ReeferMadness

Under the current system, that's true but only because we're used to getting false majorities. With STV, the dynamics change and the number of parties elected is likely to increase. I can't tell if you're just cynical of if you actually like having a dysfunctional political system.

Most democracies worldwide operate on the basis of coalitions and coalitions are built throught consensus. It isn't perfect but it's a damned sight better than having one elected dictator heading a party that got 38% of the vote making all the decisions unilaterally. Most of the FPTP troglodytes can't see past the limitations of the system because they won't look outside of England, US and here. Essentially, today we have a dictator every time there is a majority government. It's funny you bring up the restaurant. During the STV debates, a school ran a simulation with kids ordering pizza toppings, once with a FPTP model and once under STV. Overall satisfaction went up markedly with STV. I would like it if my satisfaction with the government went up.

OK, I checked. It turns out that the involvement of NATO and the UN was all window dressing and politics. It also turned out that the invasion of Afghanistan was a violation of international law. The Afghan government offered to turn over bin Laden to a neutral country for trial if the US showed them the evidence. Of course the US has evidence only nobody is allowed to see it. The US had an opportunity to capitalize on international support and firmly establish establish a position of moral authority. Instead, it invaded both the country that had bin Laden and another country that was completely unrelated. In doing so it turned most of the most of the world against it. Nice work, George. Now, Afghanistan is ruled by a bunch of warlords and thugs instead of religious fanatics. And it's in worse shape than ever.

Bill, it sounds like you think that none of the NDP pet bills should ever be enacted and that the portion of the population that supports the NDP (and other small parties) should just sit in the corner and sulk. A good system should ensure that all points of view with substantial support in the populace are represented in government. Certainly that would include the NDP. If the NDP are demanding an excessive price for their cooperation in the coalition, then the other two parties could easily form a coalition themselves. Our problem is that in Canada, we've become used to false majority government. 40% of the popular vote = 60% of the seats = 100% of the power. And with voter participation hovering around 60%, you're really talking about 25% of the voters controlling everything.

Ah, yes. Common wisdom. More common than wise, I'm afraid. Anyone in Canada who feels safer having a heavily armed, aggressive neighbor to the south should do a little bit of thinking on that. And maybe take a history course. Who is it that NORAD is protecting us from? Who is NATO protecting us from? Try for a minute to escape your military indoctrination and think for yourself. Who is going to attack us? Why? How? How many countries have a navy capable of launching an amphibious assault on the other side of an ocean? More of the same crap. The last time the US protected us from anything it was WWII and that was only because the US was attacked. The last time I checked, Canadian soldiers were fighting a Canadian-funded war in a third world country at the behest of the US. Is fighting that war making us safer? Of course not. If anything, it is putting my family at increased risk of a terrorist attack. Is the war making Afghanistan a better place? Not according to the civilians over there who've lost loved ones. Think some intelligent, independent thoughts. Then come back and maybe I'll listen to you.

It's currently used in Ireland, Northern Ireland, Malta and the Western Australian senate. So, if you know anyone from any of those places, you might ask them. If anyone is old enough to remember, it was used in urban areas of Alberta and Manitoba between the 1920's and the 1950's. In those two provinces, politicians eliminated it without holding referenda. Politicians in Ireland have tried to get rid of it twice but the electorate voted to keep it. We'd have it for this election except Gordon Campbell wanted to make it extra hard by imposing the super-majority rules. It isn't perfectly proportional but it does produce much better proportionality than our current first past the post system. The point of STV is to strike a balance between local repesentation and accountability and proportionality. Unlike other forms of PR, in STV you vote only for the individuals, not the parties. Under STV, we could expect coalition governments. This seems to frighten a lot of people but a lot of the worlds democracies work just fine with coalitions. Vote counting under STV is somewhat involved and the no supporters use that as a bogeyman to frighten people away. It isn't that complicated and in the complexity is good in that it makes it more difficult for parties to 'game' the results. The results of 2001 (Liberals got almost all the seats with just over half the votes) and 1996 (NDP, trailing significantly in popular vote, still got majority) would have been much different under STV. First past the post may be fine for horse races but it doesn't produce legislatures that reflect the wishes of the electorate.

