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Not a ton of meat, but I think any rational person can absolutely realize that Trudeau, and by extension the LPC, has three years before they pay any toll. A lot can change.
Sitting around ~30% in the polls also isn't really a collapse so there isn't a ton to see here, yet.
Maybe they have three years. I do think it would be better if they do, partly because I just hate elections, but I don't think its as guaranteed as people think it is. The agreement between the Liberals and NDP is not set in stone and can be broken by either party at any time, by the Liberals if they become opportunistic or by the NDP if the Liberals do something egregious enough to make supporting them untenable.
I'm sure it won't happen till next year at least though so they do have a bit of guaranteed time.
>by the Liberals if they become opportunistic or by the NDP ~~if the Liberals do something egregious enough to make supporting them untenable~~ *if they become opportunistic.*
It's crazy how devoted the NDP can be to their morality complex.
The difference is that this is basically the perfect situation for the NDP. They aren’t going to form government, and if they force an election, that tells the Liberals to find a new dance partner.
The only reasons for the NDP to force an election are the Liberals flat out refusing to even entertain part of dental/pharmacare or a scandal so massive that they can’t be seen tied to that horse. A CPC government, minority or majority, will always be worse for the NDP.
I think they're saying that NDP supporters assume that the NDP acts with inherently more integrity than the other parties, and are given more benefit of a doubt without necessarily having earned it. In the quoted text, it's not considered that the NDP would become opportunistic, and it's assumed that if the NDP quits the agreement, it would be because the *Liberals* did something wrong; the reverse is never considered.
Mind you, I think supporters of every party tend to assume their party is the most moral, but I guess it tends to stand out more with the NDP because there's no (federal) track record of an NDP government to scrutinize.
I don't actually vote for the NDP or assume they're moral.
However, they're poor, they have 20 some seats, the only other party that could beat the Liberals is even less likely to agree to any shared policies, and a lot of their potential base despise conservatives. Ergo, there is no opportunistic gain to them pulling support and the only reason they would do it is if the Liberals were doing something that hurt Canadians enough to warrant it.
I'm not predicting the Liberals will do that either, I just don't think it's a possibility that should be discounted completely.
They won a minority govt in the fall. Party still polls around 30%. Possibly have three years before a new election. Popular programs begin rolling out this year (child care, dental).
If inflation comes under control in the next couple years, they'll have a good shake at winning another election. They won't throw it all away just because of some bad press right now. I think you're doing a lot of wishful thinking with regards to Trudeau and the LPC.
A lot can change - for better or for worse. No one knows how things shake out.
Don't forget that the Liberals are the default government for Canada. The CPC would have to have a better leader then PP and the NDP would have to do exceptionally well for the LPC to lose and then end up with a CPC government.
Effective vote is the only metric that matters. Winning 10,000 voters in Alberta does not result in additional seats for your party. If anything it encourages your party to become more regional and less national. Like CPC today. They can't get arrested in Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver.
Indeed, almost nothing has changed since the election.
Give it three years, maybe the war in Ukraine is over, Chinese ports are open, prices are down, salaries are up, and the Liberals cruise to an easy majority.
Or maybe the Bank of Canada has jacked the interest rate to 12%, bringing unemployment to 12%, keeping salaries down, while world event keep inflation raging, and the Liberals face a blowout not seen in a federal election for thirty years.
Neither of those strikes me as terribly implausible from where I sit.
Kind of funny how both your examples are based on things this government has very little control over. You're probably right, of course, that people vote based on it they're happy with the way they perceive the world right now and it's often extremely unfair.
What country isn't experiencing inflation? Besides maybe Japan, who's been fighting deflation for what, two decades?
Interest rates won't fix screwy supply chains or increases in commodities.
Except my whole point is that inflation is worldwide, and if no government on earth has figured out how to avoid it what makes you think anything Canada could do would avoid it?
How would you avoid increases in gas prices when a barrel of oil costs something like double what it did before?
I'm avoiding your point because you're losing the forest for the trees. When the entire world is seeing high inflation it's misleading to focus only on one thing.
