this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
168 points (96.7% liked)

Canada

8550 readers
2431 users here now

What's going on Canada?

Related Communities

🍁 Meta

🗺️ Provinces / Territories

🏙️ Cities / Local Communities

Sorted alphabetically by city name.

🏒 SportsHockey

Football (NFL): incomplete

Football (CFL): incomplete

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer

💻 Schools / Universities

Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.

💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales

🗣️ Politics

🍁 Social / Culture

Rules

  1. Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
otter@lemmy.ca
mp3@lemmy.ca
168
What’s more chilling than Trump’s presidency? The fact that we use the same system that just handed him total control... If we want to protect democracy in Canada, we need proportional representation. (bsky.app)
submitted 3 days ago by AlolanVulpix@lemmy.ca to c/canada@lemmy.ca
14 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/40140681

Fair Vote Canada on Bluesky

What’s more chilling than Trump’s presidency? The fact that we use the same system that just handed him total control.

First-past-the-post fuels a hyper-partisan two-party system.

If we want to protect democracy in Canada, we need proportional representation.

#cdnpoli

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] AlolanVulpix@lemmy.ca 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Good idea but also a gross oversimplification.

In a microblogging platform, there's only so much content you can write. And even Lemmy's post titles are limited to 200 characters.

You can’t compare a parliamentary democracy with a presidential republic whatever the voting system.

Of course the systems are different, however, the core of both Canada’s and the US’s electoral system is winner-take-all (e.g, FPTP).

Read more about how Canada is trending towards a two party system.

[–] shirro@aussie.zone 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

It is a great idea. Strike while the iron is hot.

I didn't realize Canada's electoral system was so outdated. I assumed you would have a popularly elected upper house and if not proportional at least instant runoff/rcv/preferential for your lower house.

We didn't want to give up local representation in Australia so we stuck with single member electorates but preferential voting. It is fairer to voters than FPTP but still results in a two party lower house that doesn't reflect the actual percentages of votes cast for parties so the senate is more powerful that UK or Canada to offset. We could do a lot better. NZ follows a more German model that compensates popular parties that didn't win seats. Not sure how I feel about that. The Greens would end up with 13% of lower house seats here instead of approximately 0 but chances are we could see parties like our own One Nation or the German AfD grow in influence as well. Tasmania has had proportional voting for their state lower house for over a century as does our capital territory.

Edit: the web site is very informative and and the fact checker addresses my extremist party fear well.

[–] Sunshine@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 days ago

We didn’t want to give up local representation in Australia so we stuck with single member electorates but preferential voting.

Single transferable Vote and Mixed-Member Proportional keeps the local representation. It's only with the Party-lists that do away with it.

[–] AlolanVulpix@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

We didn’t want to give up local representation in Australia

Did you know there's actually a way to maintain full local representation, while still meeting the criteria of proportional representation?

It's called single transferable vote (STV).

[–] shirro@aussie.zone 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

That is how Tasmania has worked for over a century. They call it Hare-Clarke but it is a form of STV. They also use it in the Australian Capital Territory.

Mixed member might be more suitable nationally here. I have mixed feelings about the example in NZ. Anything is better than FPTP which should only be in history books. Even ranked choice/preferential with what you already have is an incremental improvement if that is all you can get.