Former prime minster Justin Trudeau infamously broke his promise to reform the electoral system. Trudeau’s own preference was for a type of majoritarian system called the Alternative Vote (AV) AKA Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). However, the House of Commons Special Committee on Electoral Reform established by his government went in a different direction: it ultimately recommended that the government design a system of proportional representation (PR) and vote on it through referendum.
Grossly, electoral systems are classified into majoritarian and proportional types. In addition to AV there are two other well-known majoritarian systems: FPTP and the two-round system (used in France). Trudeau rejected the recommendation to move away from a majoritarian system and has negatively characterized proportional representation in different ways. In this townhall exchange, Trudeau explains his opposition to PR. "If we were to make a change or risk a change that would augment individual voices — that would augment extremist voices and activist voices that don’t get to sit within a party that figures out what’s best for the whole future of the country, like the three existing parties do — I think we would be entering a period of instability and uncertainty."
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Political stability, dissatisfaction with democracy, and political polarization are easiest to compare with simple data. With political stability, PR countries on average perform better. With democratic dissatisfaction, PR countries dramatically outperform majoritarian countries. On political polarization, PR countries outperform, with Ireland achieving the lowest polarization score in the whole OECD.
Further, when you examine the three comparison pairings listed above, the PR country performs better on each dimension for all three pairs. Trudeau feared that proportional systems would bring instability, polarization, and that voices which undermine what’s good for the country would be augmented, but it’s the majoritarian countries where these concerns are more severe.
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Trudeau’s thesis was that these problematic outcomes should be happening in PR countries, not majoritarian ones. Given the observation we see, there is no basis to say that majoritarian electoral systems can minimize these concerns, there is simply no supporting evidence for this.
The idea that PR (at least the MMP and STV systems) would definitely lead to these outcomes is also not supported by the evidence. To be able claim that PR would cause extremism, or that majoritarian systems protect against, you would at least need to observe an association that suggests this possibility, but we do not observe any such association.
What we do have an association for is that MMP/STV are protective against democratic and social decay, while majoritarian countries inflame these issues, which is the opposite of what Trudeau believed. This does not mean causality, but it does make a causal relationship possible.
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In proportional systems, coalitions tend to form, and different political parties sharing power helps alleviate the irrational decision-making of groupthink in a majority government. In addition, politicians must always be wary about losing their spot at the top because voters can easily select alternative parties without the inhibitions of vote splitting and vote wasting. In a proportional system, there is no shielding to give a false sense of security: politicians understand that if they are complacent, a disruptive political force can easily swallow them, so they must stay vigilant and proactive about emerging political issues to keep the public satisfied. In proportional systems, complacency and corruption can be easily punished by the electorate, which keeps politicians disciplined.
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Disagree. Governments are supposed to be run by the representatives of the people. Parties are an ugly thing that are unfortunately unavoidable and we have to live with. Given that all political parties suck, the goal should be increasing the representation of people and decreasing the power of parties. PR is an attempt to do the opposite.
It's up to Pierre Pollievre to work with the government, not the other way around. But PP can't even work with people in his own party. It would've been a smart move for him to offer to form a Goverment of National Unity just after the last election (it worked out well for Clement Attlee), but PP isn't all that smart.
A lot of the things the Liberals passed in the past year have been thing the CPC have wanted. PP will never admit that and if he does he'll complain about it taking too long or not being enough or whatever. He tried being "nice" but that didn't even last a week. At his core he's a debate club kid, he always just takes the opposite side and argues. There's a lot of people in the Conservative base that hate Liberals so they support him, but he's not really a leader. He was Stephen Harper's attack dog and is unable to grow out of that role.
Any MP can put forward a private members bill. Of course if it's a good idea the governing party will probably co-opt it into one of their bills so they can take credit for it. The Liberals have been doing that with NDP proposals for a long long time. But if the goal is to get good legislation, does it matter who takes credit for it? What matters is what passes, the rest is just politics.
Each party has a whip and they pressure people to vote with the party on every bill. They can declare a free vote and everyone can vote their conscience, but that doesn't happen often. If an MP regularly votes against party lines, they might be kicked out of the party. Crossing the floor has the benefit that you're not going to be hounded by the party whip or PP constantly.
But probably a bigger factor (at least in the most recent floor crossings) is the committees. If there's a majority government, the committees are all lead by the governing party. It's not this way in a minority government and so an opposition party could hold up legislation at the committee level if they want. And this was happening. Mark Carney is a "Red Tory", that is a conservative but in the Liberal Party, but more of a Progressive Conservative, not a Reform Conservative. A lot of the things he's doing is what a lot of the Conservative MPs actually want. So imagine seeing the thing you want passed being held up in committee under the orders of your party leadership and knowing that if you cross the floor you'd be able to unblock it.
In the last year we've seen blockages occur because of party leadership (which parties can do under any system) but those blockages were cleared because we're under a community representation system where the parties don't own the seats. The people that work with the party leadership know them better that the voters and it's good to have those people have the option to leave a bad leader. These are important features of our system that a PR system doesn't have.