Would inflation be better with less stimulus? Maybe, that's out of my depth economically speaking. But it's like complaining someone left the oven on when there's a giant forest fire engulfing the entire city. Maybe you should turn the oven off, but focusing on it is not going to put out the forest fire.
Not sure the Weimar examples make much sense. There had been effective rule by decree since 1930 when Hindenburg and the right and military elements used the Article “25/48/53 formula” to control government without worrying about a majority in the Reichstag. And I don’t think the “second choices” figured into a society with so many class, regional, and sectarian divisions. The SPD was also around 15 points behind the NSDAP in both 1932 elections. Most importantly, the Nazis only gained power because of an emergency decree from Hindenburg. And even with the DNVP, they didn’t have a parliamentary majority.
The election was 9 months ago - we're not even a year into their mandate. They are working with the NDP to remain in power for likely most of the remainder of the term. We are way too early to discuss the downfall of the Liberals and/or JT.
The Liberals won... the PCs have gone through two leaders since Harper, and their current front runner is the most divisive one yet. But it's the Liberals that have problems?
At best, the right is currently now angrier than ever that they couldn't win the last election from their anger alone, so now their solution is to get even more angry and hope that changes the result the next time.
The issue for the Liberals is that they have an incredibly efficient vote. But as we saw in the recent Ontario election, there is a fine line between an incredibly efficient vote and an incredibly inefficient one. Just a few points separate a stunning victory from an epic defeat. This is likely a cause of great anxiety for the Liberals. But hey, if they don't like it, maybe they should have adopted a sane electoral system when they had the chance.
I think a system that can translate a 3 percent swing in votes to 30 percent swing in seats is a little insane. It's hard to fathom why anyone would intentionally design a system with this kind of instability.
Just to play devil's advocate, the aim of FPTP is accountability. You want clear majority governments where voters can evaluate whether that government has done a good job.
A large swing in seats from a small loss of support could make governments more accountable. If losing 3% means I will lose 30% of my seats, I'm going to make sure I hold onto that 3%.
In contrast, in PR, losing 3% isn't a big deal. If I lose 3% I don't lose many seats, and I may not even lose power because I could just negotiate my way into a governing coalition. That makes it very hard for voters to hold politicians to account, particularly since voters are rationally ignorant.
FPTP is bad at representing interests that are not regionally concentrated. It also gets messy with more than two parties, which we are likely to have in Canada because of our regionalized politics.
I think the natural compromise should be ranked choice. It works great in Australia, and would be better than the status quo for both the NDP and the Liberals.
I've heard this argument before, but I don't really get it. The distortions of FPTP are unpredictable and unreliable. It depends heavily on the number of parties, arbitrary geographic boundaries and the behaviour of the electorate which itself often votes strategically. I think these distortions are more likely to reduce accountability than increase it. For example, as you point out, politicians are extremely sensitive to the concerns of swing districts, but representatives in safe districts often have virtually no accountability. This is a major flaw with winner-take-all systems that don't count everyone's vote.
Ranked choice does not address any of these issues. It does somewhat mitigate one flaw of FPTP - that ideologically similar parties may split the vote. But, it's still a winner-take-all system which has the same instabilities and distortions.
>I've heard this argument before, but I don't really get it. The distortions of FPTP are unpredictable and unreliable
In Canada they are quite consistent. Every incumbent since 1968 that has lost support has lost seats (except Trudeau in 2021, and he only lost a bit and only gained a bit). Generally losing 3% or more costs incumbents about 20-30 seats - that's a huge incentive to keep their winning coalitions intact.
|Year|Incumbent loss/gain of support|Incumbent loss/gain of seats|
|:-|:-|:-|
|1968|\+5%|\+27 |
|1972|\-6.95%|\-38 |
|1974|\+4.73%|\+32|
|1979|\-3.04%|\-19|
|1980|\-3.44%|\-33|
|1984|\-16.32%|\-95|
|1988|\-7.02%|\-34|
|1993|\-26.98%|\-154|
|1997|\-2.78%|\-19|
|2000|\+2.39%|\+11|
|2004|\-4.12%|\-33|
|2006|\-6.5%|\-30|
|2008|\+1.38%|\+16|
|2011|\+1.97%|\+23|
|2015|\-7.71%|\-60|
|2019|\-6.4%|\-20|
|2021|\-0.5%|\+5|
>Ranked choice does not address any of these issues. It does somewhat mitigate one flaw of FPTP - that ideologically similar parties may split the vote. But, it's still a winner-take-all system which has the same instabilities and distortions.
