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No, I'm suggesting that if a remedy to a Charter violation only fixes it for some of the affected citizens, I don't think you'll get much traction with it.
Suppose I'm an employer, and one of my policies disadvantages female staff. How far do you think I'd get proposing a remedy that fixed things for half of them?
Personally, I'd like to see us try some flavour of PR. But if it doesn't actually fix the problems of FPTP for everyone, I still retain my doubt that the SCoC is going to order Elections Canada to switch to it. If anything, mounting a Charter challenge to FPTP would probably open the door for exactly the same challege aimed at MMP or STV, unless they can be made into a remedy for all voters. The section 15 you quoted above is a double edged sword.
That is why our elected representatives need to study the issue carefully and make the decision. After all that is what we elect them to do and they are the only people with the constitutional authority to make the change. Unless you want to put the whole parliamentary system we operate up for discussion then the use of referendums is not even on the table. Except for a few rigged experiments by right wing governments they are no more a part of our electoral system than Presidential elections.
I would like to see a debate on more participatory democracy but I will settle for a tinkering with the electoral system by our MP's. If we get a stable minority parliament that is functioning there should be no problem for all our representatives of the people to get up to speed on the ideas and views of Canadians and to then make a reasoned decision.
Why not just roll-back women's suffrage while we're hot? And every acre of land should have one vote. And we could fit one another up for blasphemy and burn the neighbors barn down once in a while to liven things up. It could be rilly fun.
It's pretty straightforward as far as I can tell. "Every individual is equal before and under the law"... Our absurd voting system is part of the law of the land. And FPTP contradicts section 15. So do we scrub section 15 or FPTP? I know which one I'd choose. It's the democracy gap-canyon.
The Charter does it balancing in Section 1. So while FPTP might be a breach of s.15 the SCC would almost certainly rule it to be justified under Section 1. Just like our pot laws that the SCC said were a breach of the Charter but justified under Section 1.
Agreed. And then take a look at the model designed and recommended by the Law Commission of Canada in 2004, which has never been rejected.
Not something one says in public on the eve of a vote. However, Quebec has been debating PR for years -- decades, even -- and the Charest government even introduced a draft bill. It did not provide for a referendum. They don't use referenda for such matters. In the 2003 election all three parties supported PR, so the only problem was designing the model, which they got bogged down on.
The current NDP platform does not call for a referendum. No country except New Zealand has used a referendum to change to PR. France has changed back and forth to and from PR four times with no referendum. BC, Alberta and Manitoba changed their voting systems twice with no referenda.
As to the 60% threshold, New Brunswick premier Bernard Lord decided to hold a referendum on PR (which he favoured) with a 50% threshold, which he called the normal way to make decisions in a democracy.
Correct. ;)
There's not much we can do here except wait. The Charter case is now at the Quebec Court of Appeal level, awaiting their judgment, and then it will no doubt proceed to the Supreme Court.
Three answers:
1. The referendum was botched by the whole timetable starting a year later than the Democratic Renewal Secretariat had planned, leaving not enough time for deliberation and little time for public education, and then Elections Ontario was told to do no public education on the question; the government even refused to send out the Citizens' Assembly's Report we were voting on. Polls showed those who understood the question voted for it.
2. Regardless, the OCA model was rushed and failed to provide enough voter choice; closed province-wide lists were a very hard sell. The Law Commission's regional-open-list MMP would have been much more acceptable.
3. The provinces don't need PR as badly as the federal level does. The exaggerated regional differences (no Liberals in Alberta, no Conservatives in Montreal or Toronto, etc.) cry out for PR more than any provincial need.
Fair Vote Canada takes no position on mandatory voting. It opposes the preferential ballot for parliamentary elections (it's a good way to elect a mayor or a president.)
And that's exactly where we're at, the justifying stage of things. If our's is a free and democratic society, then it's debateable and nothing written in stone. They used to use stones for coronation of kings who were once absolute dictators. Not anymore. In the city of York the law says it's legal to murder a Scotsman within the ancient city walls, but only if he is carrying a bow and arrow. I don't think anyone has tested that law in modern times though.
