Roundup: Misleading to the point of misinformation

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As they tend to do after every election concludes, Power & Politics had David Meslin on to talk about electoral reform, because apparently, we are going to re-litigate it once again. (The saving grace is that this time they didn’t have Meslin using his LEGO to show different PR results). The problem? The graphic that the show produced as an example of how the results of this election would be under PR was essentially misinformation.

https://twitter.com/Catelli2Oh/status/1440818668217135110

The assumptions made to produce said chart is that Canada would employ a system of pure proportional representation, and then allocate seats in that regard. But this would be a PR system that nobody is actually asking for, and which would be unconstitutional because seats are allocated on a provincial basis, while such a system would be unable to take that into account under the current 338 seat model. That’s a pretty big deal. Most people advocate for some form of mixed-member proportional, where you vote for a local MP, and then vote a second time for a party, which will then allocate someone from a list into a number of seats designed as “top-ups” to make the seats more closely resemble the “popular vote” (even though such a thing is a logical fallacy under our current vote construction). Furthermore, it would assume that we’d have the same parties, which is unlikely (and Meslin went at great length about how great it would be for the big tent parties to break up), and even more to the point, under a different voting system, voting behaviours would be different. With all of this in mind, the fact that the gods damned CBC produced an infographic with a misleading characterisation of what Monday’s vote might have looked like under PR is not just irresponsible – it’s downright misinformation.

It’s also concerning that Meslin thinks that as many as 21 seats for the People’s Party under such a system is no big deal, and he thinks we should have more radical parties for the sake of “innovation.” The notion of a far-right party getting 21 seats and putting them in the potential position to be kingmakers in a coalition government is frightening to say the least, but we’ve also seen in other countries that use PR, such as Germany and the Netherlands, that when far-right parties breach the threshold to attain seats, they grow in popularity because they are given respectability and a platform to espouse their views. One of the great strengths of big-tent parties, that Meslin completely ignored, is that they moderate extremes, which is actually a good thing in politics. Big tent parties build coalitions of regions and factions within themselves, rather than having smaller parties building the coalitions externally post-election. It’s one reason why radical parties are short-lived, and why disruptive parties tend to “self-correct” within a couple of election cycles, because they can’t maintain the necessary organisation that Canada requires. These are features of our system – not bugs, and it would be great if CBC didn’t turn to the same guy every election to make the same misleading points, time and again.

Good reads:

  • Further delivers of COVID vaccines are being paused, as provinces already have more supply than they have demand for.
  • There will be seven out LGBTQ2+ MPs in this Parliament, now that Randy Boissonnault has secured Edmonton Centre.
  • Successful Liberal candidate George Chahal is being accused of removing rival fliers from mailboxes; he says he was replacing flyers with incorrect polling information.
  • After a member of the Conservative Party national council circulated a petition to call for a leadership review of O’Toole, the party’s voter database was locked down.
  • And yes, it sounds very much there are knives out for O’Toole in the wake of his loss.
  • Post-election, the Conservative caucus is now 95 percent white (several of their racialized incumbents were defeated, noting that they were also homophobic).
  • Many Conservatives incumbents who lost were in ridings with large Chinese-Canadian populations, and some are now decrying foreign interference from Beijing.
  • Disavowed Liberal candidate Kevin Vuong has won his riding and plans to stay on as an independent MP, promising to address the allegations against him soon.
  • Now that the Liberals have won, Ontario premier Doug Ford now says he’s negotiating a deal around $10/day childcare.
  • Jason Kenney had a near-miss with a non-confidence vote in caucus, and will face a leadership review at the party’s convention in the spring.
  • Heather Scoffield wonders whether all of the promised wealth taxes will come to pass, given that the government doesn’t want to scare off growth and investment.
  • Jen Gerson advises the Conservatives to not give into their worst instincts and dump their leader, believing the tide to be turning for them.
  • Rupa Subramanya feels that the Conservatives have lost their purpose, making it no wonder that they can’t win elections anymore.
  • Colby Cosh takes umbrage with Gerald Butts’ assertions about the Liberals’ campaign and their finely-honed vote efficiency.

Odds and ends:

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4 thoughts on “Roundup: Misleading to the point of misinformation”

  1. The NDP are wedded to PR and don’t care if it would produce more seats for the honest-to-god fascist party as long as it (supposedly) produced more seats than them. And because “dEmOcRaCy”. Ranked balloting is a lot simpler and really would solve a lot of the problems with “fringe” parties having an outsized role in Parliament, but the NDP themselves are a fringe party and so they take umbrage at the notion of the lunatic fringe effectively being subdued.

    It’s why Trudeau said there was no consensus on the electoral reform issue. Honestly, I wish he had never made it a campaign plank in the first place. The NDP will never let go of this bone to gnaw upon and as a result, Canada won’t get the kind of electoral reform that could make things go a lot smoother. Max Fawcett had a great column about this but he hedged the caveat that the NDP diehards would never compromise. They refuse to bend to reality or pragmatism anyway. It’s just not what Dippers do.

    • FPTP is simple to understand for Canadians – it not necessarily ‘better’ or ‘worse’ because of this. Replacing a system that (generally) most Canadians understand, with one that is neither intuitive pure PR (or worse) MMPR would require a course in civics education that no one wants nor could they pass. For all its faults, FPTP is accessible to citizen-voters because they can easily comprehend it. I see nothing but danger from PropRep, and ‘misinformation’ made easier.

  2. Thanks for the info about where this chart came from.
    And wasn’t it PR and the plethora of little parties that has led to the mess in Israel over the last several years, where they kept having elections again and again because they couldn’t agree on a Prime Minister? If people get mad about spending $600 million on an election after two years, how would they think about spending $600 million on elections every 4 months?

  3. So what do we do about the harmful effects to national unity of a party forming government with different regions of the country completely shut out, the aggravation many Western Canadians feel when a majority government can be decided before the polls even close in their part of the country, the diversity of different political regions masked by nearly uniform blocs of MPs, not to mention the fact that regional parties can become quasi-permanent fixtures, to the point of even becoming the Official Opposition, when they don’t run candidates in any other part of the country?

    Those sound more like bugs than features.

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