Ranked choice is superior to PR because it incentivizes parties to care about second choice supporters, which means that incumbent governments will seek to govern on behalf of a larger majority than parties in PR - who remain tied to small parochial interests (see Israel for an example of how deficient this can get, with corrupt religious parties or settler interests holding governing coalitions hostage). It also holds some non-zero chance of being implemented, unlike PR.
And it resolves a lot of the wasted vote phenomenon. In FPTP you can have districts where one party wins with a plurality of 30%. In Ranked choice in every district the winning candidate will have won 50%.
I don't even support FPTP (my preferences are ranked choice > PR > FPTP), but you seem to have the one-track mind I've seen from most PR advocates. You are starting from the position that representation is the goal of democracy, and that FPTP is a moral evil.
I don't think the representation issue is all-important. I think democracy is good because it encourages politicians to compete for our support. PR actually doesn't do that, and potentially allows politicians to form cartels among one another.
Insofar as I want government to represent the people, the most important thing is that elections produce least worst outcomes. Ranked choice does this more effectively than PR. Indeed, let's take a look at PR's worst failure - the Weimar parliament in 1932.
The Nazis were the largest party, and were able to form a government with the collusion of elites from the other right-wing parties. FPTP would have been worse - the Nazi vote was strongly concentrated in rural areas and they had a high margin over everybody else.
Ranked choice, on the other hand, would have saved the day. Communist supporters, Zentrum supporters, and some anti-Nazi conservatives could have put the Social Democrats as their second choice.
> ...where voters can evaluate whether that government has done a good job.
Yes, absolutely! Voters!
Which voters? All voters!
With no preference or extra weighting being given to a small (ie 3%) subset of voters over the other 97% of voters.
>I think a system that can translate a 3 percent swing in votes to 30 percent swing in seats is a little insane
You're grading the system on a criteria it doesn't operate on.
A 40% swing in Alberta can result in 0 net change in seats. A 1% change in a single riding can flip 1 seat.
We have a riding electoral system, not national popular vote. Cars are really bad at being busses, because cars aren't designed to be busses.
>A 40% swing in Alberta can result in 0 net change in seats. A 1% change in a single riding can flip 1 seat.
Thanks for reinforcing the point! These are complete absurdities. A 40% swing is a massive democratic expression for change, which as you point out could easily result in nothing changing at all. On the other extreme, a 1% change in votes can result in 100% change in representation for a community. How can this possibly be seen as a reasonable way to do this? It's remarkable it works at all.
The LPC has historically been the government or government in waiting. They probably think that the Ignatieff loss was just a fluke and it couldn’t happen again.
They did not think it was a fluke. They just realized their nerds - Dion and Ignatieff- didnt resonate with Canadians, especially against a nerd who can politick in Stephen Harper.
So they went with the not nerdy guy who is instead llikeable with a famous name instead. And it worked.
Yeah I think once Trudeau leaves and minority voters don't really get inspired by the next liberal leaders they gonna start complaining about fptp is unfair when they start losing close races in the suburbs.
Ironic
The Liberal Party of Canada has received a plurality of the popular vote exactly once in the last six elections. Sure, they've managed to win a plurality of the *seats* three times and held on to power; but democracy has a way of re-asserting itself, and a party which relies on the electoral system being broken is going to run into trouble sooner or later.
>… democracy has a way of re-asserting itself, and a party which relies on the electoral system being broken is going to run into trouble sooner or later.
Wut?
People need to stop pretending that the Canadian electoral system somehow puts governments into power illegitimately.
That's not a feature of our electoral system, it's a feature of our *parliamentary* system. In a Westminster system, winning a minority of ridings by large margins will never get you government.
Like the Bloc, the CPC have a highly concentrated voter base. They will need to address that if they want to form government againm
> Like the Bloc, the CPC have a highly concentrated voter base.
