Canadian Federal Election 2015

[Oerwinde]

 

 

CBC projecting Liberal Majority. Leading in 189 ridings. Not bad considering they were all but declared dead after the last election.

What happened the last election? A scandal or just good 'ole voter's fatigue?

Jack Layton happened. Michael Ignatieff was Liberal leader and the conservatives were successful in defining him as not really Canadian, as he lived and worked in the US before becoming an MP, then he turned out to be terrible in the debates. Layton, the leader of the NDP was running a fantastic campaign and was nailing the debates, then his big moment, he brought up house attendance, with himself voting in every house vote, Harper voting in 60%, and Ignatieff voting in 40%, and he quipped "Mr. Ignatieff, usually when someone wants a promotion, they actually show up for work." that began what people referred to as the "Orange Crush" as the NDP colour was orange. Their numbers skyrocketted and they ended up crushing the Bloc in Quebec, and either won or cause enough vote splitting to get Conservative mps elected resulting in like 18 Liberal seats. It was the biggest win in NDP history and they became official opposition for the first time in party history. Sadly shortly after Layton took a leave of absence as he had been diagnosed with cancer, and like 3 months later he died. Even though his party never got into power he was constantly ranked at the top of people's choice for PM and was such a beloved figure he got a state funeral despite that usually being reserved for PMs and former PMs.

 

The Liberals previous leader Stephane Dion was also quite uncharismatic despite being a capable MP and had been successfully defined by the cons as weak and indecisive. Before that was Paul Martin who was finance minister during the sponsorship scandal and took all the blame for that leading to the first Harper minority. The sponsorship scandal had to do with the federal sponsorship program enacted after the last Quebec referendum to raise the federal profile in quebec. Federal funds were supposed to go to private projects in Quebec to show that Quebec was a valued member of confederation and to reduce quebec nationalism. What happened instead is millions of dollars went to friends of quebec mps for little to no work. Paul Martin was exonerated in the inquiry into the scandal, but the damage was done.

Edited October 20, 2015 by Oerwinde

[Oerwinde]

Personally I don't get why the Liberals got hammered on 300 million in mispent funds, yet the Conservatives got a free pass on straight up losing 3 billion in defence spending (was budgeted, wasn't spent, but no one could trace what happened to it), or spending 35 billion on jets that a) Don't have engines, and b) even with the engines won't work in the arctic, which is one of the main reasons we need new jets.

[Volourn]

They didn't get a free pass. Just the other aprties were worse at the time. Now people want a change (even though nothing will change). 10 years in charge is enough anyways.

[Oerwinde]

Trudeau told Obama today that he would be pulling Canadian jets from Iraq and Syria. He also took questions from the press in the national press gallery. That hasn't happened in 7 years.

[BruceVC]

Trudeau told Obama today that he would be pulling Canadian jets from Iraq and Syria. He also took questions from the press in the national press gallery. That hasn't happened in 7 years.

What !!! Why would he do that...doesn't he want to part of the international military coalition in the ME

 

And if Canada gets attacked by extremists linked to ISIS is he now going to ask for USA assistance? Its a slippery slope  Trudeau walks.....we all need to do our part 

[Malcador]

Canada is weak enough that the campaign against ISIS half assed or not won't suffer

[BruceVC]

Canada is weak enough that the campaign against ISIS half assed or not won't suffer

Good point raised...its just more of symbolic consideration if you think about what its saying  " Hi World, I'm the new Canadian PM and I'm pulling Canada out of the multinational force that is fighting a global, ostensibly, threat which happens to be ISIS " 

 

The truth is I don't believe ISIS is a global threat but it has been positioned that way so the expectations from certain countries is the same 

[Oerwinde]

So if the Liberals switch the electoral system to STV which is what looks likely, Harper may be the last conservative Prime Minister, and the Greens might make significant gains in BC

 

Oh and Bruce, this will make you happy. Trudeau vowed his cabinet will be made up by half women, despite women only making up about a quarter of liberal MPs.(they ran more than that but a lot were defeated)

Edited October 21, 2015 by Oerwinde

[BruceVC]

So if the Liberals switch the electoral system to STV which is what looks likely, Harper may be the last conservative Prime Minister, and the Greens might make significant gains in BC

 

Oh and Bruce, this will make you happy. Trudeau vowed his cabinet will be made up by half women, despite women only making up about a quarter of liberal MPs.(they ran more than that but a lot were defeated)

 

 

That's funny....how is he going to do that ?

