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Currently viewing articles tagged with Proportional Representation.
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Of Trial Balloons and Hot Air: Political Mergers in the News
The chattering classes are making much of what some claim to be a mooted prospective Liberal-NDP merger. The story is making its way onto editorial and front pages and into the priority news lineup. Is there any virtue in exploring the idea?
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A Vote That Might Really Change Something
On October 10, Ontarians will go the polls in their first fixed-date election, just one of a host of allegedly modernizing innovations introduced by the McGuinty Liberal government. But election day will also offer voters a chance to comment on a much more radical and far-reaching proposal to alter Ontario’s electoral process; for there will also be a referendum on the provincial voting system.
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Progressives must rally behind the STV-PR referendum in BC
On election day this May, B.C. voters will decide whether to adopt a form of proportional representation. B.C.’s right-wing Liberal government did the unthinkable and created a Citizens’ Assembly, a randomly chosen body with participants from across the province that would look critically at the voting system and make a recommendation about possibly changing it.
The CA was a pretty good model of deliberative democracy. Participants had a chance to study different voting systems, discuss and debate their effects amongst themselves, and hear from experts, activists and average citizens in public hearings held across the province. In the end, they did recommend a change to a form of PR called the Single Transferable Vote (STV). Given the recent groundswell of support for PR from the B.C. NDP, the labour movement, the Greens, the women’s movements and many others, the recommendation should have a lot of support.
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The Uncertain Path to PR
The election of a minority Liberal government in the June federal election has created a historic opportunity to push democratic reform in Canada, specifically dumping our unrepresentative, uncompetitive first-past-the-post voting system for some form of proportional representation. While there have been minority governments before — throughout the 1960s, from 1972-74 and in 1979 — this is the first time since Mackenzie King’s farmer/labour-supported Liberal minority government of 1921 that a number of key political parties favour at least considering PR.
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