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Don't Vote. It Only Encourages Them
February 1, 2017 - 3:54pm
I have voted (NDP) all my life. But no more. Or at least not until we have proportional representation.
Trudeau's about face on electoral reform was the last straw.
I'm not interested in preferential or mixed member nonsense. I want it simple. If a party gets 42% of the vote they should get 42% of the seats.
Does that mean boycott an imperfect democracy in the hope that it will improve? Surely the best way to bring in PR would be to elect an imperfect NDP government.
and it starts already
Others will have to do it then. I gave up my NDP membership because no provincial NDP government moved on PR. I'm sick and tired of my vote not counting.
It started with the pipelines, and keeping the Saudi arms deal.
But on this issue, having a choice to vote also means having a choice to not vote. I don't try to invalidate that, and the flip side is I don't buy arguments that voting is inherently invalid.
That's not my argument.
I know (despite the thread title). I got that from your last sentence. I was answering montrealer.
huh find your position strange. Trudeau won't bring in PR so you gave up your NDP membership.
is this a new development for you? your feverent support of PR i mean?
i've not seen you post before so i went back through your entire posting history. it's interesting on lot's of levels.
in this case you've not mentioned a word on PR here.
Let me just say that I will never vote for a party that does not stand for electoral reform. I will not vote for one I do not believe means it when they make the promise.
Yes, I do believe that had the NDP won we would have electoral reform.
I see no point punishing the NDP for the broken promise of the Liberals.
I certainly would not vote for an NDP provincial party that promised electoral reform and got elected only to ignore the promise. That has not yet happened in my province.
i knew there was somethin going on all of sudden pookie is here bashing Mulcair and this osci being weird about punishing NDP cause the Liberals won't go PR.....lmao
New Democrats Call Trudeau A 'Liar'
With or without a referendum?
If you run on a platform you don't need a referendum.
Impossible to say. A referendum could have been made necessary due to political pressure. They would not have necessarily needed one given the NDP ran on this and it has been long term policy. They could have decided to have one anyway though. They might have brought it in with a promise to have a referendum after trying it for a term.
If you don't vote or take part in the democratic process, you shouldn't complain when things go to hell in a hand-basket.
Just look in the USA when people didn't vote, and wound up with Trump as President.
Politics has been called the art of the possible, not the art of the ideal.
Please explain how you think that applies to the conversation -- could apply in a couple ways and I want to understand you.
I am disappointed that, yet another, promise is broken, but not surprised.
I have always favoured PR but now it's top priority for me.
I'm not punishing the NDP. It's just that I won't vote or make donations to any party until we have PR.
I used to believe that too. But the system is NOT democratic. I will no longer be bullied into thinking that it is.
There is a problem of logic in your statements I think.
I can follow, although not agree with, the idea that you might not participate in voting given the distortion. I disagree with the facile statement that you cannot complain if you don't vote. Of course you can.
But why you would not donate money to the organizations who want to change the thing you don't like does not add up. Why punish the NDP, Greens, or BQ by refusing support when they promise to changing the thing you don't like? Why punish them for the broken promise of another party?
How do you expect an organization trying to change somethign to succeed if you deny they support becuase you want the same change that they want? You then, sorry to say, by making a decision to withold support becuase of this reason, you become an enabler to the system you do not like and part of the problem. My point is if you do not support for any other reason then you are not invovled but if you deny support exactly for this reason then you are part of the problem.
As former NDP leader Audrey McLaughlin always said "You must first become what you seek to change"
Yeah, you could say I'm part of the problem. But I'll contend that political parties taking part in an undemocratic process are a bigger part of the problem. They give legitimacy to the process. And so did I for most of my life. No more.
Take away their legitimacy by not running candidates in the next election. I know that's political anathema for operatives but show me a better way.
Taking away the support for the people trying to make a change and them blaming them is hardly a plan. It is hard to make change. Dealing with the effect of those who give up and walk away makes those who want a change not to want to bother. By withdrawing you don't send any message other than you don't care.
I don't agree with the reasoning, but the bottom line is that it is no one else's vote.
I'll speak against campaigns to convince people to not vote, but when it comes to a person's individual decision on something like this, and how someone reaches that decision, it is not really our business, and I wouldn't dismiss it as not caring.
There is a logic in being fed up to the point that you don't want to support any party at all, even the party that promises real reform.
A couple things-- Accuracy of words is important.
