Electoral Reform - Blog

With the Conservatives winning a majority government by virtue of 6,102 votes and only 39.6% of votes cast, talk of electoral reform is surfacing once again. In fact, rallies were held across the country on May 14 calling for electoral reform and some form of proportional representation in Canada.

Meanwhile, a referendum in the United Kingdom – a key component of the coalition agreement between the Conservatives and the Liberal-Democrats – saw Alternative Vote go down to defeat on May 5 with 68% of voters opting in favour of first-past-the-post (FPTP). Read more »

Earlier this week Chandra and I attended a reception hosted by Equal Voice, in celebration of their Experiences mentorship program. Equal Voice is an organization that works in partnership with women in elected positions at all levels of government to encourage women across Canada to become more involved in politics.

Currently only 21% of elected officials in all levels of government in Canada are women. Just 22% of the Members of Parliament in the House of Commons are women. This ranks Canada 49th out of 189 countries, including under several developing countries. The current Federal Ministry has one of the highest proportions of women of any Cabinet, but still only 11 out of 37 (less than half) are women. Read more »

Canadian democracy is broken. Macleans’ columnists Paul Wells and Andrew Coyne don’t beat around the bush with this conclusion. They identify sham elections, an irrelevant parliament, declining democracy within political parties, the triumph of tactics over policy, and the lack of decorum in politics as the symptoms of our democratic distress.

But the two columnists with notoriously different world views agree not only on the diagnosis, but on some possible cures. Read more »

Tomorrow’s the day! The BC referendum on STV. For those who still haven’t made up their minds, I recommend a little last minute reading to help you decide. Read more »

Last week I attended a conference sponsored by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, “Till Elections Do Us Part: What Makes a Coalition Government Work?” The event brought European and Canadian scholars and members of parliament together in a dialogue about creating and maintaining coalition governments, including lessons learned from Canada’s pre-Christmas experiment with a coalition.

The dialogue was extremely informative, and the comparative insights provided a lot of food for thought. It was particularly useful to view Canada’s system through outside eyes, and German journalist Gerd Braune provided a wakeup call to Canadians that while we smugly view our system as the best in the world, seen from another perspective our system is rather dysfunctional! Read more »