What would be the point of scrapping FPTP (because it cannot satisfy section 15) and then replacing it with a different system that also cannot satisfy section 15?
Don't forget that fans of FPTP, assuming there are any, may dislike MMP, but fans of STV hate it. You don't think they'd challenge it?
And of course fans of MMP despise STV, and could be expected to challenge it as well.
Wjy is "public education" necessary, if, as the link above suggests, the majority of Canadians support PR?? That doesn't make sense. They support it, but they won't choose it when asked? Can someone explain?
But Snert I like STV but I don't hate MMP and my wife likes MMP but doesn't hate STV. I know that is only anecdotal evidence so could you please give us some cites for your insistence that we are anomalies not the norm.
Right wing parties set the referendums and they are set up to fail. Those kind of measures are foreign to our political system and were brought into the political discourse in Canada by Manning's Reform Party. They are populist not necessarily democratic instruments. Easily manipulated by powers that pull the levers and make the smoke and mirrors in our body politic.
I amend my post. Real fans of STV.... :)
Thing is, I don't think I've ever seen someone, in the context of a discussion on PR, say "I'm a supporter of FPTP, and MMP sucks ass". But I've seen plenty say "I'm a supporter of STV, and MMP sucks ass". Ironically, while the choice is between FPTP and PR, the public mudslinging seems to be between STV and MMP.
First, the reason Ontario ended up with a closed-province-wide list model is because the Citizens' Assembly ran out of time to go back and reconsider whether their final model, with 39 compensatory MPPs, now could permit regional lists, and therefore allow open lists, as explained here.
Second, the main problem was that no one could explain definitively how the list candidates would be nominated, because the model came out too late for even the NDP to come up with a proper answer; it was already in pre-election mode. All we could say was, in New Zealand, the Labour Party uses six regional nomination conventions, and then folds the six lists into one, which I'm sure is what the Ontario NDP would have copied, but they had no time to determine that. The Liberals never said anything except that they would set up a democratic method. The PCs spent months saying that they opposed MMP because candidates would be appointed by the party headquarters, and when the press finally asked them why they were saying that when no other party said that, they finally conceded -- one week before the referendum -- that they would nominate them democratically. One irony I loved was when a Liberal Senator was interviewed on TV saying that he opposed MMP because the 39 MPPs would be appointed like, um, Senators.
Third, the majority of voters didn't even know we were having a referendum on MMP until they got to the ballot box. And then they had no idea what "Mixed Member Proportional" meant, or what the Citizens' Assembly was. The Citizens' Assemby had carefully produced a user-friendly pamphlet suitable for mass distribution, and were ready to print enough when Elections Ontario said they would not distribute it since they had to be "neutral." That's the first thing I mean by public education: the basics. The second thing I mean is enough discussion in the media to rebut the myths and complaints by opponents, who got a free ride in the media. And I could go on.
Not so. Fans of STV hate closed lists. MMP with fully-open lists, as in Bavaria (the list order does not matter), satisfies them. And fans of MMP despise the three-seaters in Ireland and prefer the six-seaters in Northern Ireland which are pretty proportional, so they were not ecstatic about the BC-STV model designed by the Boundaries Commission for the second referendum -- average district magnitude 4.25, not quite high enough to give their Greens the full share of MLAs -- but "despise" is far too strong.
I think what sank BC-STV in the second referendum was that the public had forgotten what the Citizens' Assembly was (it got great publicity when it was at work, unlike Ontario's) and didn't understand the point of the transferable ballot. However, a poll after the referendum showed that 44.3% of those who voted for first-past-the-post in the referendum responded they are in "favour of replacing first-past-the-post with a voting system in which the percentage of seats a party gets in the legislature is more in line with their percentage of the popular vote." That makes 66% of BC voters in favour of some proportional system. Just like all the polls show.
