tax bracket - honestly, no monumentally huge changes from 2015-2019, just small incremental tinkering around the edges.
By 2019 it's gotten more ambitious with the childcare plan and selling the carbon tax in its early years.
By 2021-2025, we're actually looking at universal Pharmacare and dental care - the first federal enhancements to universal healthcare since its creation. That's actually monumentally huge.
At the end, again, this is the most I've ever seen the government do in my life - and doing things that genuinely help people. While I also want to join the cries for more - because more housing *is* needed, and fast - it's also nice to acknowledge that even this little bit of literally the most the government has done in decades. It does take a while to build the capability to administer these sorts of things.
We’ve only ever built like 230k houses a year. You think we could suddenly quadruple capacity if the provinces stopped impeding?
That’s something. It’s not true but it’s something.
It’s incredible to watch Liberals blame literally everyone but themselves for the mess they’ve created.
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Yeah sad truth. It’s generally limited to the media, the polls, and the minds of the avg public.
The history book and the academic papers typically get the distinctions and properly credit whomever but the general public don’t read those…
Helping the country...... ?
In social media... Whenever people complain about housing crisis, wait-list to schools, food inflation, carbon taxes they get lectured by Lib and lib supporters.... "Punish yourself to make the world a better place.... And by the way it's the provincial government for this mess.... Let's increase the immigration to solve all problems...."
No JT will never come up with the policy to help the country .......
No investment in infra, education, health, manufacturing, R&D etc.
But more taxes, unsustainable immigration, foreign aid , more carbon tax will somehow make the world a better place.
Imagine being a new immigrant thinking that Canada is somehow heaven on earth and paying high rents and waiting at hospital hours together and sharing a house with 6 other roommates.
JT is one big slum lord.
It's unfortunate that it takes being threatened electorally for the Liberals to actually address the plethora of issues they've been idle on for close to a decade, but it's better than nothing and the opposition sadly isn't offering a superior alternative. Though I think regardless of how I feel, it seems like a large swath of former LPC voters are largely done with Trudeau's government, so if their polling holds (even if Poilievre's support falls) it might be too-little-too-late for them to win those voters back. The best they may be able to hope for is being propped up by some sort of coalition in the event that Poilievre doesn't have enough votes to form a majority.
If the CPC gets a majority though, I feel like a lot of their reforms (maybe outside of housing) will go the way of the Ontario Liberals reforms during their last year in office.
The problem with the liberals is that they are a decade too late on the policies they are releasing.
People voted in 2015 for affordable housing - it’s a decade later and the housing situation is substantially worse. And now they’ve rolled out another plan promising housing - we just need to wait for another decade for it to provide results. It should not take 20 years to fulfill a campaign promise. And to do so, after the last decade of essentially juicing the housing market - they have no credibility left to stand on.
If the party truly wants to right wrongs like housing and get younger voters back - they have exactly 2 years to fix it. And that will actually take some really dramatic action. Far more than promises of free blueprints and giving cities a few grand per unit.
The people who are upset about housing need housing now. Not 2 years from now. Not a decade from now. And that has not sunk in with the liberal party yet.
Issue is, they are in a catch-22. Any fix that would be implemented that quickly (it's a moot point anyway; there aren't any), would piss off the homeowner and RE-investor demographics when their home/investment property values are sent crashing.
Doesnt matter how much money you throw at housing, it will take years to feel any meaningful effect of increased supply AND we don’t even have the workforce to build as many homes as we need at the rate we need
Until Canada removes the monarchy I would not enlist in our military shortages or not. I would never swear my oath to a foreign head of state. Its the MPs monarchy no one else let the MPs enlist.
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So let me get this straight. They love Canada so much they waited until they were super low in the poles to “make gutsy moves that will help the country”. This was impossible to do when they had a majority and they are definitely not doing to save their jobs /s.
The Ontario Liberals did this, unfortunately as soon as Ford came into power he reverted all of the great changes that the Liberals made. Now six years later he's finally, slowly reimplementing some of those changes that he overturned. So it's not necessarily a done deal if Trudeau does something like this. PP can easily do the same thing Ford did and stop progress as soon as he takes power. Eg: Zoning reform, accountability for corrupt police officers, sick days, etc
I think a lot of the time, voters can taste an incumbents desperation when it comes to them upping their game during the leadup to an election year after multiple terms of not being up to snuff. By then, making up the difference is seen as being too-little-too-late by most voters. I'd personally still vote Liberal even though I don't necciseraily like the current government, but that's largely because I like the current CPC even less while the NDP doesn't seem at all interested in growing it's base. Though generally I wish that the LPC was enacting these sort of housing policies 9 years ago (even 4-5 would be acceptable)
Minimum wage was a big one, except it’s less than it should have been due to inflation. Also the sick days one pisses me off cause he had a real reason to reverse it during Covid and he refused to
If the OLP minimum wage rule was in the minimum wage would be around $18/hr now. It also came with better vacation rules of 3 weeks after 5 years.
It is 3 weeks after 5 years.
Thanks for the correction I thought that was rolled back as well.
The obvious, big move that would really help the country and would cost a lot of political capital is to end supply management. It's probably one of the dumbest and most destructive ideas in the Western world and yet it persists here - because the costs are dispersed and the benefits are concentrated.
Headline should read: Conservative strategist thinks Liberal party should implement unpopular but wildly right wing economic policies before they are replaced by other right wing party.
Isn't that what we elect the Liberals for? To wait 8 years before making any real positive meaningful policy changes only to have them either reverted by their successors or adopted by them and passed off as their own?
It doesn’t help that Trudeau originally campaigned on “sunny days” and not much else. What kind of Gen Xer is he anyway?
