Bizud

That's not enough. The status quo is not self-justifying. You have to argue why FPTP is better than PR systems.

Whether change should come at a moderate pace or overnight should be up to the voters, and proportional representation allows them to express their will. You'll get no argument about stability from me, but you still haven't demonstrated that PR leads to instability. True, there are some cases (Israel) where it seems to have bred instability and a fractured parliament, but there are also cases where our system has done the exact same (India).

You still don't get it. Making demands on legislation for your vote is not "pushing someone around," it is proper and correct. That is what they are supposed to do. They're not supposed to vote for something they don't agree with, they're supposed to say "I can't agree with that, but change it to this and I will agree." Chuck Cadman agreed with the budget as is, good for him. If he hadn't, he would have been well in the right to say "I can't vote for that as long as it has X in it. Take X out and maybe I will vote for it." It's called negotiation, and it is how the legislative process is supposed to work. Look, my main problem with the current voting system is that if I vote NDP and the local New Democrat doesn't win, my vote counts for nothing. People who want to vote Conservative in Quebec don't, because they know that it won't count. That is not merely bad for the country, it is evil and it is unfair, and you have yet to provide a reason why we can't make a PR system work when other countries have managed to do it so well. You mention "the conservative movement" and "Europe's socialism" and how Canada is a big country, and all that, and it just doesn't have anything to do with proportional representation. The last election, if we had used a PR system, would have allowed for a stable Liberal/NDP coalition or a Liberal minority with NDP support. If you have a problem with that, focus your arguments on why you think single-party majorities are preferable to coalitions and minorities - you know, like the intelligent critics of PR do - not on imaginary reasons why PR "can't work." http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentSe...ol=968350116795

I wish Canada's Greens were like the New Zealand Greens: http://stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3422867a14095,00.html

Because Liberals always keep their promises. ;) They shouldn't say "change the bill to this, which you'll still agree to, and we'll agree to it as well, and that way everybody wins?" What's wrong with that? That is the very essence of collaborative democracy. The elected Members of Parliament sit down and talk and argue and debate amongst themselves until they get something that a majority of them can agree to. How can that possibly be wrong? Nobody's abandoning any principles - if a majority can't agree to it then it simply won't be passed. What you don't seem to get is that the Liberals are under no obligation to continue governing. The NDP can't force them to do anything. If the NDP's demands were ones that the Liberals would have to compromise principle on, the Liberals could simply say "no, we won't do it." The budget would be defeated and an election would have been called. You might well say that would have upset Canadians, and you'd be right - and they'd probably either punish the Liberals for being intransigent or, if they thought the Libs were in the right, give them a majority. So to say the NDP pushed the Liberals around is just absurd; the NDP acted to keep Canadians from going back to the polls when most of us didn't want to, they acted to eliminate a big corporate tax cut that most Canadians thought was unnecessary, and they helped to deliver a budget that most Canadians seem to like. And there's no problem at all with that, it's how a parliamentary democracy works and is supposed to work. To say that the Cabinet must keep the confidence of the House is not just some old-fashioned notion, it's the proper way to govern in a parliamentary democracy. We need to take power out of the PMO and return it to the legislature, and the best way to do that is by ensuring that parties are actually given a fair share of seats that corresponds to their share of the vote, so that parties and politicians can actually be held accountable instead of coasting into the nigh-unlimited power of the executive on 35% of the votes because of a fractured opposition. or because of a voting system that is a relic of the past. And also, it is wrong that my vote for the NDP doesn't count unless the NDP candidate in my riding wins. That is wrong, and it's not democratic. We need to switch to a voting system where we can elect, indirectly, a government, not just a bunch of legislators. Our voting system is a relic from the days before political parties, when votes and representation were based on geography. You know, my MP represents my community in Parliament. That's all well and good - MPs should still represent distinct geographic areas, that's why I like MMP - but it's far from enough. When I vote for Mike Hansen or whoever, I'm not really voting for him, I'm voting for the NDP. Kamloops should still have a representative, and I should get to vote for who that is, but I should have my vote for "The New Democratic Party" count for something. That's the beauty of MMP. Read up on that model I linked to in a thread a while back, it's very interesting, elegant, and above all, democratic. Under our system, representation is still based on geography, but quite often votes are not. Quite often votes are based on ideology, as they should be - you have a certain idea about how things should be done, so you vote for the party that best approximates that. That is modern representative democracy, and we do not have it. I'm pretty baked. 'Night.

