Tag Archives: Fair Vote Canada

Squeezing Discourse At The Debate Level

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I won’t lie. When I came across a Tweet that read: Pg 41. RT @kady: Btw, given the May kerfuffle, an interesting paper on electoral debate reform (warning: PDF): http://bit.ly/fF1s7A #elxn41 from @garryoakgirl I understood it as ‘an interesting paper on electoral reform’. What with being the resident expert on electoral reform and all that. Imagine my disappointment when I went to all the trouble of downloading it, and sat to read it with red pen and highlighter in hand only to discover it was in fact a 60-odd page report written by Michelle Rogers at Queen’s University’s Centre For The Study of Democracy on ‘electoral debate reform’.

Oh man, what a waste of paper and toner! Debates are debates, right? I’m all about the electoral reform, the complete package. Full on proportional representation, etc., etc.

Yeah well, I defy anyone to take a look at Ms. Rogers’ report and not have their blood boiling by page 23. One might draw a line, if one were so inclined and had a writing utensil and straight edge, between our lack of truly representational government and our lack of democratic leaders debates. It might be a bit of a stretch but I don’t think it unreasonable to suggest that stifling wider debate on the campaign trail leads to a narrower discussion of issues after the election. If we don’t hear all the voices out there asking for our votes, how can we make an informed decision when casting our ballots? And if we don’t make an informed decision when casting our ballots, how can we get truly representative government?

And how do I make a seamless transition from the above paragraph to my overview of the report? Let’s pretend I just did.

In televised debates, there are 3 interests to be served. The party/candidate whose main concern is being represented fairly and delivering an appealing, compelling persona that will increase voters’ positive perception of them and the likelihood of securing their vote. There’s the media who want good television, must see TV. And finally, the public.

All three coming together in the hopes of heightened public awareness and engagement in the political process.

And yet… and yet, the numbers in terms of voter turnout suggest that’s not happening. Was it something we said? Apathy and cynicism rather then engagement reigns.

Perhaps it’s because in the triumvirate of interests that constitute televised debates, the public is pretty well an afterthought. The logistics of electoral debates – the whens, wheres, the whos, the how manys — are ironed out far from the voters’ view, behind closed doors between what is called the Broadcast Consortium and representatives of the parties. The parties, of course, said Broadcast Consortium deems worthy of inclusion. Two of the three stakeholders, to use the parlance of our times, in the debates process decide on everything while the third gets to watch the result on TV. Maybe we’ll let you ask a question or two, heavily vetted naturally.

How does that arrangement foster democracy and participation? As we witnessed last year during Toronto’s mayoral campaign, television networks arbitrarily and summarily determined who were to be considered viable or serious candidates with little reasoning beyond, well, we’ve heard of them before or somebody who’s somebody has heard of them before. From the very beginning. There was no winnowing down along the way. No clicking the refresh button to incorporate any changes on the campaign landscape. Probably because the only changes that happened happened within the bubble of contenders the media created from the outset. It was all self-fulfilling because it’s designed to be self-fulfilling.

Other countries have independent, non-partisan bodies in place to deal with political debates. A cross section of the public that isn’t made up entirely of network executives and backroom politicos. The intention is to designate a group to make decisions based on what’s best for all parties involved, politicians, media and voters, not just the most powerful of the three.

Such a body was suggested way back in the 90s in a report done for the Lortie Commission. Yet it and a number of other recommendations never made it to the final cut which ostensibly upheld the status quo. Established parties and network executives know best. Nothing to see here, carry on about your business, ladies and gentlemen. A surprise result, I know, for a government commission.

And here we are, nearly 20 years later and the debate still continues to be framed by very narrow special interests. Elizabeth May’s exclusion from the leadership debate this week was not the first time for the Green Party, nor was it in 2008. Way back in 1988 after the election that year, the party took the CBC et al to court because it had been turned away from the leaders’ debate at that time. It lost and that seems to be the measure we’re still using to keep them from the table.

But much has changed since then. The Green Party suggested a method that could be used to determine eligibility which seems fair and reasonable. A 3 of 4 qualifying scheme, like determining CanCon. To be included in a televised leaders debate a party must possess 3 of either i) having an elected MP; ii) be running candidates in all ridings; iii) be federally funded; iv) have at least 5% support in national opinion polls. Now, I’d reduce it even further and say that inclusion would be predicted on having 2 of these 3: an elected MP or running candidates in all ridings or be federally funded since funding is based on achieving a certain percentage of the popular vote.

