this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
31 points (94.3% liked)
CanadaPolitics
2840 readers
5 users here now
Placeholder for any r/CanadaPolitics refugees
Rules
- 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 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Quite right.
But what I'm excited about is a major party actually saying that the govt can actually solve the housing crisis, a reference to when the govt did this in the past, and describes a practical way of doing it.
If we won't reward a party that actually comes up with a plan because we don't trust them, when is any party going to actually do it?
And don't forget, Trudeau actually did do some of the things he promised---like legalizing cannabis. And that was something that I heard nothing but hand-wringing about from other politicians my entire life!
You make fair points about housing and cannabis legalization. The Liberals do occasionally follow through on promises, especially when they align with both political opportunity and public pressure.
However, electoral reform is more fundamental than any single policy area. When Liberals promised that 2015 would be "the last election under first-past-the-post", they weren't just offering another policy - they were promising to fix the democratic foundation upon which all other policies rest. According to the opposition, Trudeau repeated this commitment to "make every vote count" more than 1,800 times, clearly understanding how much it resonated with voters.
The Electoral Reform Committee recommended proportional representation after extensive consultation, but Trudeau abandoned it when he couldn't get his preferred system. More recently, 68.6% of Liberal MPs voted against even creating a Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform.
This matters because in a proper democracy, citizens are entitled to meaningful representation. A housing program (however needed) can be implemented and cancelled with each election cycle under our current system - what experts call policy lurch. But proportional representation would fundamentally reshape how all policies are developed, ensuring they better reflect what Canadians actually vote for.
I'm not saying we should dismiss other policies - housing is critically important. But it's worth noting that the same party repeatedly promising electoral reform for over a century (since Mackenzie King in 1919) while never delivering it suggests a deeply entrenched pattern that voters should question.
Electoral reform is not the most pressing issue, it is your most pressing issue, which is very different.
And as we've discussed, given how well PR is going in our G7 peers like Germany and Italy, goodness gracious I'm glad we dodged that bullet.
Your continued cherry-picking of specific countries while ignoring the fundamental issue of democratic representation is telling.
First, electoral reform isn't just "my" pressing issue - 76% of Canadians support electoral reform. This overwhelming support exists because millions of citizens recognize their votes are systematically discarded under our current system.
As for Germany and Italy, you're mischaracterizing how PR functions in these countries. In Germany, the AfD has representation proportional to their actual support, while coalition dynamics have successfully kept them from power. Their support would exist under any electoral system - PR simply makes it visible rather than hidden within a mainstream party.
Meanwhile, PR countries like New Zealand, the Nordic nations, and many others consistently outperform FPTP countries on measures of economic equality, social welfare, and policy stability. Your selective examples ignore this broader evidence.
The core issue remains: in Ontario's last election, the PCs formed a "majority" government with just 43% of the vote. Under FPTP, 57% of voters who explicitly rejected them have no meaningful representation. How is this democratic?
What you call "dodging a bullet" is actually dodging democracy itself. A system where every vote contributes meaningfully to representation isn't a radical idea - it's a fundamental democratic principle. When you oppose this principle, what you're really saying is that some citizens deserve representation while others don't, based solely on where they live or who they support.
The mathematical reality is undeniable: PR produces governments that more accurately reflect how people actually vote. This isn't a minor technical detail - it's the entire purpose of representative democracy.
For this election, electoral reform isn't making it into the top 5 or 10 in any poll I've seen, feel free to share something contrary! (It's sort of like climate, many people are in favour of climate legislation but it's not top of mind for this election.)
We've already gone over the merits of PR and I've politely shown you why PR doesn't seem to be a great choice. (For anyone interested, I've given this person a boatload of time to hear these same tired points over and over again. https://lemmy.ca/post/40556342/15124577)
tl;dr: Despite cries of cherrypicking (which seems absurd given that our G7 peers are probably the best comparisons, though you could also look at Austria, Netherlands, Poland etc to see PR going so poorly that people are giving up and turning the extreme right. Basically, it comes down to what you think Democracy is for? If it's to produce good governments that benefit their people, I think our system seems to be doing a better job than PR has recently (Personally, I think polarization, less informed populaces and the emergence of a bunch of serious problems in rapid succession have made a system based on coalitions much more difficult) whereas this person seems to believe the only thing that matters is getting the most accurate reflection of how people vote (though, oddly, hates some forms of PR like Israel's even if they are more representative of how people vote. I guess it's vote representation is all that matters until the examples don't look good.)
Edit: OP also seems to have responded then locked the thread to prevent a response. For anyone who manages to get through the pages of silliness.