Green Party Supporters: What would it take, etc....part II

Also, you should remember that the candidate is supposed to represent his constituents, not the party. If he should represent the party, then non-party members have no voice in Parliament.

remind wrote:

Constituents have no right to determine my human rights.

I don't understand what you mean here. A candidate is elected to represent his constituents, not the party. His obligation is to the people, not a party.

Actually, this has led me to thinking of another point. Instead of providing funding for parties, why does Elections Canada not do the following instead:

Provide each candidate in an election with his own website and e-mail @ that website for the duration of the election, thus allowing him to communicate his ideas to his constituents uncensored and his constituents to communicate with him likewise.

I think this is all that would be needed to put all candidates, be they party members or independents, on an equal footing.

Also, if we just expect our candidates to just vote party lines, then are we not wasting lots of money? In that case, why not just have one representative of each party in Parliament, which would likely make it about 12 or so people, and each one's vote would be worth the percentage of the population that had voted for his party. That would save lots of money on salaries. Why pay so many people just to bleep out yea or nay like sheep?

remind wrote:

I agree with that machjo as far as it goes on the surface of things..

However, if I live in a riding that has a majority of those who are against women's rights or other's human rights, they have no right to force their elected official to vote against my or others human rights based upon their belief, for example, in a mythical being.

MP's should not be sending out attack ads against any other party to conctiuents, using tax payer money and they should be punished by voters of all stripes for doing so.

My MP, who is Conservative definitely does not represent me as a constituent, we have had EI issues and have gone to her, only to hear absolutely nothing back. In fact, I believe our voting choice has caused our problems.

My MP is a Conservative too, and a total party sheep, partisan to the core. He represents his party through and trhough. I've contacted him before and never got an answer back. The guy's absolutely useless. But now this is also where voting party lines can backfire. I remember when Scott Reid, Conservative MP (not in my riding) voted against the Anti-Terrorism Act, breaking ranks with the Conservative Party and opposing the Liberals. He was essentially a lone sheep standing out in the cold on that one.

Now if you say we should always vote party lines, then you're also saying that an MP should always vote alongside his party even when it violates human rights. I support defending justice in government too, so naturally I want my candidate voting on justice, not along party lines at all costs, even when it may violate justice.

remind wrote:

If the party you choose has a history of voting against human rights, while you believe in them, then you get what you choose.

So how does the NDP fare? In Ontrio, the NDP never outright defended the separate school system, but certainly kept quiet about it too. The Ontario Greens do oppose it openly though. And the way I see it, staying quiet on a hot button issue makes the party complicit.

remind wrote:

If the party you choose has a history of voting against human rights, while you believe in them, then you get what you choose.

So how does the NDP fare? In Ontrio, the NDP never outright defended the separate school system, but certainly kept quiet about it too. The Ontario Greens do oppose it openly though. And the way I see it, staying quiet on a hot button issue makes the party complicit.

remind wrote:

The Green Party can, and does, say whatever they want, to whatever person(s) they are talking to. They shift positions depending upon the audience. And as they do not have a hopin hell, of  ever having to impliment a thing it remains easy for them to say whatever they want in any given situation.

Last election, the Green party had placed its entire platform online for all to see, so there was no way for a candidate to pretend the Green Party never promissed it.

By the way, I do beliee one of the biggest advantages with running as an independent candidate is the freedom to vote one's conscience.

remind wrote:

Doesn't matter at all about pretending, they just say whatever they feel like, may it be about abortion or support of nuclear energy.

Can you give any example? I'm not aware of a time during the campaign when the party as such officially sanctioned conflicting policies at the same time.

remind wrote:

LMAO, "officially sanctioned",  and I already did  give you examples.

If you need further, GP members in ON were saying they believed in nuclear  energy, there is a thread  about here where we just discussed this too so you could look for it.

Many have stated, including EMay herself though she retracted it, that they do not support abortions on demand.

If you need more look at some old Green Party threads.

What the party leader says is different from what the written platform states.

Now, I do agree though that it looks strange for the leader to not uphold the party platform to a T. But that's the disadvantage of being a leader I suppose.

But then again, seeing that I vote candidate and not party, what the leader says doesn't sway me much. What I want to know is waht the candidate intends to do. In facft, I generally lean in favour of independents over party members overall.

p.s. arguing over the merits of political parties is like comparing different brands of cola.  Its all cola, in the end.

die-hard NDP-ers would do well to recall Roy Romanow's days as premier of Sask. when he presided over some of the deepest cuts to social services, and was perceived as being far more conservative than any previous NDP administration.  He upset the left-wing of his party (and other left-leaning and progressive minded people) with his policies.

