I love STV but imho it just doesn’t work for Canada. We have too many massive wilderness ridings. If you had a heavily-urbanized province like if Southern Ontario was its own province, I’d say it would be the perfect system for that area.
Here’s why: The northern areas of every province are extremely low-population and are enormous. For example, if BC had 5-seat-riding STV federally, the entire province north of Kamloops would be one massive riding. It’s possible all their MPs would be from the populated end of the riding, so that people in the ass-end of the riding live over 1000km from their “representative”. Ontario would look similar - Northern Ontario is probably the most sparsely-populated area outside of the Territories. That’s not an acceptable outcome – being 1000km from your MP means you are not represented.
Contrast this vs Mixed Member Proportional, where local ridings still exist - under MMP, 2/3 of the seats are normal-ass ridings that work exactly like we do today. Then we group them together in “regions” and back-fill the most popular party-members within that region to make it proportional. A lot of people get upset about non-local representatives, or “unelected party staffer MPs” in MMP, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
The plan that was floated for BC is actually really awesome – imho it should be applied Canada-wide. It’s basically a vanilla MMP plan but there are details that do great work to mitigate the main complaints about MMP:
Take the map of Canada and carve it up into regions of 14 ridings (obviously for provinces with less than 14 ridings, just take the whole province). These are our “regions”. So, for example:
Saskatchewan is one "region"
Peel Region (Mississauga + Brampton + nearby towns & exurbs) is one “region”.
Niagara Peninsula (including Hamilton) is one “region”.
A big city like Montreal would probably be 3 different electoral “regions”.
Within each Region we have 9 ridings (or 2/3 of the total number of Seats if the Region is smaller than 14 seats). Those are normal-ass elections. So Calgary Centre still has its own MP, and so do more remote areas like Gaspésie—Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine. These ridings are only about 50% larger then our current ridings.
The other 5 Seats within the Region are backfill seats, that are used to fill up the Region until the proportion of party-members roughly matches their % of the vote within the Region. So even though the back-fill people don’t represent a riding, they’re still somewhat local. Flin Flon’s non-riding members are still from Manitoba. People in Markham will still have a local MP, but also will have regional MPs from the rest of York. So locality is still good for the regional representatives, and we have a proper local riding MP, we’re not losing that guarantee of locality.
Avoid the “nobody elected this asshole” problem with open-lists. The ballot is simple, it has 2 sections:
A section to pick your local MP, which is exactly as it is today. Pick 1 person here.
A section to vote for your regional MP, grouped by party, which has multiple options per-party. Pick 1 person here. As a side-effect the person you select here is also your party PR vote.
So, we figure out how many seats to back-fill by % of votes per-party (on the regional section) - so if there are 14 seats in a Region, and one party gets half of the regional MP votes, got 5 local seats? They’ll get 2 Regional seats. And which of their Regional candidates get those 2 seats? The 2 that got the most votes.
So it’s not like they’re unelected. They still have to be the most popular people within their party and within the region.
So let’s think a concrete example - imagine Southeastern Quebec region, which includes Quebec City. Generally not a very Red area except for the city itself. The Liberals continue to run Steven Guilbeault in Quebec City itself as a local MP, but to drum up interest they also run Stephane Dion and Joël Lightbound as regional candidates in the Quebec City regional area, including a massive amount of rural and suburban area they expect to get a little support from but generally lose. To pad out the rest of the list, they also run Ricky the Pigfucker as a regional candidate. Now, this is an open list - if the Liberal voters outside of Quebec City really hate Dion, they can still vote for Ricky. And so instead of the expected three MPs for the Quebec region being Guilbuealt (elected directly by Quebec City), Dion, and Lightbound, it’s an upset and they get Guilbeault, Dion, and Ricky the Pigfucker.
And Independants “I don’t want to run as a party” types? They can still run as a local riding MP. They’re not frozen out like most people think of about in “Proportional systems” that are very “party-oriented”.
It’s not a perfect system. It’s very party-oriented in the way that STV isn’t. It’s weirdly complicated. But it works. It’s used IRL in real first-world countries like Germany and New Zealand and Scotland. There’s lots of fiddly knobs to argue about like whether it’s okay to add more top-up MPs beyond the fixed size to preserve proportionality (true-MMP vs AMS - personally I’m on the fixed-size side AKA AMS) But with Canada’s geographic considerations, I strongly think it’s our best option.
Right? Seems like there are ways they could make that less one sided. “Unnamed Canadian man killed in Cancun; Mexican authorities say he had a record of gang activity”. And the preview contradicts the headline – was he killed at the resort or at a mall?
I have trouble believing that petition matters since it reads like business as usual for the CPC. The only thing that stands out is that it doesn’t specifically call out the carbon tax.
I was thinking it’s not too late but the Bloc would never support a system with PR outcomes since it’s the FPTP system that gives regional-intense groups like them outsized power.
A shame. I still insist that a regional-based open-list MMP would be the ideal fit for Canada.
The problem is that 70 years ago a massive baby-boom happened and there aren’t enough people in Canada to keep the economy and healthcare system running properly as those people all become systemic burdens. Immigration is the only thing that keeps our demographic system from being as upside-down as every other 1st-world country.
And student-immigration is actually the best kind, because they’re young and healthy and already finished the expensive free-education-schooling-years and are ready to go right into the workforce after they dump a crapload of money into the educational economy.
The problem, of course, is that in order to make this work, you have to make sure there’s enough housing. And instead, we stopped building government-funded housing 30 years ago, and we let municipalities declare new housing basically illegal (well, it’s legal if you Know A Guy, which is why all the builders are mobsters now). And also we don’t have enough people to build as much as we need.
So yeah, the Fed has some good ideas and a reasonable top-level economic plan but they’ve screwed up the details catastrophically.
Basically, the “no immigration” path is either Logan’s Run or every young person gets taxed to the gills as we try to support an elder-heavy country on an increasingly anemic economy. How much “opportunity” does that sound like for your kids?
I love the concept but that gameplay looks hella repetitive. Combined with a black and white art style that could get tiring, I’m worried about longevity.
This. They could’ve offered literally any other plan, like saying “we’re charging fuel-burning home hearing per BTU so oil doesn’t cost much more than natural gas and offering more subsidies for heat pumps.” or something.
I think I saw some co-op in the Golden Axe. If they lean into the multiplayer I could see it being good fun as a co-op soulslike without the oppressive grimdark atmosphere that tends to define the genre.
Shinobi looks cool, but there are enough amazing pixel-art platformers out there already.
No interest in Streets of Rage.
Crazy Taxi looks like Crazy Taxi. Which is neat but I don’t really have nostalgia for that.
I’m mostly disappointed they missed how awesome Armored Core 6 was and didn’t jump onto that bandwagon with a new Virtual On game.
Powerstone 2 was basically a Super Smash Bros-style 4-player fighting party-game but with the 3D-platformer gameplay of a Wrestlemania game. Instead of Smash Balls, there were a set of “Stones” where you’d get an ultimate if you got 3 of them. Very fun party/fighting game, much like Smash.