Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Majority bull

The fucking election.

You know, my stance on the Tories is pretty much a given. My stance on our electoral system is just as poor. A government in this antiqued system can be given total power with 40% of the vote. That minority of support grants over half the seats and delivers a majority government. Or in this case, less than 40%.

That's right, folks. 39.62% of the country elected a disproportionate number of MPs who now speak for 100% of Canada. The rest of the MPs have little voice now. Their policies and ideas and questions can be ignored.

When a system grants over 50% of seats for a 40% showing in support, the system makes no sense. The Green party focused on getting their first MP elected, and they succeeded. But due to a lack of campaign efforts across the country in order to do so, they lost half their support. But with half the support, they have a seat with around 500,000 votes total for their party, whereas with nearly 1 million they had zero seats.

Toronto is thoroughly undersupported. We have 2.5 million people in Toronto. Prince Edward Island has 140,000. We have 22 ridings and they have 4. Doing the rough math, PE Islanders have about 1 MP for every 35,000 people and Torontonians have 1 MP per 113,000 people.

Saskatchewan has about 1,050,000 people and 14 seats. That's 1 MP per 75,000 people BUT! Let's take a look at Rural Alberta ridings, shall we? 590,000 people, 12 seats. That's one MP for every 49,000 people.

The more rural you are, the more sparsely populated your area, the more your vote counts and the more you get heard in the House of Commons. But then again, we have a first past the post system and not proportional representation. So who the hell even needs to bother counting up these numbers. Roughly 60% of Canadians cast votes which elect nobody.

We live in a broken electoral system and that's a fact. Who's going to fix it? The party that just rode a majority off of the existing system? Probably not.

1 comments:

Alek said...

http://www.fairvote.ca/civicrm/profile/create?gid=4&reset=1

Fair Vote Canada. I just signed up as a volunteer. You should too. :)

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