Bizud

Oh, you mean in one country, where the "movement" was initiated by the government and rejected by the voters? The "some countries in Europe" you're referring to are "all of them except three" (to my knowledge, only France, the UK, and Belarus - hardly a democracy - use non-proportional systems). You've made claims of the disadvantages inherent in PR systems, and have yet to provide a shred of evidence to support them. Chief among them are the claims that PR slows down the pace of government and empowers fringe parties. Has this happened in Denmark, Germany (in the past 50 years, just in case you try to bring up the idiotic Nazi example), Austria, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Finland, etc? The answer is quite simply, no, it hasn't, but I'd be delighted to hear you argue that it has. You have nothing but baseless assertions, as usual.

Actually, they're nowhere near enough. One of the ways Paul Martin "slew the deficit dragon" in the 90's was by transfering the burden to the provinces by cutting a lot of transfer payments. We see the results in the erosion of health care and education services. If we want to resolve the health care crisis Canada is facing, Ottawa needs to pump a lot more money into the provincial coffers. Example of equalization formula (from 1999): Note that the aim is not technically equalization; taxation on the "have" provinces is not increased to reduce them to the average.

I'm from BC, and yes, I do defend equalization payments, which are necessary for poorer provinces to provide adequate services - just as I defend publicly-funded education, which is necessary for poorer people to receive adequate education.

Albertans and Ontarians do not pay any more in federal taxes per capita. The rest doesn't make any sense, what does population density have to do with anything?

The money actually comes from taxation from all provinces, more isn't taken per capita in the "have" provinces. Yeah, the "haves" don't get any of it back, but that hardly equates to getting "seriously BONED" - at least no more than Ontario and, when it was a "have," BC.

Equalization payments are never from one province to another; the money comes from the Federal government.

Other provinces?

I thought the NDP's mistake was racking up debt - how can this require running a deficit to fix, Matt? If you ask people if they want more money piped into health care, education, social programs in general, etc, they say yes. If you ask them if taxes should be raised to accomplish this, the number decreases a bit, but most people still say yes. If you ask people "should we pay higher taxes?" they say no. What does this tell you?

I guess that explains why it's used in Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Ireland, Poland, Spain, Portugal, Finland (almost every country in Europe, actually, you get my drift - France and the UK are the only ones I can think of that don't use PR nationally, and even within the UK, PR systems are used in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales), New Zealand, and so on and so forth. Note, there is no significant electoral reform movement, to my knowledge, in place in any PR country to change to a first-past-the-post system. Wonder why? Oh, and thanks for the evidence, MAtt, it makes it so much clearer!

That's not evidence, that's speculation. I specifically said "evidence, not speculation." And other than that, you give "Nazi Germany." Great, one example which ignores: -The many jurisdictions, including modern Germany, (and Scotland, Ireland, Malta, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, etc.) which use proportional representation electoral systems and have not degenerated into "nazism." -Whatever criticisms you could make of Nazi germany, "acting too slowly" is not one of them. Boggles.

And taxpayers can't pay any more? Canada has among the lowest taxation rates in the first world. We could stand to pay much much more. The Liberals balanced to not-balanced budget ratio is worse than the NDP's. The NDP had, if I'm correct, 8 deficit budgets out of ten...the Liberals have had three out of four. Who's worse? Also, compare the NDPs deficits to the SoCreds, and compare each successive (smaller) deficit, and compare the Liberals first three massive deficits to the NDP surpluses that preceded them.

Provide evidence, not speculation, that proportional representation and minority/coalition governments would slow down the pace of government.

