Canadians

BillyBishop · Post by **BillyBishop** » Thu May 05, 2011 12:18 am

Technically it is, but realisitcally it's only taken when you vote and you choose where it goes by voting.

Having said that, let's look at the Conservative which in 2009 received approximately 47 million dollars in subsidies, only roughly 10 million dollars was the per-vote subsidy the rest is a variety of other subsidies where I can see why people complain. If you look at the article the Green candidate wrote you'll see the illustration of how the more money you have for a campaign to spend the more you get back- and *that*, is from the general revenue.

Note that the Conservatives only want to remove the per-vote subsidy, they want to keep the other 37 million dollars they get from general revenue. Hypocritical at least, obfuscating for certain, dishonest- probably.

Grimmwolf_GB · Post by **Grimmwolf_GB** » Thu May 05, 2011 10:50 am

It is very interesting to read about canadian politics. One hardly ever reads about them in german newspapers, there wasn't even a mention of elections. So continue please.

BillyBishop · Post by **BillyBishop** » Thu May 05, 2011 3:14 pm

Grimmwolf_GB wrote:QUOTE (Grimmwolf_GB @ May 5 2011, 11:50 AM) It is very interesting to read about canadian politics. One hardly ever reads about them in german newspapers, there wasn't even a mention of elections. So continue please.

Well items of note from the 2011 General Election;

RECOUNT IN PROGESS Jay Aspin (CON) - Nipissing--Timiskaming, ON - won by 14 votes (0.03% margin); Anthony Rota (LIB) finished second.

RECOUNT IN PROGESS Ted Opitz (CON) - Etobicoke Centre, ON - won by 25 votes (0.05% margin); Boris Wrzesnewskyj (LIB) finished second.

RECOUNT IN PROGESS François Lapointe (NDP) - Montmagny--L'Islet--Kamouraska--Rivière-du-Loup, QC - won by 5 votes (0.01% margin) after the validated count reversed the election night win by 100 votes of his opponent Bernard Généreux (CON).,

RECOUNT IN PROGESS Kevin Lamoureux (LIB) - Winnipeg North, MB - won by 45 votes (0.18%); Rebecca Blaikie (NDP) finished second.

First Green (elected) Memeber of Parliament. There was a few years ago a Liberal that was kicked out of his caucas for reasons under a variety of election misconducts, he was cleared eventually but wasn't let back into the caucas, he joined the Green party and became the first (unelected)- however an election was called before he ever took his seat as a Green.

The Liberals had their worst proportional vote and seat total ever, and for the first time are relegated to third place. People are talking can they survive, and the answer is of course. The real question is, can they recover enough to place 2nd in the next election, and that answer is murky though they might be able to. Actually the ideal thing (for most "lol's") would be a New Democract minority governement being proped up by the embarassed Liberals while the Conservatives foam at the mouth and their eyes roll back in their heads.

The Conservatives for the first time are a national party, having elected members in all provinces and have their first majority government. Primarily they benefited from vote spliting, though did see a marginal increase in the popular vote.

Vote splitting; where two (or more) other parties take enough votes to prevent one of them winning and allowing another party to win the seat expressly against the wishes from the "majority" (more or less) of voters- vote spliting is a problem with the archaic First Past The Post (FPTP) electoral system, and a different situation, say Single Transferable Vote (STV) where you can vote for more than one candidate and rank them 1st, 2nd, and so on, vote spliting is effectively elminated and instead of that the general will of the people is taken into account if their first choice typically isn't winning (actually losing candidates are eliminated and their vote is transfered to their second and then third and so on until someone has a 'majority')).

The New Democracts, first time as Offical Opposition, incrased their vote total to 4.5 million, increased their seat counts frrom a previous high of 43 to 102. There are talks of unitiing the left and have the Liberals join in with the NDs to form a new party, that won't happen, both parties are sufficiently different that though there is reason for it to eliminate vote spliting between two "left wing" parties against the Conservative "right wing", the Liberals are not left wing and will be moving more to the centre (where they've traditionally been). To any Americans reading, all our parties including the Conservatives are rabid socialists- danger! Don't move here if you think a majority Conservative government will be like a Republican right wing government, danger!

The Bloc Quebecois seats were reduced by almost 92%. While almost 20% Quebecois voted BQ, only 5% of Quebec's MPs are BQ. Both the Conservatives and Liberals received significantly fewer votes than the BQ but won more seats in Quebec, 6 and 7 respectively.

The Conservatives increased their share of the Ontario vote by 5% and saw their share of the seats grow by 20%.

The NDs increased their share of the vote in Manitoba, but their number of seats was cut in half.

The NDs had almost a third of the votes in Saskatchewan without winning a single seat.