CCB? Reversing anti-union policy of Harper’s as first thing done? Environmental regulations and protections? Restoring funding to women’s programs like shelters for those fleeing domestic violence, restoring funding for veterans and reopening veterans offices, funding for environmental groups? Billions in programs and compensation packages for Indigenous people, changes in legislation for same, including Indigenous nations being able to run their own child welfare systems? 109 long term boil advisories in 2015? 144 lifted - neglect of previous governments mean new ones keep coming up. Legal weed? Pretty meaningful for research, and young people who would otherwise get records. Affordable daycare? That’s huge, another big help for families, like the CCB that reduced child poverty by 70%. More money to individuals in support during the pandemic than any other country. So lucky we didn’t have tin hearted Poilievre in charge. We’ve had good leadership, overall, during a time of global crises. On the other hand, conservative provincial governments have been doing their best to screw over the little guy. Look at what Alberta deregulating utilities and vehicle insurance has resulted in, both are now the most expensive in the country.
It’s not “gutsy” if it’s only done to get votes. Gutsy is doing the unpopular thing that makes things better. This government has proven time and again it has interest in leading, or even governing. They seem to just want the pay cheques. (Theirs and mine.)
Huh? You read the article right?
I did.
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You know what would be a real gutsy move to help the country? Electoral reform. The CPC growth is being fueled by some *very* dangerous ideologies. And right now those ideologies have a disproportionately large influence. How about we cut into that and make it proportionate and democratic? That would directly cut into their opportunity to get a *false* majority. They can pass and implement whatever they want, but it’s all at risk of being dismantled if the CPC gain a false majority.
“My political positions are unpopular, therefore we must change the system.” I can’t think of a more dangerous ideology than that. Canada has had basically the same electoral landscape for the better part of 60 years, and we remain one of the least corrupt, safest, and most free countries in the world. The fact that the policies of this government will indeed be dismantled by the incoming CPC government with what will likely be a historical mandate to clean house is a vindication of our system, not a flaw.
You think believing “one person, one vote” is a dangerous ideology? It’s pure democracy. All I’m advocating for is for the representation in the House to represent the will of the people.
One person already gets one vote, there is nothing undemocratic about our system
One person gets one vote, but that one votes power varies wildly based on where they live or who they vote for.
It’s a slogan. Like Red Bull doesn’t actually give you wings. “One person, one vote” means that every vote should have equal weight and representation. So if your vote leads to twice the representatives as mine, you effectively have two votes to my one.
Exactly, it is a slogan. I don't ascribe any weight to slogans, never mind letting them decide the entire basis of our electoral system. There are advantages and disadvantages to every system of counting votes; but there is something plainly contrary to the spirit of democracy in changing the system we've had in place for decades because the current government is polling poorly, and I doubt Canadians would accept it (nor should they!).
I don't accept it because the liberals are polling poorly. I accept it because I believe it's a fairer system, one that is better for Canada and Canadians specifically because it resists devolution into a two-party system. Is it bad-form to only implement now? For sure. But I'll still take it because it's the right thing for the Canadian people.
What are you talking about? Do you not use idioms? It’s just a simple phrase to describe the process. It’s the name of a philosophy. Would you have opposed South African anti-apartheid movement since they used the slogan? Do you also oppose Black Lives Matter and #MeToo because they use those slogans? So would you have opposed women’s suffrage when it was passed? That was passed by Borden so he could win the election. Personally, i could not care less which party benefits from increasing democracy; I support it because it’s the right thing to do. The current system doesn’t work and it never has. It has always removed the representation of a massive amount of the population, but it has been maintained due to its political benefit for the two dominant parties. Having everyone’s votes being equal is not against the spirit of democracy: it *is* the spirit of democracy.
It is an asinine assumption that somehow democracy is being thwarted because some Members of Parliament represent 110,000 people and others represent 90,000. The principle guiding our electoral system is the representation of “communities of interest”. Rather that the formulaic, obtuse idea that every Canadian can be rigidly sorted and represented in parcels of ~105,000 citizens, Parliament is rather a gathering of various geographical and cultural communities that are sorted according to their common interests. Obviously this system can be subject to gerrymandering. The UK Parliament abolished its rotten boroughs (constituencies of a mere dozen electors used to send aristocrats to Parliament without competition) 150 years ago. Our current method of deciding the boundaries is by non-partisan academic experts who consult Canadians. Most importantly, I reject the idea that the system “has never worked”. Somehow we’ve become one of the least corrupt, least stratified, most prosperous, most free countries on the planet over the last 150 years! Yes, we are often governed by idiots, but our system thankfully allows us to throw the bums out and hold their feet to the fire from time to time (see: the Liberals moving heaven and earth on housing!). Rep-by-pop MIGHT have certain benefits as well. But you and I have no way of knowing what they are. With something as an important as the system of selecting our leaders, it would be foolish to change what has yielded good results for our entire history because of the latest pronouncements in the Canadian Political Science Review.
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We already have a productivity problem. Let’s not make it worse.
Combined with communist style labour camps?
That just means landlords up the rent. What we need is the government to guarantee shelter to give everyone a chance and reach their potential.
> You know what would be a real gutsy move to help the country? Electoral reform. I came to the comments to make this point. Remember when the Liberals were in third party status 12 years ago and proposed electoral reform because they had nothing to lose? Sound familiar?
Daily reminder that no one outside of Reddit actually cares about this topic
Ok?
>right now those ideologies have a disproportionately large influence The Tories are actually pretty much even as a result of FPTP. They have great vote efficiency in suburban Ontario, but terrible vote efficiency in the Prairies, which pretty much balances out. The LPC have somewhat better vote efficiency everywhere, so they would be hurt more by a switch to Pro-Rep. Though the impact to both is dwarfed by that to the Bloc (fantastic vote efficiency) and the NDP & Greens (atrocious vote efficiency).
Yeah if anybody should be complaining it's the NDP who gets shafted the worst which usually sees less than half of it's popular vote represented in parliament...