You mean give away their support unconditionally? Sorry, that's not how minority governments work. The governing party in a minority has to earn support from the other parties, whether it's the Conservatives or the NDP. If the NDP had just propped up the Liberals they would have been committing political suicide, you know that. People are happy with what you've been calling the "NDP budget," because the NDP held the Liberals to account and gave people something closer to the platform they voted for when they voted Liberal - remember, if you have to simplify the budget in terms of left to right, the agreement with the NDP just swung a budget that was already leaning way to the right (back when the Liberals were leaning towards working with the Conservatives, remember?) slightly back towards the centre because the Cons didn't want to play anymore. Minority government, even moreso than coalition government, is about compromise. There's nothing wrong with that - in a world where different people have different ideas about how to go about doing things, compromise is the essence of democracy. I'm waiting for you and every other clown to bring out the editorials condemning MMP for the "bad" election results in New Zealand and Germany. ;)

You can say that the NDP were "pushing the Liberals around," but they're not obligated to give confidence to the Liberals. They did exactly what they should have done, they cooperated with the Liberals to reach an agreement that, by definition, represented a majority of voters. I get it, I just don't see what that has to do with PR. PR is about democracy, not about leaning left or right.

An internal NDP document regarding the debate within the BC NDP on the party's affiliation with the labour movement is now available online. http://www.publiceyeonline.com/archives/000862.html#more Here is the dissenting view, which I agree with:

Under PR, the Conservatives and Bloc would have had fewer seats but the New Democrats would have had many more, and the Greens would have a few. I think the SSM bill would definitely have passed had we conducted the 2004 election using MMP. That also would have allowed for a stable Liberal/NDP majority coalition government and we wouldn't have had (some of) this instability. You might not like that idea, but I do. I believe coalition governments can be just as stable as single-party majorities, I think Britain's (another country with our electoral system) limited experience with coalition governments proves they can work just fine if all parties are committed (which they would have to be under PR), and certainly the experiences of other countries with regular coalition governments prove this. Also, I believe coalition governments are inherently more accountable. Finally, I don't understand what Europe's supposed "socialism" has to do with which electoral system is more democratic.

We're still waiting for you to demonstrate how bills don't move at a fast enough pace in PR systems.

It's not a strike, it's a lockout.

I completely disagree, I think there's a much larger progressive movement, in part associated with the Green movement, and things like the PR movement are a part of it too. The PR movement has reached the stage where governments basically can't ignore it, that's why there's all this electoral reform in Canada. Matt, come back and talk about how much slower PR systems are once you've studied them, thanks.

That article was talking about BC referendums too. No, they don't usually need a supermajority. Name one that has in the past. I don't really get what the conservative movement has to do with anything.

Yeah. Regarding Matt's other bullshit statements about the 60% threshold having always been the standard, here's Fair Vote Canada's statement on this announcement:

Ah, but you made the assertion. You claimed that nothing gets done in countries that use PR, so you have to substantiate that claim. Go on, tell us how nothing ever gets done in, for example, Norway, which is repeatedly described as the best country in the world to live in by the UN and the Human Development Index and is ranked 9th in the world in terms of economic competitiveness. And has zero debt.

Matt, can you please prove that nothing gets done in Ireland, Germany, New Zealand, or Norway?

Odd then that you support a voting system that allowed, in 1996, 36% of the votes to carry 100% of the power.

I wouldn't say "life-changing," but I don't think choices should be biased towards the status quo.

That's not a province-wide referendum. Name one of those. We didn't need 60% for the province-wide referendum on the Charlottetown accord. 60% is an absurd standard.

I don't see how that's common practice. Name another referendum the 60% quota was used for.

So give them that option too, obviously. Give us two referendums, one on whether we want to change to a proportional system or not, and then if that passes, give us the choice between STV or MMP. Or else give us the choice of all three options, but for crap's sake don't ignore the fact that pre-assembly report MMP was the clear preference.

Also, the USSR didn't "switch sides," Hitler doubled crossed Stalin and invaded. And made some serious strategic blunders along the way. It's the part about Vietnam that contains the most truth, but there are some errors; I wouldn't say that Vietnam "wanted to be communist." Rather, there were many popular resistance groups, mostly socialist, that had the support of the overwhelming majority of the population in both the north and south (internal pentagon documents concede this fact, too), and due to the savage colonial war the French fought there before the US got involved, Ho Chi Minh's bunch were the ones left in the best position to take power in the north.

Voters ought to have a choice as to what system to go for. There was a lot of talk about democracy and how the citizens' assembly having so much authority was such a great thing, but that just isn't democracy. It might have given real power to average British Columbians, but it's not democratic. I see no reason why we couldn't choose between multiple systems. That's what they did in New Zealand. Let us choose which model we want to switch to. I'll bet dollars to donuts that we end up switching to it within 20 years anyway (PEI will almost certainly do it later this year, with Quebec soon to follow and the federal government already having basically made up its mind to move in that direction).

http://www.gov.bc.ca/bvprd/bc/home.do?acti...NAV_ID_province

Yeah, that was basically a load of crap.