Oh…
…Great.
That was the most stress I’ve felt about a Canadian election in my lifetime. Yet, even with my vote not counting for shit (fuck you racist-ass western Canada) and the NDP doing worse under Singh than Mulcair (fuck you xenophobic-ass Quebec), I’m glad it turned out so well.
“Well” being based on how broken First Past the Post is. The best realistic outcome in FPTP is the Liberals leading a minority government with them needing to get an actual left party (NDP or Greens) to do anything.
Given that the Bloc also have that power and the Liberals are already courting conservative voters by promising to violate the rights of First Nations people build pipelines, it’s obviously not perfect.
Best I can hope for is for the NDP to really pressure the Liberals for Electoral Reform. Hell, my MPP-loving ass will settle for proportional representation at this point even if it would have lead to the PPC getting seats (the alt-right getting a platform is a HUGE problem with PR) and Conservatives having power (if no coalition was made), it’s still fucking better than this FPTP gong show.
Oh, and by the way, since no one posted something similar, I did the rough math on what this election would have looked like with Proportional Representation.
Cons 116
Liberal 112
NDP 54
Bloc 26
Green 22
Maxime Bernier’s Shitshow 5
Underterminable 3 (would depend on how PR would be implemented)
Obviously this ignores that most people vote strategically and that PR would likely cause there to be a higher amount of people voting (as everyone’s vote actually matters), but even this doesn’t look too bad for the left leaning parties, especially the Greens.
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Still, more than 1 in 100 voters voted for this hate group supporting party and that’s a problem.
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The weird thing to me about our previous parliament’s C-69 is people who are pro-oil think it was put in place make new/ expanded energy projects impossible to move forward, while I feel it’s there just to make sure the government does a better job crossing 't’s and dotting 'i’s before steamrolling people so that there will be far fewer court challenges.
So, unlike a normal 69 situation where both sides go in hoping to get f’d the way they like, this 69 seems more like both sides being dragged in fearing they will get f’ed the way they hate.
I do wonder what it will take for electoral reform to become a reality. I think a major obstacle is every government seems to see a referendum as a necessary first step, but I’m not sure the voting public would support it with a majority.
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Considering two of them were my own mother and her boyfriend… believe me. I know.
It’s probably a form of institutionalization from living as a PoC in the west, but I’ve come to expect a certain level of racism in Canadian society. To me, 1% is an encouraging result.
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1% of the popular vote seems… fine? It’s 1%. Really what I find disappointing is how much attention the PPC was able to command given how irrelevant they turned out to be.
The media took for granted that the trend of far-right parties gaining significant support would happen in Canada as well, and seemed to report on them as if they were a significant party, but they never were or became such. Any significance they did have was granted to them because the media would report on them alongside the major parties. This seems most evident when looking at the election results as presented by both the CBC and CTV, where the PPC were granted the colour purple and given a spot for their name and logo in the standings, instead of just being lumped in with the grey “Other” category.
So maybe a lot of people were actually too pessimistic and cynical about the resilience of Canadian politics against far-right parties and out-and-out racism. Of course in this very same campaign we had the event of the blackface discourse to remind us that this doesn’t mean racism isn’t an issue in Canada. Truly this election was as Canadian as possible… under the circumstances.
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I would love to see some sort of PR for Canada. It seems to act as a good buffer against political stagnation. But! I had thought that straight PR wouldn’t work under the Constitution Act, since it could not guarantee the minimal regional representation set out there. Which would mean you’d need a constitutional amendment to pass it, and since PEI is probably not going to give up its 4 seats willingly, the whole thing would die right there. MMP is both a better system, and a more likely sell to the provinces, since it can be tuned to maintain regional (over) representation.
Reform is somewhat doomed as an idea though (as we found out with the Liberals). Any party that takes power likely owes that power to quirks of the FPTP system, and is disincentivized to sabotage its own power to bring it about. Because the provinces have to be involved, passing it means the expenditure of a lot of political capital (and probably spreading around a lot of pork), which has its own problems. The only way I can see it happening is in the somewhat unlikely event of an Orange wave. The NDP might possibly be principled enough to sacrifice present power for future relevance.
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love 2 be held hostage by the electoral system that I want to be reformed
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Canada: Where the dude who was caught doing blackface multiple times is somehow only the 3rd or 4th most racist guy you can vote for.
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Well, there goes the most competent leader of a political party we’ve had for the last… [counts years since Jack Layton died]… 8 years.
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Andrew Scheer probably doesn’t think women should be executed for having an abortion, or that Alberta should be the 51st state, so his leadership clearly wasn’t going to work out long-term
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Yes, of course this is how a Conservarive party leader would go down.
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I mean we’ll never know. He refused to say a single thing about what he believes in during the entire election.
For all we know he thinks oil is made from rainbows and women get abortions by using their evil mind control powers.
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So I guess this means in nine months he’ll be the mayor of Brampton.
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In all seriousness, I hope this can be a moment of clarity for some tory voters. This is who these people are, naked capitalists who use party funds to put their kids through private school, they don’t give a FUCK about you, and you need to stop supporting them.
[narrator voice] “It wouldn’t be”
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The issue is that these centrist Canadian voters will (correctly) point out the scandal plagued Liberals, throw up their hands and call all politicians corrupt. Meanwhile the NDP is jumping up and down screaming “we’re right here!”, but the old centrism goggles make it so they may as well not exist.
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So stealing party money to pay for education in a country with one of the best public education systems in the world seems like a very political class way to end a political career. One can only assume he’ll be punished for it with a high paying job and speaking engagements for life?
And the rest of us are going to have to live with Michelle Rempel running for leadership again. Lived in her riding: Great organizer, actual nerd, awful human being. I don’t understand how conservatives can be Trek fans without self destructing from cognitive dissonance.
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This UK election news would have me upset regardless, but partnered with this news? I’m fucking livid.
I can’t think of a more clear example of aggressive conservative self-interest, and people STILL VOTE FOR THEM! WHAT THE FUCK AM I MISSING HERE!? I wish I knew how to convince people to try, you know, giving a shit about something other than themselves and stop cozying up to these wealthy assholes.
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