Regular readers, all two
or three of you, will know that I have had little to say here at
Democracy Under Fire during the recent election period, the manure
being spread was simply too deep for this old fellow to wade through.
Now that the BS is gradually subsiding I thought I would return to
examining our voting system based upon the results from this recent
attempt to bring us 'fair' representation to the House of Commons.
First lets dissect the
results and the campaign funding involved in that....
Liberals 157 seats,
5,915,950 votes, 33.1 per cent of the popular vote
Conservative 121 seats,
6,155,662 votes, 34.4 per cent of the popular vote
Bloc Québécois 32 seats,
1,376,135 votes (7.7 per cent)
New Democrats 24 seats,
2,849,214 votes (15.9 per cent)
Greens 3 seats, 1,162,361
votes (6.5 per cent)
Others 1 seat, 383,373
votes (2.1%)
It can be clearly seen
that the Block is strongly over represented and both the Greens and
the NDP are under represented if representation by popular vote is
taken into consideration. Clearly there is a strong influence to
national results by the regional concentration of votes in any
particular region, this is further reinforced by the Conservative
sweep of Alberta and Saskatchewan (100% representation from 55% of
votes in Alberta)
There will be no doubt a
number of folks saying if this were proportional voting the results
would be this xx, but I will not do that here because I believe that
if folks knew that their vote for a particular candidate would not be
'wasted' by the first past the post system they may well vote
differently.
Moving on to the influence
of 'funding' upon any particular individual or their party its much
more difficult to pin down, clearly the various political partys
believe it has a great deal to do with the results or why else would
some of them be spending millions of (partly refundable) dollars on
(often questionable) advertising. This in addition the the
substantial refund they get at the riding level.
Here are some
of the numbers on that (just from April 1 to June 30 of this
year).....
Conservatives raised $8.5
million from 53,000 donors.
Liberals raised $5 million
from 41,500 donors
NDP raised $2.65 million
from 21,000 donors
Greens raised 2.15 million
from 21,000 donors.
The final numbers not yet
available obviously will be much more revealing but I suspect that
the amount of money spent has far less influence on the results than
the fundraising gurus would have us, and their partys, believe.
Obviously those running for election must have the ability to let the
public know about their 'platform' but spending millions on political
advertising much of which is spent slagging the opposition rather
than outlining their own beliefs, is but BS no matter who's paying
for it.
NOTE
The election expenses
reimbursement subsidizes 50% of the national campaign expenses of any
party that obtains at least 2 per cent support, or at least 5 per
cent in the ridings (electoral districts) in which they presented
candidates.
Riding organizations are
also reimbursed 60% of all expenses incurred by their candidates in
each riding where they obtained at least 10% of the votes, plus 100%
of allowable "personal expenses". There does not seem to be
any restrictions on how those 'returned' funds are then used.
A final thought here on
this, I believe that the previous per vote subsidy of $1.53–$2.04
previously paid to every registered federal political party based
upon their previous election results prior to 2015 when Harper
discontinued it was a much fairer way of ensuring that partys had a
way of getting the word out. Those electors who were not inclined to
send thousands to the party of their choice still got to support the
electoral process where unfortunately the almighty dollar has far too
much influence.
Having looked at some of
the various voting systems over the past few years some
of which I have explored in detail on these pages I still dont
know if any of the proposed alternatives are a step forward or an
invitation to further problems. I suspect there will be further
discussion about this in the coming couple of years based upon the
results outlined above.
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