First, there is a huge distinction between what you think and the message you send. I am not saying he is not caring-- I am saying that is the message sent, how it is interpreted and the effect it has. His personal thinking? Well he decides if this is the message he wants to send and of course that is his right.
Second, I absolutely could not object forcefully enough to your statement becuase it is ridiculous to say this is none of our business. What is an ocsi? OCSI is a persona on a web site advocating a point of view. Of course it is our business. He came here to share -- to promote, presumably to discuss. If he wanted this idea to be private all he had to do was not post it publicly for discussion. Now you criticize me for taking him up on it and commenting about the effectiveness and message it sends.
To say this is his individual decision that he alone has a right to is simply laughable. I am not debating the opinion of whoever OCSI is, I am responding on a political website to what a person is advocating and has specifically started a thread to discuss.
Finally the logoc to being fed up is not logic at all. Being fed up is an emotional response. And it can be understandable without needing to be logical. Now I do not engage with people personally who feel this way as they have a right to their emotions and decisions, unless they invite me to consider it as an effective strategy for political action. I will respond to a person who presents this, not as an understandable emotional response, but as a plan that is being promoted to others.
Get real. Please.
Sean, there are others on this site who reject the institution of voting. I disagree, but they have every right to share their views.
ocsi's position seems very personal, and borne out of frustration over a decision which I think most of us also find frustrating. Again, I disagree with the decision, and I said so. But it isn't your vote, or mine. And I don't see "not caring" here at all.I see a difficult decision.
I think the obsession with PR is a distraction and there are better ways to improve our democracy that do not involve our voting system. I still moderately support Dion's P3 model of PR but most posters here were against it or disinterested. That means Trudeau is right. There is no consensus. Even supporters of PR are particular about which PR model they support. At one point the NDP was against a referendum. There is no groundswell of desire amongst Canadians for PR. This will have little to no impact on Trudeau's electability in 2019. Obviously this issue has not grabbed the attention of Canadians.
The NDP has to find the issue(s) that matter most to Canadians, or that Canadians can be persuaded to care passionately about, and focus on those. PR is not one of them. Speaking of which, the NDP had lots of time to focus on educating the public on electoral reform in the year before the election. They didn't do it then and they haven't done it since. They promoted PR a bit, but that isn't the same thing. Promoters claim that if someone answers "yes" to the question "should the number of seats a party gets reflect the number of votes they got" means someone supports PR. That's not the case. That's like the PQ's "sovereignty association" question.
Furthermore if the NDP had won a majority I believe that federally they would have forced a PR system on us in a heartbeat if they thought it would give them the most power going forward. They would have ditched it equally quickly if they decided they could win elections without it or they thought it would benefit their opponents more than themselves. Notley doesn't want PR in Alberta because the Conservatives and Wildrose would easily have the power to block her every move.
Voting to me matters because it kept Harper out. A few more people staying home and we could have been looking at another four years of him. Hate Trudeau as much as you like, he is still better than Harper. That might be damning with faint praise but it is still true.
Many people here think Mulcair would have been a better PM but that is just a matter of opinion. I think the NDP would have been a disaster and would have been destroyed in 2019. We will never know because they didn't win.
Not voting doesn't delegitimize the system. The conclusion is that those people are not interested in politics. Many conclude we are better off if they don't vote because they are ill-informed. I'm betting that would hold true even if only 20% of people were voting.
The problem isn't the electoral system. The problem is getting enough Canadians to oppose the excesses of neoliberalism and getting a political party to oppose neoliberalism. Under those circumstances FPTP benefits progressives just as FPTP benefits Notley in Alberta.
If they had campaigned on that promise they would have had a mandate to do just that. There is nothing forced about it. And unlike Trudeau's latest decision, it is not a question of "the most power". As Nathan Cullen pointed out, under PR the NDP would not have had such major gains in Quebec as they did. It is a matter of what is best for the country.
Trudeau most certainly got votes based on that promise. Despite the fancy footwork, he lied and seems intent on reneging on that promise.
What people seem to agree on is that each vote should count. Constitutionally, we only need an alteration to the Elections Act to invoke a new system. We do not need a referendum if a Party campaigns on changing the voting system. If the changes are found to be imperfect, they could change them again after a subsequent election.
If I were in the NDP brains trust I would advocate that the Party campaigns on electoral reform which will be passed via Act of Parliament. The Party should just decide on what system they want to move to, and take some leadership on that and live or die by it.