The federal New Democrats are eyeing Alberta’s urban-rural divide as a way to flip blue seats in the next general election. Leader Jagmeet Singh’s recent visit to Edmonton is part of a shift in the party’s approach that will have him spend more time in fewer places as a way to deepen connections with people in certain regions of Canada.
Any time I think about federal (or provincial, for that matter) politics in Canada, I always come back to lamenting FPTP elections. Single Transferable Vote is such a perfect mix for capturing Canadian political views more accurately while still maintaining our geographic representation model required by the Constitution. It would give roughly proportional representation, within geographic weightings, with the added benefit of forcing incumbents to compete within the party to maintain their seat in “safe” ridings.
I hate the “Fuck Trudeau” rhetoric, but I feel betrayed by their reneging on their commitment that we’d never have a FPTP federal election again after they won. Fuck the Liberal party specifically for that. I think the only way we’ll see electoral reform in Canada, federally, is with an NDP-Green majority/coalition government. It’s just not in the Liberals’ or Conservatives’ best interest to move away from FPTP.
So any news of the NDP gaining ground is good news for Canadian politics. We need to stop our descent into Americanized two-party identity politics.
I really hope they can flip Edmonton and parts of Calgary! That would be fantastic to skip right over the Liberals.
Any time I’m reminded we use a FPTP (first past the post) system, I think about how Canadian that sounds. Like it’s a frickin hockey game.
The liberals get a lot of flak for not changing the electoral system, but I think that flak is unearned. Unpopular opinion time: The CPC, NDP and GPC deserve every bit as much blame, if not more, for the failure to move away from fptp. Why? They banded together in committee to poison any hope of getting electoral reform past the Senate or even the house. Trudeau , naively I think, promised to do things differently from Harper. True to his promise he balanced the electoral reform house committee by popular vote, instead of using his majority power. This meant that the opposition parties could outvote the liberals in committee and, seemingly forgotten by everyone, the opposition parties welded that power to deliver a complete nonsensical , posion pill filled committee report / reccomendation to the house which had no real chance of passing. That document, a worst of all ideas document if I ever saw it, threw out all ideas put forward by the LPC (the majority in the house, who had a free vote on this) instead favoring CPC demands for a referendum, NDP demands for a vague and nonspecific system that wasn’t STV, but was proportional. The GPC and Bloc got in on it, and passed this report that had no chance , none, of passing the house. Even if it had passed the house it wouldn’t have got past the Senate and the committee delayed their report so long nothing could be done before the next election.
I know parliamentary procedure is boring, and most people don’t follow it, but I do and I saw what happened here. The LPC failure was only in so far as they didn’t just stomp all over the opposition to impose their changes. The LPC acted in good faith instead and got politiced so bad people still blame them .
Trudeau killed electoral reform because he wanted to switch us to Ranked Choice voting which massively favours the Liberals. When the Liberals held nationwide consults (one of which I attended) it became clear that Canadians overwhelmingly wanted something with Proportional Representation, not Ranked. This is why he killed it.
That’s the tale the hive mind landed on, yup.
If the Liberals wanted it so bad, how do you explain the incredibly biased survey they put out that was designed to manufacture consent for cancelling the initiative?