This idea we tightly hold onto of the Green Party being fringe simply comes from the result of our antiquated and hopelessly undemocratic first-past-the-post electoral system. Where true proportional representation is in force, the Greens are often times a serious factor in the government make-up. The latest evidence of that occurred last weekend in Germany where, in state elections, Baden-Württemberg Green Party leader, Winfried Kretschmann, became the first ever Green Premier.

The continued marginalization of the Greens in our country from participating fully in the political discourse by small vested interests intent on maintaining the status quo is a growing blot on our democracy. Adherence to old ways of doing things simply because that’s the way we’ve always done them regardless of the obvious deleterious effects seems nothing short of determinedly pathological. Our way of doing politics as it stands presently is itself becoming fringe.

There is a better way. We know it. We can show it and see it at work around us. Yet we insist on continuing along a path that can only lead to continued cynicism, apathy and disillusion.

— greenly submitted by Urban Sophisticat

When The Writ Comes Down

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Dear Federal Politicians,

We here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke don’t tend to write about you too often. Partly it’s because you seem so far away and distant from us but mostly because your behaviour has been nothing short of reprehensible for the past five years or so. Like watching a version of Gossip Girl set in an exclusive boys school.

But it seems that unless we are prepared to leave the country for the next month and half (which, if this kind of spring weather keeps up, wouldn’t be a bad idea) there’s no ignoring you.  So think of this little missive as some friendly advice.  A How To manual offering tips and coaching on How To best woo us and secure our votes.

It’s relatively simple, really. How about running on a healthy, vibrant, strong city platform? As has been regularly pointed out, some 80% of Canadians live in urban centres. Now, to be fair, I think those numbers are a little misleading because if I understand correctly that’s based on the definition of ‘urban’ as non-agricultural centres. Any old shithole with more than 10, 000 people and, let’s face it, only hillbillies live in places with 10, 000 people.

So I’ve done some quick number crunching in order to provide you with a more realistic picture.

According to the 2006 census (of the long form type, I imagine), just over 16 million Canadians live in cities and city regions of more than half a million people. That’s roughly half of the country’s population. Throw in another 2.65 million who dwell in places with more than 250 thousand people, and another 2.84 million from cities of a 100k+, and that’s roughly 21.5 million Canadians living in cities with populations of more than 100, 000.

That’d be about 2/3s of us. A healthy majority to tap into if you’re looking at it from a strategic standpoint. It would also challenge the regional blocks that have taken hold of our system, pitting west against east, Quebec against the rest of us and maybe even the urban-suburban divide that is so ably exploited right now. No city can be strong if only a part of it is strong.

So Toronto might realize that it has much more in common with Calgary than it does with Backwarddumptown, Ontario. And Calgary would see that, language aside, Montrealers share a similar view of the world since they live, first, in a big city and only second in a different province. Vancouver, well, it doesn’t care right now because they are dreaming of a Stanley Cup but I don’t think they would take exception to my theory on this.

We’re a big hunk of voters, is what I’m saying, us city folk. Lining up a bunch of us under your banner would go a long way to helping form a government, you federal politicians. Maybe even a majority, you know what I’m saying? What percentage of the 66% of us would you need to secure that? I’m asking because I don’t know. You’re the experts. I shouldn’t have to do all the work for you.

Except, of course, it doesn’t work like that. Because we are still subject to an antiquated first-past-the-post, disproportionally representational electoral system that has not been significantly altered since Confederation, nearly 150 years ago when almost all of us were still fucking farmers! How is that possible? We bitch and moan about how turned off politics we are, how little our votes count, the degree of disregard our elected officials hold us in, the apathy, the cynicism and yet we continue to allow ourselves to be undemocratically represented. Of course we’re apathetic. For most of us, our votes don’t count and the act of voting is an empty exercise. Of course our politicians cynically disregard the majority of us. They don’t need a majority of us to be able to form a government even a so-called majority government.

This system of ours that we so proudly hail as a model of democracy the oppressed of the world should fight to emulate doesn’t really hold up in the modern light as something  truly democratic. It enables politicians to ignore sizeable portions of the population by simply pandering heavily to small regional hot spots.  For the past 5 years we’ve had a government in Ottawa that has maintained power without a single representative in the country’s 3 largest metropolitan centres. So is it at all surprising that we continue to languish without a national transit strategy or national housing strategy, where both these are needed most in the places with no voice in the government?

OK, so maybe what we should be looking for, those 60+% of us who never actually elected our governments in Ottawa, is a party dedicated to the cause of electoral reform.  Let’s all read up and get familiar with the work being done at Fair Vote Canada. Learn about true proportional representation, the benefits and the ways in which we can go about achieving it. Without it, nothing much is really going to change and we all just might end up agreeing with the Conservatives that this was an unnecessary process. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

It’s time we stopped that from happening.