Are we back to this again? Go and argue with all of the experts who think STV is a type of PR. Crap - ola. FPTP, as it's currently practised, gives the party all of the power. 40% of the votes = 60% of the seats = 100% of the power. In 1996, the NDP formed a majority government with less than 40% of the popular vote; and significantly less votes than the Liberals received. Under PR, voters are allowed to vote their conscience but the representatives still need to compromise in the government. Most of the democracies in the world use some form of PR. We are one of the backwards countries stuck with an archaic system. STV is not a variant of FPTP. It is an electoral system that supports the best element of FPTP (regional representation) while still producing proportional representation. If the parties represent more than 50% of the population, then they have a mandate to make decisions. Cooperation is central to democracy.

It's easy to tell that people have nothing intelligent to add when they start to make fun of your handle. Thanks for identifying yourself as one of those.

It isn't "my way". Read the links - it's the way it is. If people get confused, it's because other people express opinions on things they know nothing about. Sound familiar? Once again, you don't know what you're talking about. Different PR systems will produce different results and FPTP tends to shut out minority opinion. According to Fair Vote Canada member Wilf Day, (someone who actually spends time studying this stuff), BC-STV would likely produce 1 NDP MLA from North Central BC (Prince George) and one NDP MLA from Northeast BC (Peace River). Currently, the five MLA's are all Liberal. Open your mind and do some research. Coalition governments are common and stable in many parts of the world. The exceptions to this (Israel and Italy) have extremely low thresholds for electing representatives (2%) and very fractured electorates. I've never belonged to a political party, either. If you want a good system for making difficult decisions, I recommend dictatorship. Oh, wait. That's basically what we have today.

Well, let's see: The UK History Learning Site thinks STV is a form of proportional representation. The Scotland Electoral Commission thinks STV is a form of proportional representation. The PR library at the Mount Holyoke College says that STV is a form of proportional representation. The Electoral Reform Society of Scotland thinks STV is a form of proportional representation. A group who call themselves the Conservative Action for Electoral Reform think that STV is a form of proprortional representation. Fair Vote Canada thinks that STV is a form of proportional representation. The Electoral Council of Australia thinks that STV is a form of proportional representation. The electoral experts UVIC Professor of Political Science Dr. Dennis Pilon thinks that STV is a form of proportional representation. I've done a lot of reading on the topic and guess how many opinions I've found that STV is not a form of PR. One - yours. But I'm sure you know best, right? Well, I've just established that you don't know what in the hell you're talking about. Are most Canadians better informed than you? People may say they like the idea of a local representative but they overwhelmingly vote along party lines. Also, I'll bet most people have never tried to get their local rep to do anything for them. On matters of dealing with government agencies, they can probably expect some help but I don't see why it would be better to have someone locally. On matters of policy, good luck. I've personally had my e-mails ignored both provincially and federally. And even if your local rep wants to help, what the responsible minister and prime minister says goes. You're arguing both sides of the issue. If you are saying that people understand that they are electing a representative to go and represent them (not a party and certainly not a prime minister), then it is perfectly legitimate for those representatives to go and form a coalition. The fact is that most Canadians don't understand their political system and the Conservative Party shamelessly exploited their ignorance, calling the coalition a 'coup d'etat'. I had e-mails from Albertan relative proclaiming the untruths that were made up and promulgated by the Conservative Party of Canada. And the worst thing was that Stephen Harper was a total hypocrite because he tried to do the same thing a few years earlier. Of course, our well-informed populace knew all about that too. The system was designed so that the MP's would represent the views of the constituents to the government. The parties have successfully turned the system on its head so that what actually happens is that the MP's are doing the reverse - representing the policies of the government or opposition party back to the constituents. Local representation is a crock. Sez you. Democracy is supposed to ensure that the views of the people are represented in government. Tell people that you can have a virtual dictatorship for 4 years with 40% of the popular vote and see how many really agree. Most people don't pay attention and they are simply unaware of percentages or how much power resides in the PMO. PR won't solve all of the problems but it will put some basic fairness back into a system that has been badly abused. The people who want to retain FPTP are mostly political insiders and others who are doing well from the inequities of the current system.