If tuition fees keep rising, and wages do not, fewer people will be able to afford post-secondary education. The universities don't have to lose out on this. There's plenty of money to go around; the universities need more of it so that tuition fees can return to affordable levels. You mean rumours that have been long disproven? Yeah, kthx. There were never any fudge-it budgets. You want to talk fudge-it budgets, ask yourself how we've got such a massive surplus in '04-'05 after running near-record deficits for the past three years? Hmm, could it be, running a deficit budget and borrowing a lot of money, not spending said money, and then using it to declare a massive surplus right before the election? Out of context that looks bad, but consider that the deficit was inherited from the SoCreds, and that each deficit was smaller than the one before it, and that by the end of their second term a substantial amount of money had gone towards paying down the debt. So, we should follow the American model, rather than the Scandianavian model? If that's such a great idea, why are social programs in the United States (the world's most indebted nation) among the worst in the industrialized world, and Norwegians have the best quality of life in the world (not to mention a robust economy and zero debt)?

Why the fuck are they calling the fetus by name? Only people get names. What they planned to name "Connor" never came into existence.

that is absolutly genius. In the case of s.p. hes going to sit on death row for like 6 years before he gets executed, somewhere i heard that california has the most people on death row. Think about it how bad is the death penalty? they stick a needle in you and its over...hardly a punishment except that ur dead. bring back the electric chair Yeah, make them really suffer! That'll make the world a better place, alright! ;)

Yeah. http://www.prisonjustice.ca/ http://prisonsucks.com/scans/instead_of_prisons/

I am in favour of abolishing prisons and the death penalty. It also sounds like the evidence here wasn't at all convincing, and certain jurors need a lecture in the definition of "reasonable doubt."

Except that using heroin is not immoral, and killing people is, duh, duh, fucking duh. It sounds stupid to me. That said, it's a lot less stupid than using criminal law to fight the heroin problem, and between this (only an experiment, remember) and the safe injection sites, it's refreshing to see government approaching a problem from new ways to find out what works best, instead of blindly following drug war dogma.

There are fewer and fewer outstanding artists as the years go by, but the overall amount of good music is increasing.

Generally speaking, terrorist leaders have a much harder time recruiting suicide bombers if the recruit has a life worth living, and if the leader can't find a way to connect the target to the recruit's misery.

Single Transferable Vote, Single Member Plurality, Mixed Member Proportional.

The Liberals are the furthest to the right of all significant parties in BC. I think there is a very small Conservative Party of BC that ran like six candidates in the last election, but even if they ran a candidate in every riding they'd be irrelevant; the BC Liberals are more or less on the same page as Ralph Klein's Conservatives, at least economically.

Pretty self explanatory. For those that don't know, Democratic Reform BC is a new party that paints itself as centrist. They have one MLA (a Liberal defector). Barring any big surprises, I'll be voting NDP. Leftist reflexes aside, Carole James (leader) has promised, among other things, the three things most important to me in this election: 1) Freeze tuition fees 2) Repeal $6/hour training wage 3) Provide balanced budgets

None to my knowledge. The BC Citizen's Assembly's selection of STV seems to be something of an anomaly - New Brunswick is almost certainly going with MMP, all the pressure groups really want MMP, and MMP is by far the more common choice worldwide.

I wanted to add that while STV is proportional, and a vast improvement over SMP, I would still prefer to see a Mixed Member Proportional system for British Columbia, modeled after New Zealand's system, and for Canada at the federal level, modeled after Germany (with seats being proportional to vote both within indidvidual provinces/states and in the country as a whole). One advantage is that MMP systems are more "perfectly" proportional, as opposed to STV, which is only roughly proportional, and is less proportional if smaller multi-member districts are used (Ireland is smaller, and can use only 5-member constituencies, while British Columbia is larger and would need to use 5-7 member consituencies for urban areas like Vancouver, and 2-3 member consituencies for more rural areas like the north, and smaller cities and surrounding areas, like Kamloops). MMP systems also encourage the proliferation of smaller parties even more, because parties with very diffuse, but still considerable, support can still hope to elect a few MP's. The more parties you have, the more choices you have. In New Zealand, leftist voters can vote Labour, Green, or Progressive, and not worry about splitting the left-wing vote.