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[OM] Re: Canada Day

Subject: [OM] Re: Canada Day
From: Andrew Dacey <frugal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 01 Jul 2004 23:30:30 -0300

On Jul 1, 2004, at 11:06 PM, Mike wrote:

>
> Now someone can try to explain for me the Canadian electoral process. 
> Makes Florida's seem downright straight forward. For example in the 
> Saanich Riding (where did that name come from?) which is just over the 
> line from here centrist and left parties tallied about 70% of the 
> vote. So of course they will be represented by the conservative 
> candidate, Lunn. Go figure. I can understand the call by some for 
> proportional representation and a fixed election date.

Looks like a standard vote split there, the Conservative candidate got 
the most votes so he won the seat but clearly didn't win in terms of 
percentage of votes. The votes are tallied as straight total, whoever 
gets the most wins. This would be one of the clearer cases for having a 
proportional representation system. Another case would be that the NDP 
received about 15% of the vote but only 19 out of 309 seats (or around 
6%). In many areas, they had over 20% of the vote.

One of the more interesting proposals I've heard was to amalgamate some 
ridings and take the saved seats to create "floater" seats for various 
regions. Those "floater" seats would then be assigned to the various 
parties in order that the number of seats each party receives more 
closely matches the proportion of votes they received in that region. 
So in the NDP's case, they would be assigned more seats to get them up 
closer to the 15% number. The big concern over this is that it would 
lead to more minority governments but we seem to do a good job of 
electing them on our own as it is, and this assumes that a minority 
government is a bad thing. The big issues I see would be in terms of 
how you insure that people still get good local representation. You'd 
still want to make sure that various regions weren't losing out on 
representatives, particularly in the case of Urban vs. Rural areas.

Andrew "Frugal" Dacey
frugal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.tildefrugal.net/


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