Let's be clear. There are only conspiracy theories about exactly who is behind the 9/11 attacks. The one that has been accepted and repeated ad infinitum by the MSM is that the attacks were funded and organized by a guy living in camps in a remote area of a backwards country. I've never seen any evidence that the US government claims it has against bin Laden. The FBI most wanted website doesn't even mention the September 11 attacks. Even if the "incriminating" videos weren't fakes (and that's far from clear), they wouldn't be considered proof. When police receive a confession, they interrogate the confessor to ensure s/he knows information that only the perpetrator could have known to ensure the confession is genuine. Does that make 9/11 a false flag attack? Not necessarily. Maybe it was bin Laden and the US just doesn't want to reveal the evidence because it would compromise some source. Or maybe they don't know who was behind it and needed to pin it on somebody to keep the US public pacified. But if it was a false flag operation, it wouldn't be the first one. Who remembers the Gulf of Tonkin incident? Not only did the US destroy Iraq on false pretenses, they destroyed Afghanistan without having to reveal what evidence they had against OBL. Where is the rogue state?

I'm sure there has been a lot of wasted money but the real problem is that we as Canadians have no clear consensus about what we want our military to be. Any discussion about the military that falls short of cheerleading is considered politically incorrect because it means we're not "supporting the troops". So, meaningful debate is stifled and Canadian soldiers keep dying. In recent years, top Canadian generals have developed an activist streak in which they've started to appeal directly to the public. This is a dangerous trend towards politicizing the military. Religion and politics are a bad mix. The mixing of military and politics is toxic. I don't believe that Canadians want or need a gargantuan military. Weaponry is inherently high tech and expensive. We need to focus on those capabilities that are best suited to our geography. Our best defence is our geographical isolation. Trying to build a meaningful defence against our southern neighbors is a pointless exercise. So why all the hoopla about main battle tanks?

A few loud, obnoxious idiots poking fun at our military doesn't bother me. What does bother me is a belief that is widely shared to the point where it has become common wisdom among large segments of the population on both sides of the border. This belief is that the US's oversized, overpriced military has kept us (and Western Europe) safe. This is one of those nuggets of common knowledge that is only believable until you think about it. What is it they think they are protecting us from? Vietnam? Panama? Korea? Iraq? Give me strength. The main basis for our security are oceans between us and the rest of the world. Imagine you live in a town with no police force. The house next door is occupied by a bunch of guys armed to the teeth. These guys resist every effort to get a police force and insist that things have to be done "their way". It seems like they're always fighting with other people in town and it's always the other guy's fault. They've attacked you before but that was a long time ago. Now, they insist they're your buddies. Does living next to these guys make you feel safe? The fact is that the view of America as defender of the free world is isn't shared by most of the people they claim to be protecting. Most of the world sees the U.S. as a rogue nation trying to impose its own views on the world. Americans themselves, of course, are sheltered from those views by a compliant media that has long ago stopped questioning the government or the basic view of the US as a force for good.

Of course. I don't understand how anyone who purports to be for democracy could be against trying to make the number of seats in representative democracy more reflective of popular vote. But the devil's in the details. Trying to implement pure PR with no threshold for percentage of vote can produce a parliament that is unworkable and gives fringe elements disproportional leverage. And let's be clear about what a "fringe is". The Christian Heritage Party received 0.19% of the vote. That is a fringe. The Green Party, OTOH, won received almost a million votes despite all of the people who voted for other parties due to "strategic voting" (there's a euphemism for you). People from most democracies would think it strange that we are disenfranchising 7% of the population because we're stuck in an anachronistic voting system. There are systems that mix regional representation and proportionality. People should check out the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system that is proposed for BC. It is still a representative system but it achieves proportionality through larger, multi-member ridings. It's definitely workable for BC but it probably won't pass because the party insiders are trying to kill it. It would present some problems for Canada due to the size of some of the ridings but I think it could work federally as well.

