toraerach
Active Member
I do not see whats so wrong with one party having power for 4 years???
Even if such Parties act in a stupid way they in the end face an embarrassing or crushing defeat.
Coalitions and such cannot work due to our electoral system. It would make these governments fragile. Plus having a coalition of Ndp'ers and Block members is something I think we should avoid.
However I don't want the electoral system to change because I hate the NDP... Rather Selfish of me, but...
What's wrong is that a government without the support of the people is undemocratic. A majority government that only received 37% of the vote (for example, the NDP victory in the 1990 Ontario election) is completely undemocratic and cannot represent the people. Extended over a four year term, an unpopular government can cause a lot of damage (think Bush in his final few years) or just result in apathy and disengagement by the people from democratic institutions.
As for electoral reform, I think it is necessary and I do think your selfishness here is a huge affront to the 2.5 million Canadians who voted NDP in the last election. Why should they not have their say? Because they disagree with you? In any democracy there will be people who you disagree with or hate.
With a more proportional system our whole party system will have to re-organize itself. The Bloc, for example, would lose all of those extra seats it doesn't deserve. I think you would also see a migration of more radical elements in both the NDP and Conservatives to smaller parties that would not have to rely on concentrated regional support, allowing both parties to compromise more in coallitions. For example, look at the way the SPD and Die Linke cater to two different leftist elements in Germany - though that relationship is much more complex, I could see a WASG-esque party splitting from the NDP if electoral success was possible. Without a PDS-like force in Canadian politics, I don't know if they could be as successful as Die Linke though.
The point here being that we cannot graft today's political parties or dynamics on to a hypothetical reformed system where co-operation is expected and encouraged. I don't think Canadians are as polarized as Italians or Israelis, and I don't think we would put up with the antics that go on there (as they inevitibly come up whenever electoral reform does). There are many countries the world over that are able to balance democracy and stability a bit better than we are. To use the German example again, the coalition government there represents 52% of the people and has been in power since 2005. To put that in perspective, the last time a Canadian government had that much support was in the 1984 election (the PCs got 50.03% of the vote). Before that, you have to go back to the PC victory in 1958 who had that much popular support. Only a very small fraction of Canadian governments have won with the support of a majority of Canadians - only two in the past fifty years.