There is no loss of mandate, if the opinion polls are anything to go by. Besides, the Canadian people chose the government in the middle of the pandemic last year. Is there a more comprehensive definition of a "mandate" than a federal election?
Whether the response is authoritarian depends on how it is enforced. The police have basically failed to enforce any law on the occupiers on parliament hill (I live here). If the local enforcement had happened preemptively and as per the law, the situation wouldn't have escalated as far as it has done.
My comment was a nitpick about how the Canadian electoral system works: no one outside of that particular riding voted for Justin Trudeau, they only voted for their own member of parliament.
> If we had ranked choice you'd have a Liberal/NDP supermajority.
That's unlikely to be true, because there would be way more viable parties. Maybe you would indeed have a supermajority of left-of-center parties but you can't conclude that they'd all have the same Covid restriction policies as the current ones.
> That's unlikely to be true, because there would be way more viable parties
Ranked choice (any form, not just IRV) voting systems without proportional allocation (whether multimember districts with STV, mixed member proportional, or party-list proportional, or something else) do not significantly increase the number of viable parties.
On the other hand, I'm amazed that 5% of the population voted for the People's Party of Canada -- a party which had no hope of winning. This absolutely split the vote on the right enough to make the CPC lose seats.
There are decent arguments that that wasn't the case - that rather the PPC drew out a lot of anti-institution voters who would've voted not just for the CPC, but also the Greens, and those who would've spoiled their ballots or not voted at all.
I did as a protest to both left and right malaise. In Canada a party gets a certain level of funding based on their popular vote which is another reason I voted for them.
Well that’s a silly thing to say. I don’t like governments elected on Tuesday. I’d prefer Wednesday. See that’s another silly thing said. Your opinions of FPTP voting have absolutely nothing to do with anything. The government was elected as per the defined rules.
And yet somehow there is regular turnover of the governing party approximately every 10 years, and the dominant parties have almost to a one been centrist. Not a terrible system.
Centrist by definition or by some objective measure? In the U.S. for example, the "center" is quite conservative compared to some other western nations.
If people could vote as they truly wanted without fear of throwing away their votes, the center would almost certainly move.
As to the back and forth between two major parties, that's hardly surprising. I'm not sure that indicates much in terms of what people actually want.
The idea is that parties have to appeal to a various groups in society in order to win elections, preventing them from taking any position that is too obnoxious to any one group. Thus, centrism.
Systems with ranked choice or similar measures to encourage smaller parties end up with a similar situation, but with less stability. Since those parties appeal to narrower bands of society, they are unable to form a government. Eventually they are forced into coalition, which brings them to the same place as the major parties in FPTP: compromise. Yet, since coalitions are inherently more fragile than parties, you get less stability, and less institutional pressure on individuals in government and cabinet to represent wider interests.
FPTP is really quite common in the western world. Going so far as to say it makes the government “barely legitimate” is a strong claim. Without other evidence, this claim relies entirely on how much we trust your sense of proportion.
Your comparison to North Korea casts doubt on your sense of proportion.
> FPTP is really quite common in the western world.
I don’t think this is true outside the English-speaking countries. Most “Western” countries are in Europe and have systems with some degree of proportionality where coalition governments are the norm.
> Your comparison to North Korea casts doubt on your sense of proportion.
It was an intentionally extreme comparison to show that “operates according to the rules” is not sufficient for a system to count as democratic. Of course Canada is much closer to counting as a liberal democracy than North Korea is, but for reasons other than “it operates according to its own internal rules”.
Perhaps a better analogy would have been Hong Kong a few years ago (before the situation there became worse and things became more directly controlled by the central Chinese state). Hong Kong has never been a democracy by any reasonable definition, but did have robust rule of law and liberal rights, despite elections being basically rigged due to the functional constituencies system.
I agree with your criticism of first past the post.
The the proposal of the convoy occupiers is that their organization picks a committee to run the country. That's a significantly less legitimate government with absolutely no claim at a mandate.
Indeed, I don’t think such a government would be democratically legitimate either. The point is that we simply can’t rely on the composition of the parliament to determine what most Canadians believe about any particular issue.
The best we can do is look at opinion polls, which suggest that most people want to get rid of most Covid restrictions, but also don’t support the trucker protest.
It was a snap election was it not? To me it seemed like the Canadian government was trying to take advantage of some weird timing/power trick to remain in government. Instead of waiting for the normal time to re-elect they saw an opportunity to stay in power. I am uneducated on Canadian politics so I could be seeing it wrong
No it’s not a trick it’s a feature of the parliamentary system. Arguably it’s much more Democratic in that you enable voters to choose whether they would like a change of leadership, anytime a Legislature is unable to function.
OTOH in a Presidential system you get no such opportunity to get the public’s opinion. You have to wait until the end of terms (congressional or presidential or both).
That makes sense to me. But which people get to choose when to re-elect a government? I read that the Governor General was the one to call this last election. Do only certain elected officials get the power to call this or can anyone?
Technically, the Governor General calls the electuin, but in practice it's not his or her choice, unless something unusual happens. Just a rubber stamp.
If a majority of Members of Parliament vote yes on a no-confidence vote, that will trigger an election. Otherwise the prime minister chooses when an election will happen, within 5 years. If the government is a minority, it is likely it will call an election within a year or two if they're confident they could get a majority (this happened last year). Otherwise, with a majority government, they tend to wait longer before calling an election.
> At the federal level, a vote of no confidence is a motion presented by a member of the House of Commons that explicitly states the House has no confidence in the incumbent government.[3] The government may also declare any bill or motion to be a question of confidence.
Major bills like budgets are automatically confidence votes as well. I think you need to get into the parliamentary minutiae to understand when other votes could cause an election.
Canada got vaccine way after the US because they simply wouldn’t help companies pay for R&D and secure orders earlier, like the US did. So while you could get a walk-in vaccine at Wallmart here in America people were waiting in line for weeks for a chance at an appointment in Canada.
Imagine how many lives it could have saved instead had they just put that money toward getting vaccines earlier.
This is how basically all elections involving a minority government happen here. They’re always trying to game the election timing to upgrade to a majority. Stephen Harper did it too (minority in 2006, majority in 2008).
Whether the response is authoritarian depends on how it is enforced. The police have basically failed to enforce any law on the occupiers on parliament hill (I live here). If the local enforcement had happened preemptively and as per the law, the situation wouldn't have escalated as far as it has done.