This discussion consists largely of a collection of stereotypes about proportional representation, mixed up with some wacky ideas. If our education system taught us about democracy and how it works in the rest of the world, maybe we'd get somewhere. First of all, proportional representation isn't a single system. It's a group of quite disparate systems that support the goal of having the percentage of representatives in a legislative assembly be similar to the percentage of popular vote that a given party gets. According to Wikipedia, the main forms of PR are party list systems, additional member systems (including MMP), and Single Transferrable Vote. A number of comments in this forum indicate that some people oppose PR because they think it gives the parties too much power. I think this is true with the party list system (particularly the 'closed list' flavour in which the party chooses which representatives that it sends to government. However, it is interesting that here in BC, where we are voting on Single Transferable Vote (STV), the major parties are not in favour. Presumably, that is because they think that STV will somewhat reduce the power the party wields over individual MLA's. In fact, STV tends to produce more independents than FPTP. Proportional representation is not, as I said, a single system and can really be thought of as a reaction against the many weaknesses of the first past the post (FPTP) system including: lack of proportionality - in BC in 1996, the NDP got 54% of the seats with just 39% of the popular vote. In 2001, the NDP got 2.5% of the seats with 21% of the popular vote. Neither of these results can be justified under any reasonable principles of democracy. Most majorities in the FPTP system are false majorities. vote rigging strategies including gerrymandering and "spoiler" candidates "strategic voting" - Voting for someone you don't want to win to deter someone you want to win even less is ridiculous low voter turnout - A lot of people come to the correct conclusion that their votes don't matter. excessive party control over candidates and the political system "wasted" votes Let's not forget that the FPTP system is a holdover from the days when the only people who could vote were men who had income-producing property. Most people Canadians probably vote against PR because most of them don't even understand our current electoral system. One of the lessons from the Federal 'coalition crisis' of a couple of months ago is that most Canadians don't have the foggiest idea of how representative democracy is supposed to work. Unless we can convince people to care enough to get a minimally educate themselves, democracy is and will continue to be a farce. Red herring. People who want to scare everyone away from PR always bring up Italy and Israel. Most of the worlds democracies use some form of PR. In fact, PR can lead to more stable governments, even if they are coalitions. The reason is that under FPTP, a swing of a couple of points in popular vote produces a much larger swing in the percentage of seats. Why do you think Harper broke his own fixed election law? He thought he could get a false majority. How do you know why people don't vote. Under FPTP, it is common for 50% or more of the electorate to be represented by someone for who they didn't vote. Personally I get tired of it. And if the Family Heritage Party gets a significant portion of the vote (say 5% or more), the people who voted for them deserve to be represented. That's called democracy . We see so little of it that it's no wonder people don't know what it is. Yes, let's do go back to the old days where big corporations, unions and wealthy individuals bought their politicians outright. And if that "fringe" few million Canadians who don't feel represented by the "goofy 3" main parties, well, too bad!

The labour isn't necessarily required if appropriate technology is employed. In this instance, the Chinese are having to bid down the cost of their labour to stay employed.

Was that a trick question? Or do I have to be in your world to understand what you mean?

Not in Edmonton. It was the worst deal in memory, maybe the worst deal ever. The media whores refused to deal with it honestly, claiming that Edmonton would be better off for getting young talent (anyone remember Martin Gelinas?) and draft picks. They claimed it was 'good for hockey'. It's funny. I haven't heard for calls to break up other powerful teams because it's 'good for hockey'. The truth is that it was the undeniable sign that there was a 'two tier' hockey league. Big market teams could afford the best players and small market teams would have to be content to try to put together teams that made the playoffs often enough that the fans wouldn't give up in disgust. But the truth was inconvenient so the media and the sheep who who listened to them went around saying 'it's good for the game'.

That'll teach him to sell Gretzky. This goof took one of the greatest teams in NHL history and sold it for spare parts. It seems like the U.S. is dealing with all of our crooks (i.e. Conrad Black too).