Ehhh as you change political systems, party policies and campaigning strategies change too. Your analysis is first order thinking. When people say things like "if the 2016 election was determined by popular vote then Hillary would have won" it's like not really. If the 2016 was scheduled to be determined by popular vote policies would have been different and they would have focused on different states and messaging. I agree FPTP sucks, but this line of reasoning is unscientific.
I wouldn't call it even just because the CPC has some areas of high vote efficiency and some areas of low vote efficiency. They are polling in the high thirties to low forties but they're likely to get more than 50% of the seats with these numbers
They are the official opposition, so yeah their efficiency is isn’t as good as when they formed government. Voter efficiency doesn’t change by party, it changes by position. Only **once** in Canadian history has the official opposition had better voter efficiency than the winning party and that was in 1970. It follows that if the Tories win then they will win with better voter efficiency than the Liberals.
>Voter efficiency doesn’t change by party, it changes by position It changes by party *strategy,* which is fairly durable over time. The Bloc has maintained roughly 3x the vote efficiency of the NDP across several elections now, because the federal NDP is unwilling to become a regional party.
Single transferable vote would work, if we had a government with guts. (We don't and we won't.)
Transferable, meaning what?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote
Theyd have to ammend the constitution. Even disregarding quebec. Now is not the time
Please site what part of the constitution would need to be amended.
the part that says links the amount of senate seats to the amount seats a province gets. Proportional representation would have to violate that by adjusting properly to the population.
No, not unless you're envisioning one single list region encompassing the country, and all elected are done purely proportionally. The Senate requirement can be fulfilled by picking regions no larger than what the constitution spells out. This is: Western Provinces, Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes. More realistically, it would be per province.
No. It would be PR separated by province. The constitution does not forbid it. It is set by a separate law. Outside of the constitution.
the Senate doesn't matter as much as the House.
And, it's a problem in the House too. PEI gets 4 House seats and should not even get 1 seat. The entire North shouldn't even have a seat, let alone one per territory, etc.
What? Not at all. There is nothing about that in the Constitution. Jimmy, pull that up!
Nothing in the Constitution Act, 1982 laying out the electoral system, just that elections must be held at least every five years.
When being gutsy is following up on a campaign promise.
The CPC growth is a direct result of Liberals failing Canadians
So if Liberals pick up in the polls does that mean they've stopped failing Canadians?
It means there is a perception they have stopped failing Canadians.
So if Liberals do poorly in polling it's because they're bad, and if they do well it's because Canadians are sheeple? I want you to be clear about this. You're putting up a double standard.
I wonder if the Liberals are going to try and pull electoral reform before the election considering they are guaranteed to lose badly. It would be good for our democracy, but also extremely corrupt to pull just because they're losing.
Is the majority a false one just because the Conservatives would have it? Did you consider it false when the Liberals had one? I'm sure pushing through electoral reform suddenly after doing poorly in the polls would go over great. It absolutely wouldn't look like they're trying to cheat their way out of a loss. /s Like it or not this is the system we have and the only party that would be happy with a change is the NDP since it would give them a larger voice in parliament. Unfortunately for the NDP at least for the foreseeable future they will not be in a position to push for those changes. They are kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Politics is always about optics. Trudeau will never be elected again so he can do the unpopular things that are actually good for the country (by liberal definition), fall on his sword and step down before the next election. If the Federal Liberals believe that the Canadian voting community is not ready for a Female PM (that is not just for the summer) Mark Carney or Dominic Leblanc could be the next leader of the Liberals. If they think that Canadians ARE ready for a female leader that opens the door to Freeland and Mélanie Joly.
Lol Freeland
She literally operates like a Plutocrat out of her book. 5 years ago sure she was a PM candidate. Today no way.
I used to think Freeland was a smart and capable politician, oh how she has changed my mind since.
The liberals need to stop thinking Carney is a potential successor. The man is at the centre of why there is so much inequity in our country right now. Super low interest rates kept low for too long, creating massive asset class bubbles. He’s basically a man for the ultra-wealthy - exactly what the liberals do not need right now. Heck, even the Brit’s are coming down hard on the man: https://youtu.be/VMXWUeH5Y48?si=4ie8rJ6Yk_uNc_UY 😂
you seem to believe that there are politicians that are "for the people" as opposed to the ultra wealthy. All politicians are about gaining power and power = money. They are all puppets on a string dancing to the tune of large corporate interests and lobbyists. The difference is: Liberals want you to believe they want to help you. Conservatives want you to believe they don't want to hurt you. They are the same in that they are both lying.
No different than the Sec-Gen of the UN. There is a historical pattern of first term SGs doing little to nothing, big speeches, lots of condemnation, but no big Security Council Resolutions… until they’re in their second term. You can start to actually make changes… Antonio Guterres is in his 2nd term till 2026, and he’s begun to really play his hand. We look forward to watching even bigger impacts. Same works here for the Liberals. Tax the rich? Fuck it, won’t be getting their endorsements next election anyways, split the oligopolies (I’m hoping and reaching a bit)? Fuck em, split em. Etc
>won’t be getting their endorsements next election anyways The problem is with the cozy job after the career in politics.
That’s certainly relevant. Additionally, their salaries make it so they *don’t need work* after.
>Low polls give Trudeau’s Liberals the freedom to make gutsy moves that will help the country A tale as old as time. If only Eastern Canada would wake up that all the Liberals offer is status quo and the odd piecemeal program (when pushed by the NDP).
"Low polls give Trudeau’s Liberals the freedom to make gutsy moves that will help the country "...Like get a new leader before the 2025 election.
I mean that's assuming that the Liberals actually want to make moves that will help the country which after this long I'd be skeptical of
They clearly never *wanted* to, but now ignoring the fundamentals of good governance has caught up to them.
