ReeferMadness

I suspect this is intended to differentiate between applied science and pure science. Conservatives were accused (with reason as I understand) of making science a captive of industry.

With all systems, the devil is in the details. With MMP, the details are how many top-up seats do you have and are they national, provincial or regional? The more top-up seats you have, the more proportional you can make the results and the larger the local ridings need to be. If you have a single, national list of top-up seats, who exactly do these representatives represent? A common complaint with MMP is that you have two classes of MP and the top-up MP's can become perceived as party hacks. I'm not anti-MMP but I don't believe that it is a "far better choice" That depends on the Green candidates ability to capture second choice votes. When you claim that STV seriously sacrifices proportionality, do you have a citation? It's true that STV doesn't force proportionality the way MMP does but my reading indicates that, providing you have a sufficient average magnitude, in practise it normally provides a high overall level of proportionality. And many people find it attractive that it does it in a way that forces voters to vote for real people, not a party. I've never seen a PR proposal that would add seats overall. Usually, it's a matter of rearranging existing ridings. If you're prepared to add seats, you could get better proportionality from STV as well.

In our system of government, we don't choose a PM, we choose representatives. The party chose him as a leader. A government can't be just one person, as we should have learned by now from our bitter experience with Harper and the clones (that would be a good name for his band). I'm more concerned with how he's going to lead than how big his IQ is. If that's not good enough for you, you'll need to wallow in you bitterness, at least until he does something wrong that you can use to justify them.

Look, buddy. You don't know me or anything about my intelligence. I'm smart enough not enough to jump to conclusions about people before they've had a chance to prove themselves - you should give it a try.

It's not really a different electoral system per se. You can have differing numbers of members in STV ridings (look up the BC STV example). If you get down to just one member in a riding, you get IRV. In terms of equal representation for each vote, we don't have that today. Rural ridings and ridings in certain provinces have much fewer people in them than large city constituencies, meaning that the people in those cities cast votes that count less. The goal of representative democracy should be that citizens feel represented. There is no point in getting hung up on a mythical notion of vote equality. There's no perfect electoral system - all are a tradeoff of proportionality, local representation and degree of party influence. By having single member seats in the north, you sacrifice a little proportionality overall but not that much. Unless you add seats, you're going to have issues with MMP as well. The regions in the regional top-up seats are going to be enormous.

I don't think he did - though with all his bitterness on the issue, it's kind of hard to tell. I don't want one person making all the decisions - that's what we just had and that's not leadership.

You're not wrong but you are overstating things. A lot of PC voters will chose NDP or something else second, same with NDP voters. And if Canadians care enough to get informed and involved in this issue, Trudeau will think twice. Go get involved with Fair Vote Canada.

So. we just had a guy who thought he was smarter than everyone around him. The result was that he was a micro-manager, overriding the advice of his lawyer in the Duffy affair. He treated everyone who disagreed with him as an enemy. Is that what you want? I don't think you understand the basic concepts of leadership. It's not about being the smartest person in the room. It's about recognizing and leveraging the smart people that work for you. You seem a little bitter about the results of the election. I'm willing to wait for Trudeau to do something and judge him on results.

More to the point, very intelligent people often make poor leaders. It's more important for leaders to exhibit emotional intelligence and wisdom than what is commonly thought of as intelligence. Harper's style seemed to be about trying to make all the decisions himself and give orders. We've had enough of that style. It's too early to judge what type of a leader Trudeau will be.

I don't agree. Most of Canada's population live in urban areas that will work well with multi-riding seats. The exceptions need to be dealt with as just that. You could lump the 3 territories together and have one massive riding or leave them separate and they would become instant runoff ballot seats.

That's not exactly true. Under STV, you can elect a representative simply by getting the quota in a given multi-member riding. So, in a 7 member riding, you can elect a member with 12.5% (+1) of the voters - even if you get no votes at all in the rest of the country. And under MMP, you can elect a local representative by achieving a plurality of votes, same as FPTP. It's only under a pure party list system (and the party list component of MMP) that you need to hit a popular vote threshold before sending any representatives.

You could respond to that without expressing your deeply held wish that all the Green members immediately relocate to a Vancouver Island rain forest and self-immolate. Or start your own "death to the Greens" thread.

Back to the topic at hand, I think the NDP needs to reflect on what it really wants to be and be it. I think Mulcair is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. I've spent a fair bit of time on rabble.ca and it seems to me that a lot of die-hard NDP supporters are so focused on the NDP getting elected that they haven't noticed the huge rightward drift of most western societies over the past 30 years (obviously, I'm talking economic issues, not social ones). I think that under Mulcair, the NDP thought it could push the Liberals out of existence and occupy both the centre and the left. Mulcair may have been the guy to bridge that span, I don't know. I don't think he's the guy to lead a party that caters to social democrats, much less socialists. It's telling that many Harper supporters on this forum like Mulcair. So, maybe Mulcair was the leader for what the NDP could have been but I don't think he's the leader for what the NDP is today.

Not sure why you hate the Greens so much but you're off topic.

Not sure who would make that argument or how they would justify it.

I'm curious whether you're aware that those emissions are produced by just 1/2 of 1% of the world's population.

Lucky you. We need it here in Canada.

I'm of the view that it would be both cheaper and more humane to simply give drugs to addicts at supervised safe injection sites. Fewer people would be stealing to support habits and you would drain funding from organized crime. Addicts will find their own motivation for turning their lives around (or not) and drug courts or jails won't affect that.

Instant run off voting heavily favors centrist parties that will attract 2nd choice votes. So, in Canada, with the current party setup, the Liberal Party would be in power forever. Smaller parties are punished and banished to the sidelines for eternity. So it's no solution. If you like it, you're welcome to adopt it in Finland.

Seems like an impressive article - but is the author Marc Morano a scientist? Why yes he is. A political scientist. So, you've quote a Republican talking head. Can you find someone with less credibility?

I'm not sure what exactly is defensible about a party getting 38% of the votes, 55% of the seats and 100% of the power. ETA: Certainly Trudeau has promised to be less dictatorial than the disastrous Harper government but how that pans out remains to be seen. And even if he is less dictatorial, it doesn't mean that the next PM will be.

Do you even read your own links? Here's a few excerpts: The results of this law are at best mixed and at worst actually hostile to the women it is supposed to help. Further, Sweden has one of the strongest social safety nets in the world, so vulnerable women might actually get the help they need. How does that apply in Canada where we have much less support for addicts and people with limited marketable skills? I don't consider myself a "card carrying leftist" (or card carrying anything for that matter) so I guess your statement isn't relevant to me. Political interests of diverse groups sometimes intersect. In this case, the interests of moralistic Conservatives who are pretty much opposed to any sex outside of marriage intersect with the interests of a certain line of feminist thinking that regards prostitution as an outgrowth of a patriarchal society. Regardless of the merits of that position, I think that the law is wrong-headed and at very best, it treats the symptoms while completely failing to address the problem. Moreover, this law makes victims out of all prostitutes. While some prostitutes certainly are victims, some choose it as a way to make a lot of money quickly and some profess to enjoy it. If we want to help people, we should be shaping an economic system and providing supports so that women (and men) can make better choices, not using the criminal legal system as a bludgeon to impose behavior.

No. The 2014 law was the result of a moralistic government with a religious authoritarian attitude. The SCC didn't make Harper impose Victorian sexual values on the country.

Do you want a cement plant next door to you? If the answer is no, can I safely assume that you want cement plants and cement plant workers made illegal and run out of the country?

No... but I am starting to see the ridiculousness of debating people who make specious and fatuous analogies. Tell me when you're done wasting my time.