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Fair Vote Canada

My brother sent me this in an email and I thought it was pretty interesting.

Quote:

Once again, Canada’s antiquated first-past-the-post system wasted millions of votes, distorted results, severely punished large blocks of voters, exaggerated regional differences, created an unrepresentative Parliament, and may possibly have even given us the wrong government.

The chief victims of the January 23 federal election were:

Western Liberals: In the prairie provinces, Conservatives got three times as many votes as Liberals did, but won nearly ten times as many seats. In Alberta, the Conservative Party won 100% of the seats with 65% of the votes. The 500,000 Albertans who voted otherwise elected no one.

Urban Conservatives: The 400,000-plus Conservative voters in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver should have been able to elect about nine MPs, but instead elected no one. The three cities together will not have a single MP in the governing caucus, let alone the cabinet.

New Democrats: The NDP attracted a million more votes than the Bloc, but the voting system gave the Bloc 51 seats, the NDP 29. Nearly 18% of Canadians voted NDP, but the party won less than 10% of the seats and does not hold the balance of power, unlike the Liberals and the Bloc.

Green Party: More than 650,000 Green Party voters across the country elected no one, while 475,000 Liberal voters in Atlantic Canada elected 20 MPs.

Full story can be found here:
http://www.fairvotecanada.org/fvc.php/

Now I am not huge into politics but that doesn't sound too much like democracy to me. Maybe one of you politics buffs such as Charlatan could let me know what he thinks.

It's how our ridings are set up. Instead of electing on popular vote. It's popular vote in the ridings. Though the liberals in AB, Tories in urban areas and the NDP collectively throughout the country got more popular vote, they failed to get the popular vote in that riding.

Personally, having been through an american election, I find it a far better system though not much better. It's basically representation by riding by popular vote. Somehow that works I suppose.

That's exactly what I brought up after the election a few years ago. It's just no fuckin point, the whole concept of "First past post" concept is stupid.

There is a lot to be said for proportional voting... Here is a site that explores a couple of methods this could be achieved:

http://democraticspace.com/blog/electoral-reform/

I beleive Yakk suggested his own method in another thread. It tried to get reid of the concept of electing candidates who are not beholden to their riding but rather to their party.