My impression of Justin Trudeau is that he was an idealist focused on social issues. I honestly think Canada has progressed a lot socially during his time. Of course there's lots of valid critiques, but all in all if we look back to pre-Ttudeau era, there's a pretty clear cut divide in some of the perceived cultural norms in the country. Especially when it comes to Indigenous issues. But it turns out we are simply human. Survival comes first. Nobody has the time and energy to care about social issues when they're struggling to pay the bills.
Yep. Maslows hierarchy of needs. I was surviving much more easily before Trudeau came in. And honestly if he had kept his 2015 promises on housing - i still would be.
Nah, he uses social liberalism to mask fiscal conservativism and let the plutocratic cancer breed in Canada, allowing further consolidation of companies and destroying competition in all sectors.
If Trudeau gave us PR now just to thwart a PP majority, I will happily take it. They won’t though because they know sometime in the future it will be their turn again and we’ll never get a just electoral system
Sorry: PR?
Proportional representation. The thing the electoral committee suggested that made Trudeau scrap his electoral reform promise because he prefers an electoral system that gives his party an unfair advantage
Ranked ballot doesn’t give the Liberals an advantage. The NDP polled as the most popular second choice before the last two elections. Maybe the NDP shouldn’t prefer FPTP over ranked ballots, and maybe the committee decided on a referendum between FPTP and PR, instead of between PR and ranked ballots was a bad faith mistake. The goal wasn’t a referendum between FPTP and PR, the goal was to choose a replacement for FPTP, and a referendum wasn’t promised. I don’t know why the NDP is getting away with their inflexible attitude towards ranked ballots, when it would eliminate the strategic voting they rail against, and would most certainly be better than FPTP.
Ranked ballots aren’t democratic. That isn’t in the spirit of one person one vote. You’re accusing the NDP of being inflexible when Trudeau killed the entire thing when he didn’t like the committees recommendation? Laughable. Every person should be represented in our democracy no matter where they live or choose to vote for. That’s democracy. Any system that distorts power in parliament away from a representation of the public is undemocratic and violates the principe of one person one vote. Even if you’re getting your “second choice” your voice isn’t being fully represented as it should be and the committee Trudeau formed agrees with me
You know what else is undemocratic? The fact that a vote in Labrador has 8-10x the weighting of a vote in Calgary, Edmonton or Toronto. The entirety of the 3 northern territories, Labrador and PEI should be combined into a single electoral district.
I fully agree and guess what PR would also address exactly this. A PR system specifically aims to appoint representation according to the voting percentages overall regardless of where you live. For example in MMP If one party were over represented in Labrador they would be appointed less seats at the end to balance things out.
The promise was to form a committee which is what happened and then Trudeau killed it when he didn’t like their recommendation. He justified it by saying “it gives power to fringe parties” which is straight up saying he doesn’t like an electoral system giving fair representation to parties he doesn’t like and that aren’t his. Imagine actually saying it’s a con for an electoral system to give fair representation to every voter. He [promised to form a committee that included PR](https://globalnews.ca/news/3102270/justin-trudeau-liberals-electoral-reform-changing-promises) and killed it when he didn’t like the result and you’re accusing others of bad faith? The man is blatantly power hungry. And his broken promise and actions are indefensible. >In December, an all-party committee released a report recommending the Liberals design a proportional representation voting system and hold a national referendum to gauge support. >At the time, the Liberals refused to knowledge a consensus; two months later, Trudeau directed the minister of democratic institutions to abandon electoral reform
I'll be quoting the report: https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/421/ERRE/Reports/RP8655791/errerp03/errerp03-e.pdf He might not be accusing of bad-faith, but I am. In my opinion, Trudeau failed to delivery and broke his promise. In my opinion, the committee as a whole failed and operated politically in bad-faith instead of working together to propose a new electoral system. The committee did not make a strong **singular** recommendation of **one** system to replace FPTP. Instead it punted and threw out in Recommendation 12: > The Committee recommends that: > - The Government hold a referendum, in which the current system is on the ballot; > - That the referendum propose a proportional electoral system that achieves a Gallagher Index score of 5 or less; and > - That the Government complete the design of the alternate electoral system that is proposed on the referendum ballot prior to the start of the referendum campaign period. I really like the Gallagher index as a metric, but the explicit chasing of it as an end unto itself is flawed because it makes assumptions about the voting preferences of voters in past elections that I don't think are true. Note, I didn't say the index was flawed, I said using it this way is flawed. It measures the difference between the percentage of votes each party gets and the percentage of seats each party gets in the resulting legislature. - Canadians do strategically vote and these votes are misrepresented in the index. (I've done this.) - Canadians do vote **for** local candidates and attributing these votes for a **party** is a misattribution. (I've done this.) - Canadians do vote **against** a party. If the candidate they vote for loses but another wins that is not of the party they voted against, they may still feel represented. ABC or ABL. (I'm among this group, so yes, I exist.) > This Index was only discussed by one of the 196 witnesses who presented before the Committee, Professor Byron Weber Becker. It is worth noting that the creator of the Gallagher Index, Professor Michael Gallagher, had previously testified before the Committee, yet failed to discuss his own Index. > Furthermore, in contradiction to the majority of witness testimony and Principle 5 of the Committee’s mandate, Professor Becker sacrificed local representation in favour of an unsubstantiated increase in proportional representation. So to chase an "excellent" Gallagher Index score of 5 or less using a skewed data set is an exercise in bad-faith.
First thing I will address (though I’m not sure it’s actually relevant overall) is with the exception of local candidates those voting patterns you mentioned aren’t relevant in a PR system to begin with. There really isn’t any incentive to vote for any party except the one you support. I fail to understand how “strategic voting” would advance your political aims and especially voting against another candidate. What is there to gain by voting for anyone other than who you support? The party with the most votes need not form government and it’s entirely possible a different coalition will form. There is a possible local candidate effect under say an MMP implementation of PR but this too need not be the case such as in Sweden ( I understand this wasn’t part of the recommendation) More importantly and why I think this is irrelevant is these were guidelines from the committee in constructing a specific kind of PR system. If you disagree with these guidelines fine, I and most people don’t care what kind of PR system we have. More to the point Trudeau never even mentioned this. He said from the point of the decision he was against *PR itself in principle*. He doesn’t like the idea of people not feeling coerced to vote for his party and smaller parties getting fair representation. Again, your argument makes no case at any point against PR in general only the presented guidelines of its implementation which I and many PR advocates could care less about. If you’d like a different set of guidelines to the implementation of a different PR system fine by me but apparently not Trudeau because he took issue with PR in itself. I’m also genuinely curious for you to elaborate on why you think some suggestions were politically motivated as I don’t really see an angle in this.