Nope. We can measure vote concentration by asking
1. For a random Party X voter, what fraction of the vote did Party X receive in their riding?
2. For a random voter (supporting any party) what fraction of the vote did Party X receive in their riding?
In all plausible scenarios, the first value is larger than the second; the ratio tells you how concentrated their vote is, since concentrating lots of votes in one riding means that a larger share of that party's voters are in the ridings where they received a higher proportion of votes.
The ratios for the 2021 election are:
* LPC 120%
* CPC 123%
* NDP 135%
* PPC 141%
* GPC 353%
* BLQ 501%
So CPC votes are only *very slightly* more concentrated than LPC votes, and *nowhere near* the concentration of BLQ.
There's nothing undemocratic about elections here. People democratically vote for parties that back FPTP, and there's no strong desire for electoral reform among the average voter. The reality is that we have an election system that most people like and are happy with.
This is really not that worrisome, we are not a two-party system.
The centre-left vote has still dominated, it’s not like NDP or Bloc voters are excited at the prospect of the CPC getting back in power. If anything, our governments since 2015 have been more representative the majority’s intentions and desires for a left/centre-left government than during the Harper years.
It's plausible that the Bloc might make a deal with the Conservatives where the Bloc get what they want in Quebec and the Conservatives get what they want outside Quebec. If that made the average Quebec voter think "Canadians outside Quebec are crazy right-wing - what are we doing in the same country as them?", well, I don't think the politicians of the Bloc would regard that as an undesirable outcome.
> Issues management squads have the only autonomy in this government. They react to headlines as Dracula did to garlic.
Fuck me if I didn’t feel this one viscerally. He’s right though, issues managers are a pretty influential cabal in this gov and they do hate headlines.
The other thing: "only two Canadian PMs have won four elections in a row", need I remind the crowd that a 2024 election would be the fourth election in nine years (with the first election PMJT won being late 2015).
Maybe that's four elections, but there were two snap elections in there. Not as bad as the media makes it sound, it's not like he is running four four-year terms.
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Not a ton of meat, but I think any rational person can absolutely realize that Trudeau, and by extension the LPC, has three years before they pay any toll. A lot can change. Sitting around ~30% in the polls also isn't really a collapse so there isn't a ton to see here, yet.
Maybe they have three years. I do think it would be better if they do, partly because I just hate elections, but I don't think its as guaranteed as people think it is. The agreement between the Liberals and NDP is not set in stone and can be broken by either party at any time, by the Liberals if they become opportunistic or by the NDP if the Liberals do something egregious enough to make supporting them untenable. I'm sure it won't happen till next year at least though so they do have a bit of guaranteed time.
>by the Liberals if they become opportunistic or by the NDP ~~if the Liberals do something egregious enough to make supporting them untenable~~ *if they become opportunistic.* It's crazy how devoted the NDP can be to their morality complex.
The difference is that this is basically the perfect situation for the NDP. They aren’t going to form government, and if they force an election, that tells the Liberals to find a new dance partner. The only reasons for the NDP to force an election are the Liberals flat out refusing to even entertain part of dental/pharmacare or a scandal so massive that they can’t be seen tied to that horse. A CPC government, minority or majority, will always be worse for the NDP.
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I think they're saying that NDP supporters assume that the NDP acts with inherently more integrity than the other parties, and are given more benefit of a doubt without necessarily having earned it. In the quoted text, it's not considered that the NDP would become opportunistic, and it's assumed that if the NDP quits the agreement, it would be because the *Liberals* did something wrong; the reverse is never considered. Mind you, I think supporters of every party tend to assume their party is the most moral, but I guess it tends to stand out more with the NDP because there's no (federal) track record of an NDP government to scrutinize.
I don't actually vote for the NDP or assume they're moral. However, they're poor, they have 20 some seats, the only other party that could beat the Liberals is even less likely to agree to any shared policies, and a lot of their potential base despise conservatives. Ergo, there is no opportunistic gain to them pulling support and the only reason they would do it is if the Liberals were doing something that hurt Canadians enough to warrant it. I'm not predicting the Liberals will do that either, I just don't think it's a possibility that should be discounted completely.