Excellent analysis and encompasses both my and my wife's views. I like STV because I see it as check on anti-democratic central party control. I will accept any system where anyone with a chance of getting elected must have put themselves forward in an election. So MPP with party lists is a complete no starter for me. MPP with the 'best" candidates who didn't secure a seat is good because then the people's assessment of the individuals is part of the equation. In BC part of the manipulation was reducing the number of seats per riding and thus the potential to get any more parties into the House almost disappeared.
Why did the second referendum fail? After a majority picked it but not the quite the rigged majority, the right wingers watered it down and and made it thin gruel instead of hearty porridge. As well the numbers of voters in the last election was very low compared to the election where STV won the majority vote. I think part of the second results were that people who would like to see change saw the undemocratic nature of both parties response and didn't go to the polls. Driving down the vote seems to be a right wing idea these days. Telling young people that 41% of the voters got their desire on the referendum and the majority got the shaft was probably a factor in the next elections lack of youth turnout.
I'm not opposed to the "best-runner-up" model of MMP used in the German province of Baden-Wurttemberg (which just elected a Green-Red Coalition government). Many women are opposed, since all candidates in Baden-Wurttemberg are nominated one at a time, worse than STV where the major parties will nominate several candidates in a district, likely resulting in more women being nominated. Indeed Baden-Wurttemberg has lower numbers of women elected than the rest of Germany. So they would prefer open-list MMP where the regional MLAs (Bavaria uses seven regions) were nominated at a regional party convention but the voters then vote for their party's regional candidate they prefer; the voters' assessment of them is crucial. It makes for a larger ballot, but that's what it takes to give voters that choice.
lol!
By getting significant representation in The House by parties that PR would benefit. Neither the Liberals nor Conservatives want PR.
It wasn't really. The wording was ostentatious. Any referendum on PR should be to the point. The average Canuck (who thinks about PR) figures that 60% of the votes = 60% representation, and looks askance at anything not as straightforward as that.
Some Conservatives do, like Senator Hugh Segal, Rick Anderson and others. And Reform originally did. But on the whole, not many, except perhaps in BC and Quebec.
Quite a few Liberals do; not Ignatieff, although he's never said he's opposed. Liberal voters need PR. On March 3 both some Liberals and the Bloc supported it.
Wilf Day: I should clarify my statement by saying that I refer to the PARTIES as opposed to individuals within those parties.
The Liberal Party in Ontario never took a position against MMP. Several cabinet ministers supported it, and some backbench MPs, but of course the government did not favour it either, and their instructions to Elections Ontario put the nail in the coffin.
The federal Liberal Party has, as far as I know, no position against PR. But they are not in favour either. However, they appointed a known PR supporter, Carolyn Bennett, as their Democratic Reform critic. That might have been a device to attract non-partisan PR supporters, or a device to neuter her (as critic she has stopped speaking in favour of PR), or both. But it may also demonstrate that they have left the door open. As a Fair Vote Canada person, I prefer to try to work with those Liberals who do, or could, support PR.
Yes, STV would be excellent for Burnaby. Your system is even worse than FPTP, it's the "block vote" where a single slate of candidates can win every seat, even worse for political diversity than a ward system. If I lived in Burnaby I'd want either STV at large for eight councillors, or two four-seater wards elected by STV. The day will come when the left loses an election for Burnaby city council. The Saskatchewan NDP held power for 16 years, and right at the end of their run they put electoral reform in their platform: if elected to a fifth term they would have held a Citizen's Assembly on Electoral Reform which would have recommended some PR system. Too late.
By the way, Tasmania is a lovely example of STV District Magnitude: they had seven-seaters, until the Greens won four seats and held the balance of power. The two big parties disagreed on everything except one point: changing to five-seaters. When they did so, the Green caucus shrank to one. Mission accomplished. Recently the Greens managed to hold the balance of power supporting a minority Labour government, and reached a deal to go back to seven-seaters again. The Liberals agreed; but then they withdrew their support, and Labour backed out on the spurious grounds of wanting all-party support. "Increasing the size of the House of Assembly to 35 members is not a priority for the Government, but Ms Giddings (Labour Premier) said there was a mandate for such a change, but "Until we see a pathway out of our financial concerns it's not a priority," she said.