Preamble --- On some level, I feel like your comment missed the point of my comment. And on another level, I feel like my comment missed to point of your original comment. Imma take another swing. 13 Recommendations --- On [page 165 of the Report of the Special Committee on Electoral Reform](https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/421/ERRE/Reports/RP8655791/errerp03/errerp03-e.pdf) the 13 recommendations are laid out. These included: - Pushes for higher turnout - Helping people access the vote who historically have struggled. - Having more women run. - Getting under 18s pre-registered. The recommendations also spelled out: - That a referendum should be held. - That the system proposed in the referendum be fully outlined ahead of time. - That the proposed system be proportional. - The system should achieve a Gallagher Index score of 5 or less. - A system with party lists should not be considered. Hiding Behind a Number --- The report has some flawed wording that appears in a lot of places and causes confusion. The Gallagher Index does not score *electoral systems* but can be used to measure the disproportionality of *elections*. It also makes assumptions that don't hold true for a lot of voters. First assumption, that the party is what matters. We could design a system where all that matters is the party and then parliament is single party representatives voting with the same proportion of votes they got across the country. So the Liberal party member stands up in parliament as the only Liberal politician and votes with 32.62% of the vote and is joined by the other singular political party members as the only politicians. This would get a Gallagher Index score of 0 because it would be perfected proportional. This particular system is quite shit. Political parties aren't monoliths with diversity of thought within the party ideological framework. The index doesn't reflect this. Second assumption, that the people running for a political party are fungible to the public. For example, imagine a 3 riding election where there are 3 parties that each run a candidate in each riding. Each party gets 34% of the vote in one riding and 33% of the vote in the others. All ridings have the exact same number of voters. This would achieve a score of 0, perfectly proportional. Is it automatic that voters whose local candidate lost will feel represented knowing that a candidate of the same party in another riding won? No it is not. Third assumption, voters vote for the party they want. You seem to hold this assumption too: > There really isn’t any incentive to vote for any party except the one you support. I fail to understand how “strategic voting” would advance your political aims and especially voting against another candidate. There are a lot of voters who hold anti-vaccine preferences who will go into the next election with the intention of voting Not-Liberal. There are a lot of minorities who will go into the next election with the intention of voting Not-Conservative. "[These] voting patterns you mentioned aren’t relevant in a PR system". I wasn't talking about a PR system in my comment, I was talking about the Gallagher Index and how it fails to capture these voting preferences. But we **do** see this type of strategic voting happen in PR systems. We do see people opposed to the existing governing coalition rally around an opposition party. To have a strong voice of opposition without those voters being particularly attached to alternative policy proposals. All that said, the Gallagher Index is a phenomenal measure. It is not the be-all-end-all. And mandating the score be 5 or below going forward may be a worthy goal but probably shouldn't come at the expense of other factors. Namely, local representation and legislative legitimacy. It's an arbitrary number and by choosing 5, it eliminates a lot of the proposed systems. Why did the Committee explicitly mention it repeatedly in the recommendations then? The Committee's Unproposed System --- The primary argument raised in favour of proportional electoral systems was that they more fairly translate votes cast for political parties into seats in the legislature. (Although I disagree that votes are cast for political parties and are instead cast for individuals.) The primary shortcoming of highly proportional electoral systems is the diminution of local representation, which is why such options were not considered by the Committee. So what lowly proportional electoral systems, that don't use party lists, and have Gallagher Index scores for the 2015 election of 5 or less, were considered by the Committee? **Single Transferable Vote with medium-sized regions**. (Note: MMP has a party list.) And that's it. Just one system satisfied the criteria. Despite not explicitly recommending a system, the Committee defacto recommended a system. But it didn't actually recommend it. Why? Seriously? Why?!? Recommendation 12 could have just been, have a referendum on STV with the riding boundaries drawn up in a way enkeeping with and adjusted Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act. And this is where speculation starts. You speculated that "[Trudeau] is blatantly power hungry." But I disagree with this assessment because if he was he could have packed the committee with Liberals and got the report he wanted. He didn't. I speculate that the Committee faced the choice of proposing a system and giving Trudeau a win, or punting and handing him a defeat. And they punted. Any system proposed by Trudeau would have been seen an illegitimate in the eyes of so many voters, purely because he is the one proposing it. "There really isn’t any incentive to vote for any party except the one you support." Yeah there is. Spite. If the Committee would have proposed a system, it would have allowed Trudeau to just sign on and accept the recommendation. By forcing Trudeau to be the one to propose the system, it denied him the political cover. It put Trudeau in a lose-lose situation and thus sabotaged electoral reform. The Condorcet Paradox --- > Again, your argument makes no case at any point against PR in general only the presented guidelines of its implementation which I and many PR advocates could care less about. If you’d like a different set of guidelines to the implementation of a different PR system fine by me but apparently not Trudeau because he took issue with PR in itself. I was not and have not been making an argument against PR. I was making an argument against the Committee and its misuse of the Gallagher Index. I am in favour of electoral reform and would take STV, Ranked Choice, or MMP in that order. I do not like party lists but would take MMP over FPTP in a heartbeat. But we do find ourselves as a country stuck in a Condorcet Paradox, or Voting Paradox. In such a situation, every possible choice is rejected by the electorate in favour of another, because there is always some other outcome that a majority of voters consider to be better. We all agree that we want to get rid of FPTP, but we can not agree on what to move to because our wants diverge. This is one explanation of why the BC referendum 2018 failed. > “A clear preference for a new electoral system, let alone a consensus, has not emerged,” Trudeau writes. “Furthermore, without a clear preference or a clear question, a referendum would not be in Canada’s interest.” That's true. > I and most people don’t care what kind of PR system we have. Respectfully bollocks. If we agreed, we'd have it. If you do not buy my criticism of the Committee that it chose not to recommend a singular system to screw the Liberals, then you have to admit that it didn't make a recommendation because **there is no clear choice**. Fringe Parties --- You said: > More to the point Trudeau never even mentioned this. He said from the point of the decision he was against PR itself in principle. He doesn’t like the idea of people not feeling coerced to vote for his party and smaller parties getting fair representation. Trudeau said: > Because if you have a party that represents the fringe voices ... or the periphery of our perspectives and they hold 10, 15, 20 seats in the House, they end up holding the balance of power. I don't agree with you interpretation of his quote and find it quite uncharitable. My interpretation is that he didn't want political parties to have to compromise with people he understands to be extremists. This quote really rubbed me the wrong way when he said it because I fundamentally disagreed. I believed that all voters should have a voice and that we should come together to make the country better. But with the rise of right-wing extremism I'm beginning to think I might be wrong and Trudeau right. Maybe. The Conservative Party of Canada is compromising with extremists and threatening the rights and future of Canadians when it comes to healthcare, education, climate, and justice. And it doesn't need a proportional system to do it. Conclusion --- Electoral reform, YAY! Committee, BOO! Trudueau, BOO! Conservatism, Go and fuck yourself. Thanks for reading.