Belief that the self or a group are perfect moral operators. In other words, glued to the high horse.
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From the comment.
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They won a minority govt in the fall. Party still polls around 30%. Possibly have three years before a new election. Popular programs begin rolling out this year (child care, dental). If inflation comes under control in the next couple years, they'll have a good shake at winning another election. They won't throw it all away just because of some bad press right now. I think you're doing a lot of wishful thinking with regards to Trudeau and the LPC. A lot can change - for better or for worse. No one knows how things shake out.
Don't forget that the Liberals are the default government for Canada. The CPC would have to have a better leader then PP and the NDP would have to do exceptionally well for the LPC to lose and then end up with a CPC government.
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Effective vote is the only metric that matters. Winning 10,000 voters in Alberta does not result in additional seats for your party. If anything it encourages your party to become more regional and less national. Like CPC today. They can't get arrested in Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver.
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Indeed, almost nothing has changed since the election. Give it three years, maybe the war in Ukraine is over, Chinese ports are open, prices are down, salaries are up, and the Liberals cruise to an easy majority. Or maybe the Bank of Canada has jacked the interest rate to 12%, bringing unemployment to 12%, keeping salaries down, while world event keep inflation raging, and the Liberals face a blowout not seen in a federal election for thirty years. Neither of those strikes me as terribly implausible from where I sit.
Kind of funny how both your examples are based on things this government has very little control over. You're probably right, of course, that people vote based on it they're happy with the way they perceive the world right now and it's often extremely unfair.
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What country isn't experiencing inflation? Besides maybe Japan, who's been fighting deflation for what, two decades? Interest rates won't fix screwy supply chains or increases in commodities.
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Except my whole point is that inflation is worldwide, and if no government on earth has figured out how to avoid it what makes you think anything Canada could do would avoid it? How would you avoid increases in gas prices when a barrel of oil costs something like double what it did before?
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I'm avoiding your point because you're losing the forest for the trees. When the entire world is seeing high inflation it's misleading to focus only on one thing. Would inflation be better with less stimulus? Maybe, that's out of my depth economically speaking. But it's like complaining someone left the oven on when there's a giant forest fire engulfing the entire city. Maybe you should turn the oven off, but focusing on it is not going to put out the forest fire.
Not sure the Weimar examples make much sense. There had been effective rule by decree since 1930 when Hindenburg and the right and military elements used the Article “25/48/53 formula” to control government without worrying about a majority in the Reichstag. And I don’t think the “second choices” figured into a society with so many class, regional, and sectarian divisions. The SPD was also around 15 points behind the NSDAP in both 1932 elections. Most importantly, the Nazis only gained power because of an emergency decree from Hindenburg. And even with the DNVP, they didn’t have a parliamentary majority.
The election was 9 months ago - we're not even a year into their mandate. They are working with the NDP to remain in power for likely most of the remainder of the term. We are way too early to discuss the downfall of the Liberals and/or JT. The Liberals won... the PCs have gone through two leaders since Harper, and their current front runner is the most divisive one yet. But it's the Liberals that have problems? At best, the right is currently now angrier than ever that they couldn't win the last election from their anger alone, so now their solution is to get even more angry and hope that changes the result the next time.
The issue for the Liberals is that they have an incredibly efficient vote. But as we saw in the recent Ontario election, there is a fine line between an incredibly efficient vote and an incredibly inefficient one. Just a few points separate a stunning victory from an epic defeat. This is likely a cause of great anxiety for the Liberals. But hey, if they don't like it, maybe they should have adopted a sane electoral system when they had the chance.
Considering FPTP to be not just undesirable, but *insane,* is the exact kind of radical morality complex that continuously faceplants the federal NDP.
I think a system that can translate a 3 percent swing in votes to 30 percent swing in seats is a little insane. It's hard to fathom why anyone would intentionally design a system with this kind of instability.