— urbanly submitted by Urban Sophisticat

Voting Reform’s Easy. You’re Just Lazy.

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As the newly self-appointed electoral reform voice here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke, my first task is to do the exact opposite of what advocacy advocates would advise doing. I am going to attack and deride the very people whose opinion I plan to sway. I fully expect the powers that be over at RaBIT and Fair Vote Canada to be in contact with me soon asking my assistance in helping plan strategy and pen informational publications.

You see, to my mind the biggest obstacle to having a serious debate about the need to change the way we elect our governments is the prevailing disinterest in the subject on the part of the general public. Lulled into a disquieted slumber by those who abhor change or who benefit greatly from the status quo, too many voters wave off any discussion about voting reform as just more politics. Politics, politics, politics.

It’s this apathetic indifference that supporters of our current, first-past-the-post, winner-take-all system exploit. Their main argument in favour of how we do things now revolves around stability. Our system tends to elect majority governments despite rarely an absolute majority actually voting for the winning party and with majority governments comes 4 years or so of one-party, stable governing. Go back to sleep, public. We’ll wake you again in 4 years or so.

Without stable majority governments, the argument goes, we exist on the brink of chaos. Look at Italy! And disregard all the other European countries that have moved on to various forms of real proportional representation. Or look at our own situation in Canada for the past 7 years. Gridlock rife with more partisan bickering than actual governance. Never mind that it’s really the lure of an oh-so-close majority situation that drives the Harper Government. (Huh. My spell check just changed ‘Canadian’ Government to ‘Harper’ Government. Strange). That counter-intuitively undemocratic 40% popular vote bar that would elect them over 50% of the seats and 100% control of the government.

Screw democracy. We need stability.

So much is made of minority governments leading to an increased number of unnecessary elections. How, without the constancy of majority governments, we’ll be dragged incessantly to the polls, against our collective wills, like the Chinese Communist Long March of 1934/5, through snow (bad), the heat of summer (bad), the Christmas season (really, really bad). Spring’s OK but can we go later when the weather’s better but not too good because the bright sunshine and blue skies absolutely drains me of my will to vote.

Since when have elections become such an onerous burden to bear? What exactly is it about them that makes the public feel so put upon? Is it because we have to actually pay attention to what’s going on, to what our politicians are saying? We don’t. Nobody forces us to participate. Rarely does political coverage preempt Canadian Idol or Celebrity Apprentice. We can all go about our regular routines, paying absolutely no attention to that stranger at our door, offering more junk mail and wanting to know what we think about the long form census.

To walk amongst the tall reeds of cliché for a moment, because that’s what one does with clichés, walk amongst the tall reeds, carrying stones in your coat pocket, people are dying out there for the right of self-determination that comes with free and fair elections. Not figuratively dying. Literally dying. And we get our noses out of joint if we have to go vote more than every other year? OMG, if a federal election gets called in the spring that means Ontarians will be going to the polls 3 times in one year by the time the scheduled provincial election is done in October! The horror! The horror!

Why do you always end up making me yell at you, people? I just wanted to talk about electoral reform, is all. There is a better way to elect our representatives at every level of government.

Our current method is not only not working, it is robbing us of true democracy where a minority of voters regularly elects a majority government that represents far less than half of us. No wonder so many of us are jaded with politics, apathetic and figure our votes don’t matter. More often than not, they don’t. So why bother? Why bother even following along?

So the system itself makes us sick of it.

None of it, however, is set in stone. Nowhere is it written that we have to vote like we do, conduct elections like we do. Plenty of countries and jurisdictions have moved on to other, fairer ways of electing their representatives and the sky hasn’t fallen or the earth stopped revolving around the sun. Our very leaders who ask us to cast ballots for them in a fundamentally anti-democratic fashion in all likelihood assumed the top job of their respective parties through alternative voting or ranked ballots. There is a disconnect there that should disturb us all.

But those already in power are not going to step up and start the discussion about electoral reform. Reform that would very possibly divest them of the absolutism that they have grown to expect and demand. We have to get the ball rolling. We have to get excited again (or maybe for the first time) about politics and the opportunity to make real, positive change.

We have to stop being idle and pointing at others for the reason we aren’t engaged. It’s a cop out and a drag, man. Wake up, sleepyheads. Let’s take our politics back.

— rousingly submitted by Urban Sophisticat