They've recognized that the emperor has no clothes but they have yet to discover the man behind the curtain. When Orwell wrote 1984, he understood that fear of a common enemy is a powerful means of controlling the population. Since then, we've had the cold war, the war on drugs, and the war on terror. I predict it won't be long until there is some kind of 'war' with China over control of Eurasia. It won't be a large scale shooting war of course because the wrong type of people could get hurt. How long will it be until people start to get wise to manufactured problems?

Thanks! Nobody ever agrees with me on this forum. What's really tragic is the economic notion of efficiency. Take a an efficient, automated plant that employs, say, 10 workers at $200 per day. Throw away all the sophisticated machinery and move the plant to China. Now you employ 100 workers at 6$ per day. You can ship the raw materials there and the finished goods back (burning greenhouse gases both ways) and still produce the goods cheaper. We're putting third world workers in a position where they have no choice but to impede the development of labour saving technology because they are desperate for the income. Economists call this efficiency which is why I respect only real scientists.

Read The UN's approach to drug prohibition is a failure.

The 'conventional wisdom' view on this topic is that welfare recipients are dependents of the state and drains on society. Some of them (like the disabled) are tolerated but the 'able-bodied' are generally treated in ways ranging from condescension to open hostility. Attitudes towards the way that welfare rules are applied vary but virtually everyone agrees that that we'd all be better off if welfare recipients had jobs. I remember hitting bottom (financially) in a recession years ago. I came very close to being out on the street in Edmonton in January. As a true Albertan, at the time, I'd have cheerfully frozen on Jasper Avenue before I'd ever darkened the doorway of a welfare office. To survive, I took a job phone soliciting, helping some slimy company rip off little old ladies. As is often the case, the conventional wisdom is all screwed up. It's not listed on the form, but a requirement of welfare is that you trade in your self-respect and self-esteem for a pittance. We take far more away from welfare recipients than we give them. We all are co-dependents on society for our lifestyles. If you don't believe me, relocate to a deserted planet and see if you can maintain your standard of living. Money is an abstraction and financial independence is not in any sense real independence. In fact, the wealthy are much more dependent on society than the desperately poor. It may be true that welfare recipients don't contribute a lot but it's also true that there are entire professions whose contribution is dubious, if not entirely negative. I'm talking about lawyers, salespeople, advertisers, political lobbyists, and investment bankers. And that's just off the top of my head. The difference between the amount of work required to produce necessary goods/services for us to have a decent lifestyle and the amount of work actually performed is huge. And growing. We should all be working less and enjoying productivity gains that technology has brought. Instead we're working longer and wondering why. Maybe the real reason that we're so down on welfare recipients is that we envy their freedom.

Eyeball, that's just a ridiculous statement. While there is somewhat of a conflict of interest in the government selling addictive substances, for the most part they act quite responsibly. When the government sells liquor, they don't put stores on every street corner, they don't advertise, they don't upsell when you go into the store. They don't deliberately get people addicted and they don't extend credit and break legs when you don't pay. Governments are there to represent the people and while there definitely are issues in terms of how well democracy is instituted (see the STV debate), overall they do a pretty good job.

In the posts I've read, you haven't suggested anything - just some vague 'get tough' nonsense. I have faith that most of the time, most of the people will do what's in their best interest. When things are legal and business is conducted fairly, it's normally not in people's best interests to start shooting at each other. If the proportion of people who commit violent acts is quite low, the police and courts can deal with them. Prohibition sets up the conditions in which the proportion of people who commit violent acts rises. As well, it sets up an environment that erodes people's respect for the law. Look. I am not in favour of people abusing drugs. I know that there are lots of people who have been killed or had their lives ruined by drugs. But the overwhelming majority of them took the drugs willingly. Read the next sentence slowly, several times. You - can - NOT - save - people - from - them - selves. The best you can do is help them. Our system of criminal law (not justice) is a blunt instrument and I don't think there are many who come out of it better people than when they went in. People don't have problems because they take drugs. They take drugs because they have problems. Admittedly, the drugs make things worse most of the time but I think you're confusing cause and effect. If you really want to help people, support research into what motivates them to do stupid things like abuse drugs. If you're one of those people who just want to control what others do, you're wasting your time and mine.