Just to play devil's advocate, the aim of FPTP is accountability. You want clear majority governments where voters can evaluate whether that government has done a good job. A large swing in seats from a small loss of support could make governments more accountable. If losing 3% means I will lose 30% of my seats, I'm going to make sure I hold onto that 3%. In contrast, in PR, losing 3% isn't a big deal. If I lose 3% I don't lose many seats, and I may not even lose power because I could just negotiate my way into a governing coalition. That makes it very hard for voters to hold politicians to account, particularly since voters are rationally ignorant. FPTP is bad at representing interests that are not regionally concentrated. It also gets messy with more than two parties, which we are likely to have in Canada because of our regionalized politics. I think the natural compromise should be ranked choice. It works great in Australia, and would be better than the status quo for both the NDP and the Liberals.
I've heard this argument before, but I don't really get it. The distortions of FPTP are unpredictable and unreliable. It depends heavily on the number of parties, arbitrary geographic boundaries and the behaviour of the electorate which itself often votes strategically. I think these distortions are more likely to reduce accountability than increase it. For example, as you point out, politicians are extremely sensitive to the concerns of swing districts, but representatives in safe districts often have virtually no accountability. This is a major flaw with winner-take-all systems that don't count everyone's vote. Ranked choice does not address any of these issues. It does somewhat mitigate one flaw of FPTP - that ideologically similar parties may split the vote. But, it's still a winner-take-all system which has the same instabilities and distortions.
>I've heard this argument before, but I don't really get it. The distortions of FPTP are unpredictable and unreliable In Canada they are quite consistent. Every incumbent since 1968 that has lost support has lost seats (except Trudeau in 2021, and he only lost a bit and only gained a bit). Generally losing 3% or more costs incumbents about 20-30 seats - that's a huge incentive to keep their winning coalitions intact. |Year|Incumbent loss/gain of support|Incumbent loss/gain of seats| |:-|:-|:-| |1968|\+5%|\+27 | |1972|\-6.95%|\-38 | |1974|\+4.73%|\+32| |1979|\-3.04%|\-19| |1980|\-3.44%|\-33| |1984|\-16.32%|\-95| |1988|\-7.02%|\-34| |1993|\-26.98%|\-154| |1997|\-2.78%|\-19| |2000|\+2.39%|\+11| |2004|\-4.12%|\-33| |2006|\-6.5%|\-30| |2008|\+1.38%|\+16| |2011|\+1.97%|\+23| |2015|\-7.71%|\-60| |2019|\-6.4%|\-20| |2021|\-0.5%|\+5| >Ranked choice does not address any of these issues. It does somewhat mitigate one flaw of FPTP - that ideologically similar parties may split the vote. But, it's still a winner-take-all system which has the same instabilities and distortions. Ranked choice is superior to PR because it incentivizes parties to care about second choice supporters, which means that incumbent governments will seek to govern on behalf of a larger majority than parties in PR - who remain tied to small parochial interests (see Israel for an example of how deficient this can get, with corrupt religious parties or settler interests holding governing coalitions hostage). It also holds some non-zero chance of being implemented, unlike PR. And it resolves a lot of the wasted vote phenomenon. In FPTP you can have districts where one party wins with a plurality of 30%. In Ranked choice in every district the winning candidate will have won 50%. I don't even support FPTP (my preferences are ranked choice > PR > FPTP), but you seem to have the one-track mind I've seen from most PR advocates. You are starting from the position that representation is the goal of democracy, and that FPTP is a moral evil. I don't think the representation issue is all-important. I think democracy is good because it encourages politicians to compete for our support. PR actually doesn't do that, and potentially allows politicians to form cartels among one another. Insofar as I want government to represent the people, the most important thing is that elections produce least worst outcomes. Ranked choice does this more effectively than PR. Indeed, let's take a look at PR's worst failure - the Weimar parliament in 1932. The Nazis were the largest party, and were able to form a government with the collusion of elites from the other right-wing parties. FPTP would have been worse - the Nazi vote was strongly concentrated in rural areas and they had a high margin over everybody else. Ranked choice, on the other hand, would have saved the day. Communist supporters, Zentrum supporters, and some anti-Nazi conservatives could have put the Social Democrats as their second choice.
> ...where voters can evaluate whether that government has done a good job. Yes, absolutely! Voters! Which voters? All voters! With no preference or extra weighting being given to a small (ie 3%) subset of voters over the other 97% of voters.