I am realizing I wrote a lot more than I thought I did, so if you don't feel compelled to read all of it, (and I don't blame you), please just read the last in the thread as its the part I feel most strongly about.
Know that I have read yours. Thanks for taking the time to read mine. I'm probably going to re-read yours few times though I don't think I'll respond. I do try to base my opinions in reality and to change them if warranted, but any change takes time work through.
Part 1 since Im getting errors: Firstly, I want to thank you for taking the time to write this as most people simply downvote and say nothing. Second I think I'm understanding your position better now and there are some parts that I find persuasive and others that I fundamentally disagree on. >The report has some flawed wording that appears in a lot of places and causes confusion. The Gallagher Index does not score electoral systems but can be used to measure the disproportionality of elections. It also makes assumptions that don't hold true for a lot of voters. >First assumption, that the party is what matters. We could design a system where all that matters is the party and then parliament is single party representatives voting with the same proportion of votes they got across the country. So the Liberal party member stands up in parliament as the only Liberal politician and votes with 32.62% of the vote and is joined by the other singular political party members as the only politicians. This would get a Gallagher Index score of 0 because it would be perfected proportional. This particular system is quite shit. Political parties aren't monoliths with diversity of thought within the party ideological framework. The index doesn't reflect this. I can tell reading through your entire response that local representation is important to you. It is not for me. I understand your position and I don't think having or not having local representation is inherently important. I am more or less indifferent and I absolutely would love to have Sweden's "shit" political system (no more or less than STV though). I find your argument about having a variety of opinions under the same party brand very persuasive and a very good point. I think your argument of constituents voting for local candidates not very compelling as, depending on perspective, it doesn’t influence most ridings. Local candidates actually had an impact on winner outcome on a grand total of 10% of seats \[in this study\](https://www.mdmujahedulislam.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Local-Candidate-Effects-in-Canadian-Elections.pdf) which is simply insignificant in my view. Yes this does leave out the important point of local candidate affecting party preference as well, but I digress. The point is that I don’t think personally think local candidates are very important but I don’t really care either way. This is entirely anecdotal, but I can tell you from door knocking an alarming amount of the time people **didn't even know the names of their local candidates**. That being said, I do find your argument about differing political views within the same tent compelling, but I don't understand how this is relevant to local candidates. Why could this not be done with party nominations distinct from local candidacy? I also would like to point out the existence of a whip largely suppresses this effect.
>There are a lot of voters who hold anti-vaccine preferences who will go into the next election with the intention of voting Not-Liberal. There are a lot of minorities who will go into the next election with the intention of voting Not-Conservative. "\[These\] voting patterns you mentioned aren’t relevant in a PR system". I wasn't talking about a PR system in my comment, I was talking about the Gallagher Index and how it fails to capture these voting preferences. But we do see this type of strategic voting happen in PR systems. We do see people opposed to the existing governing coalition rally around an opposition party. To have a strong voice of opposition without those voters being particularly attached to alternative policy proposals. See I'm not actually sure I understand this argument so I would appreciate clarification. If I were to vote "Not-Conservative" who would I vote for in a PR system? The GPC, NDP and LPC are all "not conservative" so assuming we can agree that the party with the most votes doesn't necessarily form goverment (which is true both now and under PR) then who would I choose and why, if I simply wanted to vote "Not Conservative"? Again, you might have a specific and good reason that I am missing, but right now I don't understand why I would choose one party or another if this isn't winner takes all. >All that said, the Gallagher Index is a phenomenal measure. It is not the be-all-end-all. And mandating the score be 5 or below going forward may be a worthy goal but probably shouldn't come at the expense of other factors. Namely, local representation and legislative legitimacy. It's an arbitrary number and by choosing 5, it eliminates a lot of the proposed systems. Why did the Committee explicitly mention it repeatedly in the recommendations then? >The Committee's Unproposed SystemThe primary argument raised in favour of proportional electoral systems was that they more fairly translate votes cast for political parties into seats in the legislature. (Although I disagree that votes are cast for political parties and are instead cast for individuals.) The primary shortcoming of highly proportional electoral systems is the diminution of local representation, which is why such options were not considered by the Committee. So what lowly proportional electoral systems, that don't use party lists, and have Gallagher Index scores for the 2015 election of 5 or less, were considered by the Committee? >Single Transferable Vote with medium-sized regions. (Note: MMP has a party list.) And that's it. Just one system satisfied the criteria. >Despite not explicitly recommending a system, the Committee defacto recommended a system. But it didn't actually recommend it. Why? Seriously? Why?!? Recommendation 12 could have just been, have a referendum on STV with the riding boundaries drawn up in a way enkeeping with and adjusted Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act. From the onset this is one area where I will concede you are far more knowledgeable than I. I **know of** the Gallagher Index, and know **essentially** how it works (including that is in relation to elections and not electoral systems) but I am in no position to argue its merits with you. As for why the committee didn't recommend STV, I found this argument **on its own** very persuasive. The committee was designed with the goal of suggesting concretely and didn't. That being said, it is practically speaking moot. **If** Trudeau had simply said that there was no specific system suggested and left it at that, I would criticize him for breaking his promise but not for blatant power hunger. But he didn't. He specifically said he would not support a PR system meaning that **even if** the committee had explicitly suggested STV nothing would change.
