Feb 01 2009
Why Do We Need Political Parties
Under our current system the Political party members elect the party leaders. About 5% of Canadian voters gets to decide who will be the Prime Minister of Canada, the party members. Up until now that means either the Liberals or Conservatives. So out of 27,000,000 voters only about 500,000 voters decide which party leader will be Prime Minister. That doesn’t seem fair but that’s the way the system works.
The party that wins the most seats in the House of Commons leads the Government and that party’s leader becomes the Prime Minister. She/He then selects members of his/her party to hold Ministerial positions in the Government. When a party doesn’t hold the majority of seats but more that any of the other parties then they govern as long as they have the confidence of a majority of the Members. If they lose confidence then there could be an election (most often) or 2 or more parties COULD form the Government by forming a coalition. That’s very rare.
What options are there? Don’t we have to keep the system that we have?
Well since we are a democracy we can make changes to the current system or we could even develop a completely new system if we want. Actually we could do a number of things.
Let’s have some fun with this. You could eliminate the parties and elect Members of Parliament the same way we elect Municipal Governments vote for the best candidate. Each candidate would have to put forward their own platform, answer questions based on what they thought was the best solution. We could elect the Prime Minister the same way we elect the Mayor, separate from the Member races.
It could make elections a lot more interesting. Suppose the candidates included comedians Rick Mercer, Ron James or Russell Peters or athletes Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Steve Nash and Jason Bay or environmentalists David Suzuki or Elizabeth May. We could really have interesting elections then.
Maybe we could get people to run who want to make Canada a better country, to provide good government, to have vision for the future, to be part of the solution not part of the problem.
March 19th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Some interesting thoughts:
1. Not all elections in Canada are run with parties. Most municipal elections are not party-driven, for example, and Nunavut has a no-party system as well. It’s not unprecedented, and it’s not “un-Canadian”.
2. Many people do run as independants, some successfully. (Note: these brave souls would be eliminated in a proportional representation process, unless a mixed-member system was used, like the one proposed for Ontario in 2007.)
3. Parties are like brand names. They create loyalty, and show like-mindedness across Canada. People recognize them, and the national media can focus on a party, rather than on the 1500 individual candidates all running on their own ideas.
4. In a country with the size and diversity of Canada, there would probably be a lot of fractioning of parliament without the parties sticking together. There would likely be a lot of groups that form, pseudo parties, which represent certain regions or issues, much like the Bloc. There are two groups of people in the world, those that put people into groups and those that don’t. I suspect that in a situation where one is trying to promote certain ideas or issues, formation of groups is inevitable, and trying to eliminate the party system would probably just result in the formation of many new parties.
March 29th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Interesting article, i have bookmarked your site for future referrence