Next election 34 more ridings are added (every decennial census the population is calculated to determine riding allocation), around 10% more, reducing the impact of the Quebec vote (and others) which has a minimum of 75 seats mandated by law*. Actually all provinces have a minimum number of seats (for a variety of reasons), first they can never have less parliamentary seats than they have senatorial seats (this is the senatorial clause), second they can never have less seats than they had in the 33rd Parliament (in 1976, this is the grandfather clause), and third they can never lose seats based on a dropping population unless they had two consective population drops equaling 5% in the last two decennial censuses (the one-twentieth rule), and fourth if they did have a drop of seats on the basis of the one-twentieth rule then they can not in a single riding adjustment lose more than 15% of their parliamentary seats (the 15% clause).

*Some provinces have a further minimum number of seats, such as Quebec, from when they entered Confederation, however, it's moot, as the other minimums are higher, Quebec for example is constitutionally required to have at least 65 seats, though they are also required to have at least 75 from the grandfather clause. Other provinces have similar situations.

How are ridings added you may ask, what's the forumla?

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MrChaos · Post by **MrChaos** » Thu May 05, 2011 9:10 pm

Girly Ive already told you I'd vote for you if you ran for local office. Its a good thing to keep the pols all stirred up

. Not President, Emperor, Grand Poobah of Canada (<--- joke)

It was a rallying cry for you to get involved and not let money stop you from making your opinions matter vs stfu

Honest

( You know Grimmie most people who aren't Canadian probably have the same knowledge... I got a general feel for things related to my southern neighbors politics, know who the grand poobah is andthe bigger social issues like the rise and fall of the francophone stuff but the gory details

)

Makida · Post by **Makida** » Thu May 05, 2011 9:44 pm

Thank you for the encouragement.

Vote girly for the Toronto Sovereigntist Bloc in 2015!

BillyBishop · Post by **BillyBishop** » Fri May 06, 2011 1:25 am

Single Transferable Vote explanation;

(aka, can has democatzy?)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiHuiDD_oTk...eature=youtu.be

LANS · Post by **LANS** » Fri May 06, 2011 1:27 pm

Roy, our system would work better with alternative vote than STV. STV is similar to AV, but designed for elections where multiple people are elected in each riding. AV is the single representative form.

BillyBishop · Post by **BillyBishop** » Fri May 06, 2011 2:45 pm

Umm what lol?

STV is a Single Transferable Vote, for electing a single candidate.

(usually)

You're thinking MMP, Mixed Member Plurality (or any of many other things I guess).

Which is not to say that MMP is bad, if it used a STV system for candidates (get it?).

See, the number of candidate has pretty much nothing to do with how they're elected.

Quebec is currently debating MMP called (and yes, they can have many different names for the 'same system' that either has minor differences or for localized purposes) compensatory mixed member voting system système mixte avec compensation or SMAC.

I really hope Quebec does it, because all voters need a SMAC-down.

EDIT;

I thought to add the BC-STV system which is a MMP using STV.

QUOTE BC-STV is a proposed voting system recommended by the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform for use in British Columbia, and belongs to the Single Transferable Vote family of voting systems. BC-STV was supported by a majority (57.7%[1]) of the voters in a referendum held in 2005 but the government had legislated that it would not be bound by any vote lower than 60% in favour.

Unlike the fully single-member system in place since 1988, STV groups all legislative seats regionally into multiple-member electoral districts. This is done so that seats in the region can be allocated in a way that reflects the distribution of votes among the electorate. For example, Richmond and Delta's five existing constituencies would be combined into one electoral district which would produce five winners, proportional to the votes in the multi-member district. It is very unlikely that all would be from the same party, in contrast to the situation in the 1996 election, when all five of these seats were won by the same political party.[/quote]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BC-STV
http://www.citizensassembly.bc.ca/public
http://www.citizensassembly.bc.ca/resource...TV-counting.pdf

Video expalaining it; http://www.citizensassembly.bc.ca/flash/bc-stv-full

Video explaining SMP (Single Member Plurality aka FPTP (First Past The Post)); http://www.citizensassembly.bc.ca/flash/fptp-full

LANS · Post by **LANS** » Fri May 06, 2011 3:08 pm

Thanks Roy. Guess I was just confused on all the different names for similar systems of voting.

BillyBishop · Post by **BillyBishop** » Fri May 06, 2011 3:11 pm

No worries, it's very common situation.

It's why electoral reform is so hard to get enacted, these things are not so simple as placing an X somewhere.

BC had the right of it in how to do it, a STV system where people could mark an X like before, or rank (some or all) candidates in order of preference, it seems that would be the simplest for people to understand (and this has nothing to do with how many candidates would be elected, I'm just talking about how they wanted people to do it on the ballots).