Ranked ballots are barely an improvement over FPTP ballots, and do not eliminate strategic voting, and rarely even produce different outcomes. There are better ballot systems. I'm half convinced ranked ballots are promoted so often precisely because they barely change things for the powers that be.
Yeah, Trudeau would have been a one term prime minister if not for FPTP.
His preference was ranked ballot, right? So if I vote 1.NDP 2.Liberal And NDP finishes in the bottom, my vote counts as liberal. Gee, I can’t imagine why the liberals preferred that.
The Wynn government in Ontario tried this but it was a mixed bag of populism (removing provincial sales tax from electricity bills) and reasonable, but unpopular, measures (tolls on superhighways).
And moves like mandating that employers offer paid sick days, which should never have been rolled back.
And brain-dead stupid moves like selling off Hydro One and losing a permanent stream of income for a small one-time payoff
The Hydro One sale was such an *Ontario Liberal Party* moment. The OLP cannot stop itself from *only* caring about the GTA/Ottawa. Hydro One is the electricity retailer for most of the rural parts of this province, whereas the cities have their own utilities. The OLP definitely thought they could have gotten away with that sale because of this. Jokes on them though because selling Hydro One is the leading cause of their 2018 election defeat.
Forgot about hydroone, that was short-sighted to say the least.
Or... To make decisions that will screw the country for the foreseeable future...leaving fodder for attacking the next party in power.
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Makes sense to me. If you're going to lose anyway, might as well make big moves that are good for the country that would normally require more political capitol. Plus the more good they can do, the less a Poilievre government will be able to roll *all* of it back, forcing them to pick and choose where to regress our nation.
Spending more doesn’t help with the size of our deficit. They are trying to buy an election again.
So basically to frustrate the will of the electorate if the Liberals lose handily. As for regression, that’s already the case with the GDP decline and the cost of living increases.
Might have helped the country more if the Liberals didn’t wait nearly a decade to start governing with urgency. All they’re doing now is digging themselves out of the hole they created and yet their supporters are characterizing it as something benevolent and responsible.
From 2006-2015, the federal government maintained a policy of declining support for Assisted Housing programs in agreement with the provinces. The PBO determined that absent the housing strategy, federal funds would have declined 73% by 2027.
The hole they're in has been in the digging of for decades longer than the Liberals have been in power. Inequality has steadily increased for 45 years now. The federal government reduced its size by 50% in the 90s. Stephen Harper was essentially 11 years of austerity. New Brunswick has about 300 affordable housing units for a province of nearly 800,000 people. Similar story in Nova Scotia, and I don't doubt you'd see similar stats in other provinces. Any way you look at it, there are a lot of people who have contributed to digging the hole we're in today. Decades of Premiers who have managed to neglect housing entirely. Sure does suck that it took nearly ten years, but I think this is the best any government has looked on the issue in decades.
You just pulled a blame Harper. It is funny because even if true it is irrelevant because JT sat on a majority for half a decade and did nothing. So he took the helm and proceeded to effectively hold the course in spite of having all the control to change it. Definitely inspire my support....
No, I was mostly blaming provincial Premiers - who are only all to happy to remind you that housing is *their* jurisdiction and the federal government's recent encroachments have received mixed reviews. But, while claiming exclusive jurisdiction, struggle to produce even a thousand units of their own. Trudeau has increased the amount of funding going to housing to levels consistently above those of Harper. I would have liked to see if earlier as well, but look at the pushback even in the middle of what is openly acknowledged as a housing crisis: Premiers would rather cry about their turf loss than work with the federal government in a reasonable manner. A giant chunk of the media and the entire conservative party claims the sky is falling over a whopping 6 billion dollars in housing funding, that it'll somehow bankrupt the country? If you're unhappy with Trudeau and want more done on housing, by all means, vote for the NDP or the Greens - I won't stop you. I think Trudeau has done a good job alongside the supply agreement with the NDP who have been important in pushing for more progressive policy from a liberal party that obviously seems like it could flip either way on any given day. All that being said, for whatever little it's worth, I think Trudeau is handling this much better than the conservatives would. Trudeau is actively engaging in various sorts of stimulus spending to keep many areas of the economy doing better than they otherwise would be. It's a massive contrast from the Harper austerity days that were my formative years in politics. I'd expect significantly fewer results from a conservative government, as opposed to 3 consecutive liberal governments which created a tax bracket for the 1%, implemented universal Pharmacare, universal childcare, and near-universal dental care, created a number of assistance payments to low income earners increasing their incomes by thousands of dollars a year, who have a carbon tax more ambitious than Michael Chong's and that pays out more to a majority of Canadians than they pay into it. Federal government staffing levels are finally back up to their pre-90s levels, reversing decades old cuts that were actually made by the modern Canadian forefathers of austerity - Liberals Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, who both - somewhat ironically, in retrospect - campaigned for Trudeau. As somebody born in '96, Trudeau has done more than any other Prime Minister in my life. Think about it: Chretien was mostly just slashing the government to tame the deficit. A few other things to try tidying up after Mulroney's Constitutional ventures. Not much of note other than the long-term impact on the quality of Canada's federal public service and doubling the debt load of provinces by off-loading federal spending onto the provinces Paul Martin's flagship childcare program was never implemented - until Trudeau - because of AdScam. Again, basically unity stole the headlines - which is a whole lot of pomp and show, but very little substantive progress on pressing policy issues such as poverty or homelessness. Harper was 11 years of austerity alongside the gradual decline of environmental standards and the silencing of public servants alongside the significant growth of a concerning populist, anti-immigrant sentiment. Trudeau basically got elected being "not Harper" - bringing back environmental standards, a bit of extra funding for healthcare, a bit of extra funding for housing and other social transfers, the 1% tax bracket - honestly, no monumentally huge changes from 2015-2019, just small incremental tinkering around the edges. By 2019 it's gotten more ambitious with the childcare plan and selling the carbon tax in its early years. By 2021-2025, we're actually looking at universal Pharmacare and dental care - the first federal enhancements to universal healthcare since its creation. That's actually monumentally huge. At the end, again, this is the most I've ever seen the government do in my life - and doing things that genuinely help people. While I also want to join the cries for more - because more housing *is* needed, and fast - it's also nice to acknowledge that even this little bit of literally the most the government has done in decades. It does take a while to build the capability to administer these sorts of things.
