Feds Address Electoral Reform
Ottawa, Ont. – The Trudeau government today established an all-party parliamentary committee on electoral reform.
It will consist of 10 members of parliament – six Liberals, three Conservatives and one New Democrat. It will also include a representative from both the Bloc Quebecois and the Green Party who can participate in meetings but not vote.
The committee has been asked to identify and study a number of different voting systems – such as preferential ballots and proportional representation- to replace the first-past-the-post system.
The government has also asked that the committee consider the issues of mandatory voting and online voting and have encouraged MPs to gather feedback by hosting town halls across the country.
The committee has been asked to table its report by December 1, 2016.
“The Government is committed to ensuring that Canadians see real change to the way politics and government work,” said Canada’s Minister of Democratic Institutions Maryam Monsef.
“We will focus on listening to Canadians across our diverse society. Parliamentarians will need to set aside narrow partisan interests and engage in a thoughtful and substantive dialogue with each other and citizens deserve that kind of leadership from their Parliament.”
Since Confederation, there have been only six federal elections where the party forming government has had more than 50% of the popular vote.
The Trudeau Liberals for example received just 39.5% of the vote but still won a majority of seats in last fall’s election.
The NDP have been calling for government action on the issue.
Skeena-Bulkley Valley MP Nathan Cullen told 250News “time was of the essence” in order to have a new voting system in place in time for the next federal election.
The NDP favour proportional representation – a system that elects MPs based on the percentage of votes they receive.
The Liberals are believed to favour a ranked balloting system while the Conservatives would like to hold a national referendum on the issue.
Comments
mandatory voting will not accomplish anything…
sure you get the peopel to the polling stations
then they spoil the ballot,
so what is accomplished…
NOTHING
on line voting…how are they going to be able to confirm the faceless person on the other end of the internet is actually who they say they are?
Honest I am who I say I am…really sire!
yea right I see a potential for abuse of the system there.
what we have works, it isn’t broke, so leave it alone.
I agree. Despite the results of the last election, which certainly weren’t what I was hoping for, I don’t see why we should change the set up we’ve got.
It’s certainly NOT going to be more ‘democratic’ changing it to what either the Liberals or NDP favour. No wonder they both fear putting their proposals to the electorate in a national referendum after there’s been a full discussion of them.
And if they want to make voting mandatory then there should be “None of the Above” printed on every ballot below the list of candidates names, and a place for the voter to make that his choice if he or she doesn’t like the other choices offered. Why should anyone feel they have to vote for someone to represent them from a prepared list presented by political Parties? Especially when the ‘policy’ of all the existing Parties is virtually the same, and the only choice is the ‘method’ by which it will be imposed on us?
There isn’t even proportional representation on the committee, it is first past the post representation
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