Its all Cola, in the end, no matter which brand you buy.

declareIndependance wrote:

Its all Cola, in the end, no matter which brand you buy.

Then maybe we should make our own cola.

Fidel wrote:

As an NDPer, I realize that the Green Party represents an important political voice that is absent in Canadian parliament today because of our outdated electoral system. I wish Green Party supporters well. But in the mean time, the best way to solve the problem of being shut out of parliament would be for Green Party supporters to vote strategically for the NDP. I really dislike the idea of voting strategically, but I think it's the only way our paternalistic governments in Ottawa will sit up and take notice. The Liberals proved they are no friends of the Green Party when Liberal MP's voted with the Tories in voting down the NDP's proposal to restart the federal study on electoral reform in May of 2007.

I have never voted strategically and never will. By doing so, we play right into the hands of the mainstream parties, even if unwittingly. By voting on principle, we do risk splitting the vote. But if we vote on principle consistently, and so keep splitting the vote, sooner or later the strategic voters will realize that they must get to know their candidates better and vote for the best candidate, not party. Until they do so, we principled voters will keep splitting the vote, not on purpose, but by nature of our actions.

By the way, I don't even like the idea of pro rep. I'd rather go in the direction of non-partisan democracy, whereby all candidates must simply run as independents. That would get rid of all the silly partisanship.

Also, the best way to give candidates a run for our votes is for us to really get to know them. That alone would improve the quality of candidates very quickly. Imagine, right now most candidates just float into power on brand name alone. Even the MP in my riding. He's an idiot, pure and simple, yet many Conservative voters I'd talked to have told me that they know he's an idiot yet voted for him anyway because of his party. There is no way in hell this guy could have become our MP if it weren't for party branding. If everyone in our riding ran as an independent, the Green candidate would likely have won. The Dipper, maybe. The Lib, well, he was a simple populist of sorts. The Conservative, even some Conservative voters think him an idiot, so maybe not.

But get rid of the party brand names, and the emperors are left bare to the naked eye of the voters.

Fidel wrote:

Machjo wrote:

  But if we vote on principle consistently, and so keep splitting the vote, sooner or later the strategic voters will realize that they must get to know their candidates better and vote for the best candidate, not party. Until they do so, we principled voters will keep splitting the vote, not on purpose, but by nature of our actions.

Unfortunately with our obsolete electoral system, a vote for an independent candidate translates to a vote for maintaining the status quo. We need to bring down those same two political parties now reduced to propping one another up in Ottawa due to voter apathy and lack of overall enthusiasm for democracy in Canada as a direct result of Liberal and Tory legacies as the only federal governments we've ever known.  Canadians just dont vote for independent candidates - we vote for political parties by and large. Progressive change will not occur in Canada by voting for independents. Not in the next thousand years is my guess.

If we all start voting strategically, the party we vote for will become what it always opposed. Remember, many Dippers vote strategically for the Liberal Party too. How far do we take this strategic voting nonsense.

I'll keep voting for the best candidate on principle, and you keep voting strategically for the second-best party to keep the worse one out, and we'll both be happy, right.

Just to give concrete examples of the silliness of the party system. I love my mom, but when she votes, it's always Liberal. Honestly, her views are very populist conservative, and if it weren't for party brands, sh'ed probably vote for a more populist conservative candidate. But becaue her dad always taught her to vote Liberal, she will always vote Liberal, and she's now in her sixties. If you took the party system away, she'd soon be at a loss as to how to vote. I've also read articles of people saying they'll vote NDP because their parents vote NDP, again not necessarily because they know anything about it, kind of like people who call themselves Christian but don't know who Jesus is (I'd met one like that, believe it or not!).

Now tell me, how will any kind of pro-rep solve this kind of problem? If anything, it's likely to perpetuate it.

Actually, here is a Dipper with the winning combination in my opinion:

1. He has his own multi-lingual website to keep his constituents and others informed:

http://www.grahamsteele.ca/

2. He lists his e-mail address on his website so that any constituent can contact him with questions.
3. His website is non-partisan, never even mentioning his party affiliation, though I know he's a member of the NDP, or at least was last I checked. He expresses his own ideas on the website, which I suppose goes hand in hand with 3 above, not just presenting himself as a party sheep, and showing his own intelligence.
4. He demonstrates a few character traits on the website. The multilingual facet of the website itself proves his cupport, without needing to mention it, for language justice. Other character traits could be included too depending on if the candidate cares for his health, is vegetarian, uses public transport, etc. depending on each candiate of course.
I think these are the traits of a winning candidate, and if he were running in my riding, he'd really be giving the other candidates a run for my vote. This is the kind of quality candidate you need. Other parties have such candidates too, and independents like myself will vote for the best candidate, so if the NDP wants my vote, this is the kind of candidate it needs to present.