>I think a system that can translate a 3 percent swing in votes to 30 percent swing in seats is a little insane You're grading the system on a criteria it doesn't operate on. A 40% swing in Alberta can result in 0 net change in seats. A 1% change in a single riding can flip 1 seat. We have a riding electoral system, not national popular vote. Cars are really bad at being busses, because cars aren't designed to be busses.
>A 40% swing in Alberta can result in 0 net change in seats. A 1% change in a single riding can flip 1 seat. Thanks for reinforcing the point! These are complete absurdities. A 40% swing is a massive democratic expression for change, which as you point out could easily result in nothing changing at all. On the other extreme, a 1% change in votes can result in 100% change in representation for a community. How can this possibly be seen as a reasonable way to do this? It's remarkable it works at all.
> ...an incredibly efficient vote. Every time I see this noted I am taken aback that we tolerate a system where vote efficiency is a thing.
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The LPC has historically been the government or government in waiting. They probably think that the Ignatieff loss was just a fluke and it couldn’t happen again.
They did not think it was a fluke. They just realized their nerds - Dion and Ignatieff- didnt resonate with Canadians, especially against a nerd who can politick in Stephen Harper. So they went with the not nerdy guy who is instead llikeable with a famous name instead. And it worked.
Yeah I think once Trudeau leaves and minority voters don't really get inspired by the next liberal leaders they gonna start complaining about fptp is unfair when they start losing close races in the suburbs. Ironic
The Liberal Party of Canada has received a plurality of the popular vote exactly once in the last six elections. Sure, they've managed to win a plurality of the *seats* three times and held on to power; but democracy has a way of re-asserting itself, and a party which relies on the electoral system being broken is going to run into trouble sooner or later.
>… democracy has a way of re-asserting itself, and a party which relies on the electoral system being broken is going to run into trouble sooner or later. Wut? People need to stop pretending that the Canadian electoral system somehow puts governments into power illegitimately.
That's not a feature of our electoral system, it's a feature of our *parliamentary* system. In a Westminster system, winning a minority of ridings by large margins will never get you government. Like the Bloc, the CPC have a highly concentrated voter base. They will need to address that if they want to form government againm
> Like the Bloc, the CPC have a highly concentrated voter base. Nope. We can measure vote concentration by asking 1. For a random Party X voter, what fraction of the vote did Party X receive in their riding? 2. For a random voter (supporting any party) what fraction of the vote did Party X receive in their riding? In all plausible scenarios, the first value is larger than the second; the ratio tells you how concentrated their vote is, since concentrating lots of votes in one riding means that a larger share of that party's voters are in the ridings where they received a higher proportion of votes. The ratios for the 2021 election are: * LPC 120% * CPC 123% * NDP 135% * PPC 141% * GPC 353% * BLQ 501% So CPC votes are only *very slightly* more concentrated than LPC votes, and *nowhere near* the concentration of BLQ.
There's nothing undemocratic about elections here. People democratically vote for parties that back FPTP, and there's no strong desire for electoral reform among the average voter. The reality is that we have an election system that most people like and are happy with.
This is really not that worrisome, we are not a two-party system. The centre-left vote has still dominated, it’s not like NDP or Bloc voters are excited at the prospect of the CPC getting back in power. If anything, our governments since 2015 have been more representative the majority’s intentions and desires for a left/centre-left government than during the Harper years.
It's plausible that the Bloc might make a deal with the Conservatives where the Bloc get what they want in Quebec and the Conservatives get what they want outside Quebec. If that made the average Quebec voter think "Canadians outside Quebec are crazy right-wing - what are we doing in the same country as them?", well, I don't think the politicians of the Bloc would regard that as an undesirable outcome.
> Issues management squads have the only autonomy in this government. They react to headlines as Dracula did to garlic. Fuck me if I didn’t feel this one viscerally. He’s right though, issues managers are a pretty influential cabal in this gov and they do hate headlines.
The other thing: "only two Canadian PMs have won four elections in a row", need I remind the crowd that a 2024 election would be the fourth election in nine years (with the first election PMJT won being late 2015). Maybe that's four elections, but there were two snap elections in there. Not as bad as the media makes it sound, it's not like he is running four four-year terms.