World Politics and Elections 2024

[Jubal]

I'm sort of surprised Trudeau isn't rolling the dice, u-turning again and just trying to push for a voting system change. It would be very obviously self serving on his part, but the NDP couldn't reasonably vote against which would give the move some political cover. I mean I don't think he necessarily has the gas in the tank or the imagination to do it now and he's probably out of time, but I feel like it would be the correct play in his situation.

[dubsartur]

I'm sort of surprised Trudeau isn't rolling the dice, u-turning again and just trying to push for a voting system change. It would be very obviously self serving on his part, but the NDP couldn't reasonably vote against which would give the move some political cover. I mean I don't think he necessarily has the gas in the tank or the imagination to do it now and he's probably out of time, but I feel like it would be the correct play in his situation.

Proportional representation would move the Liberal PARTY from 47 seats to 64 seats in the next election (they won 160 last election), but not make a majority of the country think Justin Trudeau in particular should remain PM.  And if he thought what was good for the party or the country was different from what was good for him, he would have announced his resignation in summer 2023.

Electoral reform also requires brokering between urban and rural Canadians, and Anglo Canadians and Quebecois, and neither is the PM's strength.

[Jubal]

And if he thought what was good for the party or the country was different from what was good for him, he would have announced his resignation in summer 2023.

Yeah, this is so often the problem with a certain sort of politician :/


Elsewhere, it looks like Bayrou's new government in France may be doomed before it's even formed, and the potential Austrian governing parties are struggling to work out how to cut the country's deficit (the left want wealth taxes, the right do not).

Iceland has a new progressive-leaning government led by social democrat Kristrún Frostadóttir, which is aiming for an EU referendum on entry by 2027 - as noted earlier this might ultimately also poke Norway to join if it passes. The other parties are the centre-right Liberal Reform and the centre-liberal People's Party.

Ireland meanwhile looks like it's going to shift right, with right-leaning independents instead of the Green Party propping up the main FG/FF centre-right coalition bloc. I also saw reporting recently that Ireland may be hitting energy usage issues because it's gone in too heavily on AI data centres, so they may be in for a rough time if there's an AI bubble collapse in the next year or two.

[dubsartur]

With this talk about changing leaders, a biography that foreigners should probably read is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Campbell

Electoral reform would be a very good thing and the PM could have easily implemented it during his first term.

[dubsartur]

If you are interested in electoral reform in Canada a good site is https://www.fairvote.ca/

A demonstration of the biggest issue with proportional representation is the riding of Timmins-James Bay: one of two ridings in Ontario with about the same size as the United Kingdom and a population under 100,000 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timmins%E2%80%94James_Bay_(federal_electoral_district)  But ranked ballots like in Australia would just cement the monopoly on power of the Liberals and Conservatives.

[Jubal]

If one wants to compromise on that sort of thing, you can use single transferrable vote (much like Ireland) but with some carve-outs where rather than 3-5 member seats the most outlying areas are allowed to be one-seat AV seats. This reduces proportionality a bit and tends to favour the parties that represent those areas, but it does provide them with local representation. The UK already has carve-outs for its most remote areas on other areas like constituency size: Orkney & Shetland numerically should be added to part of the mainland but is legally allowed not to be because it'd make it impossible for anyone to cover the whole area as an MP.