Liberal Party - NOW will you support proportional representation?
Pollsters and others seemed to predict the results for the NDP, Bloc and Green parties fairly closely. But, no one predicted the fall of the Liberals as far as they went (and thus the rise of the Conservatives into majority status).
The Liberals lost a lot of seats in the 2011 election. But, they still received a fair amount of the popular vote.
They won 34 seats.
With proportional representation, they would have won closer to 59 seats.
Compare seats won vs proportional number of seats (according to the proportion of the populer vote they received):
(numbers have been slightly adjusted to round and to total 308)
Conservatives 166 - 124
NDP 102 - 95
Liberals 34 - 59
Bloc 4 - 18
Green 1 - 12
Not only would the opposition parties have more seats (except for the 2nd party), but their 60% of the votes would be fairly represented in the number of seats in Parliament.
The Liberals lost a lot of seats in the 2011 election. But, they still received a fair amount of the popular vote.
They won 34 seats.
With proportional representation, they would have won closer to 59 seats.
Compare seats won vs proportional number of seats (according to the proportion of the populer vote they received):
(numbers have been slightly adjusted to round and to total 308)
Conservatives 166 - 124
NDP 102 - 95
Liberals 34 - 59
Bloc 4 - 18
Green 1 - 12
Not only would the opposition parties have more seats (except for the 2nd party), but their 60% of the votes would be fairly represented in the number of seats in Parliament.
4 comments:
Reading other blogs, I'm not feeling that the Liberals can get past their enormous egos.
It's time Canada left them behind.
RIP LPC.
Rather than strictly proportional representation, I think the alternative vote (also known as instant runoff voting) is a better solution to the problems that ail Canadian democracy. Basically, you rank all the candidates from first choice to last and then all of the first place votes are counted; if no one has a majority, then the lowest placed candidate is tossed out and that candidate's votes are reassigned to the voters second choices. And so on until someone has a majority. The likely result in a lot of ridings would have been Liberal or NDP victories over the Conservatives.
An added benefit of the alternative vote is that it might encourage the reformation of something like the old Progressive Conservatives, since right-of-centre voters would not face the prospect of vote splitting.
At the very least, let's have a coalition for 2016 to finally bring this about.
After the travesty of government we're going to endure, the need will be obvious.
Yes, if not direct proportional representation, then some form of it.
A working coalition government of NDP and Liberal might help to promote the idea of proportional representation to the public at some point. As things look at the moment, it's not option. We'll have to see how things stand next election time (if there will be another election).
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