Machjo wrote:

Now tell me, how will any kind of pro-rep solve this kind of problem? If anything, it's likely to perpetuate it.

With PR, strategic voting becomes obsolete. You vote for who you want to win, and your vote, and the vast majority of votes are not cancelled and invalidated by a political candidate winning a phony majority. Green Party should have something like 23 seats right now not zero.  FPP is a most inefficient and mathematically unfair electoral system invented before electricity.

Fidel wrote:

Machjo wrote:

Now tell me, how will any kind of pro-rep solve this kind of problem? If anything, it's likely to perpetuate it.

With PR, strategic voting becomes obsolete. You vote for who you want to win, and your vote, and the vast majority of votes are not cancelled and invalidated by a political candidate winning a phony majority. Green Party should have something like 23 seats right now not zero.  FPP is a most inefficient and mathematically unfair electoral system invented before electricity.

That still dodn't answer my question. It was how will PR eliminate voting on tradition (i.e. voting for party X because granddad always voted for party X) or esthetics. If anything, it would likely entrench it further. Sure STV might be OK, because in theory party names could be eliminated from the ballot.

in fact, I'd forgotten that point. Th Green candidate in my riding last eleciton was OK, but I handed in a blank ballot and couldn't remember what had promted me to make that last minute decision. I remember now. It was the fact that a party name appeared under the candidate's name, and that angered me. Now here's why it angered me:

1. Though I intended to vote for the candidate, the ballot could give the false impression that I was in fact voting for the party, essentially constituting a symbolic bait and switch legitimizing the party unfairly. And

2. This bait and switch allows the party to get $1.75 or so from each vote, even if it's for a candidate. Clearly, if I'm voting for a candidate, the party should in no way benefit from that.

Until this bait-and-switch highjacking of the ballot by political parties ends, I'm likely to react in the same manner next election. I don't know how common my reaction is, but I have read and heard of others who've spoilt their ballots too. And I'd heard one man tell me he'd spoilt his ballot since there was no independent candidate on the list. We may be in a small minority, but I'm clearly not alone.

Honestly though, I suspect we're in a small enough minority to not likely influence the outcome by much, unless of course many of the non-voters are choosing to stay home for similar reasons. That could be an interesting study I suppose.

In fact, I feel so strongly about this that I've just e-mailed the following to Elections Canada this morning:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I was wondering if it is possible at the beginning of an election campaign for a voter to request a non-party ballot (i.e. a ballot without any party name mentioned, with any money distributed from that ballot going to the candidate instead of the party) to be sent either to the voter's home or, alternatively, to a voting hall where it is reserved for when the voter arrives to request it.

I'm asking this because I find it offensive that my voting for a candidate gives the false impression that I'm also voting for his party, thus making it difficult for me to check a candidate's name when a party name appeares underneath it. Beyond the symbolic significance of this, there is also the material financial benefit that a party gains even from a vote for a candidate which, in my opinion, essentially amounts to a bait-and-switch, whereby I vote for a candidate, with Elections Canada then interpreting it as a vote for the party, and rewarding the party accordingly.

I thank you for your attention, and look forward to your response.

Yours sincerely,

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Now, for some reason, I couldn't find the e-mail address itself but did fill out the e-mail form. After clicking enter, though, it says it could not find the page, so I'm not sure if it worked or not. Anyway, I did try.

I'm not necessarily against pro-rep per se, as long as I can vote for my candidate.

This brings me to ask who gets the money per vote, if the wining person is an Independant? One has to assume the person does, as opposed to the party, as they can hardly withhold it, yet give it to others.

remind wrote:

This brings me to ask who gets the money per vote, if the wining person is an Independant? One has to assume the person does, as opposed to the party, as they can hardly withhold it, yet give it to others.

 

I don't know the answer, but have asked myself that before. I hope the candidate gets it. But then again, if I check a box next to the NDp candidate let's say, because I think he's the best candidate, nothing to do with his party, then why should his party get the money if I never voted for it.

Last election, this is the main reason I think I couldn't put a check next to the candidate. He was a decent candidte, but I just felt manipulated with a corrpupted bait-and-switch ballot. I should reserve the right to vote for a candidate minus his party.

You want your own special ballot then?

Why should I be forced to vote for a party of which I'm not even a member? Should it not be my democratic right to vote for a candidate without his party highjacking my vote for its own profit?

There are many differing opinions across Canada about that, I for one am all for it, as are millions of others.