[Oerwinde]

 

 

So if the Liberals switch the electoral system to STV which is what looks likely, Harper may be the last conservative Prime Minister, and the Greens might make significant gains in BC

 

Oh and Bruce, this will make you happy. Trudeau vowed his cabinet will be made up by half women, despite women only making up about a quarter of liberal MPs.(they ran more than that but a lot were defeated)

 

That's funny....how is he going to do that ?

Well a quarter of 184 mps is still quite a few, and Harper had the largest cabinet of any pm ever with like 30 positions. Trudeau likely won't have as large of a cabinet, so he'll probably only need like 10 or so, but he'll likely have to gloss over some much more qualified male candidates to do it.

 

Trudeau spent most of yesterday morning shaking hands, taking photos and speaking directly to people in a montreal metro station. So he meets directly with people of all types, and has an open relationship with the press. So far a total 180 from Harper's vetted events and 5 question limit with no follow ups. The openness pledge from his platform is in full swing already

Edited October 21, 2015 by Oerwinde

[Volourn]

L0L  Trudeau isn't about action. He's about words. He'll speak lots but won't accomplish much.  I guarabntee you my life with not change one bit with him in power depsite that I'm in his 'demographic'. Just another sexist racist nazi. That is what he is. He does not believe in true equality. He doesn't believe in true human rights. He is just like Harper.

[Zoraptor]

So if the Liberals switch the electoral system to STV which is what looks likely, Harper may be the last conservative Prime Minister, and the Greens might make significant gains in BC

 

Proper STV is a great system, us going for mixed member proportional instead when we switched from first past the post was a horrible decision.

[Oerwinde]

 

 

So if the Liberals switch the electoral system to STV which is what looks likely, Harper may be the last conservative Prime Minister, and the Greens might make significant gains in BC

Proper STV is a great system, us going for mixed member proportional instead when we switched from first past the post was a horrible decision.

STV means you still get the stability of a majority government every once in a while, without MPs being elected with 25% of the vote, so I'm game

[Oerwinde]

 

Our new PM being AWESOME.

[Rostere]

So if the Liberals switch the electoral system to STV which is what looks likely, Harper may be the last conservative Prime Minister, and the Greens might make significant gains in BC

 

Cool, congratulations! Shows that good things can happen. STV is IMO not the best voting system, but close enough that it doesn't matter.

[Oerwinde]

Stephane Dion (previous Liberal Leader and all-around hardworking MP) came up with a proposal he called P3, for Proportional, Preferential, Personalized. Basically his system would have larger ridings with multiple MPs. Each party would supply the list of candidates for each riding, and you would rank both the party and the candidates. This way each party would get the proportion of the seats in that riding that they gained, and the candidates put forward for that proportion were chosen by the voters rather than the party. This would allow for independent candidates to get seats if they were ranked higher than candidates in a party.

 

He's a big federalist Quebecer too. When Quebec argued that if they voted to separate, their territorial integrity couldn't be sacrificed (Quebec the Province couldn't be broken up when it became Quebec the country). This was after people argued that since large swaths of Quebec, such as the north, and southwest voted overwhelmingly against succession (in the 70% range), that those parts should be allowed to remain part of Canda. Quebec used some UN decision on territorial integrity not being able to be broken based on a small amount of the population. Dion argued if that was the case, just over half of Quebec shouldn't be able to make a decision on the territorial integrity of Canada, and since like 60% of Quebec's territory was granted by an act of Canadian parliament, they could easily revoke that act of parliament and strip them down to their original boundaries.

[Rostere]

Stephane Dion (previous Liberal Leader and all-around hardworking MP) came up with a proposal he called P3, for Proportional, Preferential, Personalized. Basically his system would have larger ridings with multiple MPs. Each party would supply the list of candidates for each riding, and you would rank both the party and the candidates. This way each party would get the proportion of the seats in that riding that they gained, and the candidates put forward for that proportion were chosen by the voters rather than the party. This would allow for independent candidates to get seats if they were ranked higher than candidates in a party.

 

Sounds good, the fact that you can rank party candidates in your vote I think is very important.

 

If I'm to nitpick I still think that the thinking of electing X MPs from district ("riding" in this case) Y is flawed, though. What if you hand out voting cards based on which part of the country you live in (with people being allowed to use voting cards from any other place), but number of seats allotted to each party is decided instead by percentage of national vote? After which MPs for each party are elected based on their number of "personal votes" from their respective party lists, in descending order. This would alleviate the need for ordering different parties on your vote.