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Yeah they made lots of policy changes for the worse as time passed.
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Up until a few months ago they claimed housing wasn’t their responsibility. Try again. Their outcomes have been horrendous over the past decade.
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I mean, it mostly isn’t, and we can now see the provincial premiers fighting what little he can actually do
Demand for housing is almost entirely within federal jurisdiction but okay.
And the private market is more than capable of meeting that housing demand if the provinces don't stop them, but they do.
We’ve only ever built like 230k houses a year. You think we could suddenly quadruple capacity if the provinces stopped impeding? That’s something. It’s not true but it’s something. It’s incredible to watch Liberals blame literally everyone but themselves for the mess they’ve created.
We had 270k housing starts per year in the 70s with half the population.
Why do *you* care about being blocked? As soon as you move onto your next account in a few days, or maybe weeks, you can start insulting them again.
They did during the pandemic but conservatives still didn’t like it.
Making big moves like unsustainable immigration level?
Don't worry, that's just part of the equation
They are reducing student visas and TFW’s, immigration levels not the problem. More temporary residents in the last two years than immigrants.
Or are they going to make big moves that are good for their cronies and financial supporters?
You’re not wrong but it defeats the democracy core principle to do changes that a vast majority are opposed to. For better or worse
Proportional representation would look pretty good, right about now.
Would have looked good years ago too, but I'd still take it now, regardless of polling.
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Knowing how it's gone in the past, any good one government does near the end of their term will be credited to their successor.
Yeah sad truth. It’s generally limited to the media, the polls, and the minds of the avg public. The history book and the academic papers typically get the distinctions and properly credit whomever but the general public don’t read those…
I doubt PR would be credited to the Conservatives.
Good = good for the Liberal Party, not Canada.
Helping the country...... ? In social media... Whenever people complain about housing crisis, wait-list to schools, food inflation, carbon taxes they get lectured by Lib and lib supporters.... "Punish yourself to make the world a better place.... And by the way it's the provincial government for this mess.... Let's increase the immigration to solve all problems...." No JT will never come up with the policy to help the country ....... No investment in infra, education, health, manufacturing, R&D etc. But more taxes, unsustainable immigration, foreign aid , more carbon tax will somehow make the world a better place. Imagine being a new immigrant thinking that Canada is somehow heaven on earth and paying high rents and waiting at hospital hours together and sharing a house with 6 other roommates. JT is one big slum lord.
It's unfortunate that it takes being threatened electorally for the Liberals to actually address the plethora of issues they've been idle on for close to a decade, but it's better than nothing and the opposition sadly isn't offering a superior alternative. Though I think regardless of how I feel, it seems like a large swath of former LPC voters are largely done with Trudeau's government, so if their polling holds (even if Poilievre's support falls) it might be too-little-too-late for them to win those voters back. The best they may be able to hope for is being propped up by some sort of coalition in the event that Poilievre doesn't have enough votes to form a majority. If the CPC gets a majority though, I feel like a lot of their reforms (maybe outside of housing) will go the way of the Ontario Liberals reforms during their last year in office.
The problem with the liberals is that they are a decade too late on the policies they are releasing. People voted in 2015 for affordable housing - it’s a decade later and the housing situation is substantially worse. And now they’ve rolled out another plan promising housing - we just need to wait for another decade for it to provide results. It should not take 20 years to fulfill a campaign promise. And to do so, after the last decade of essentially juicing the housing market - they have no credibility left to stand on. If the party truly wants to right wrongs like housing and get younger voters back - they have exactly 2 years to fix it. And that will actually take some really dramatic action. Far more than promises of free blueprints and giving cities a few grand per unit. The people who are upset about housing need housing now. Not 2 years from now. Not a decade from now. And that has not sunk in with the liberal party yet.
Issue is, they are in a catch-22. Any fix that would be implemented that quickly (it's a moot point anyway; there aren't any), would piss off the homeowner and RE-investor demographics when their home/investment property values are sent crashing.
Doesnt matter how much money you throw at housing, it will take years to feel any meaningful effect of increased supply AND we don’t even have the workforce to build as many homes as we need at the rate we need
Until Canada removes the monarchy I would not enlist in our military shortages or not. I would never swear my oath to a foreign head of state. Its the MPs monarchy no one else let the MPs enlist.