Conservative voices for electoral reform

Notable because we don't often hear Conservative voices speaking publicly in favour of electoral reform.

Sept 8, 2016. Colin Craig of the Manning Centre interviews President of Canadian Taxpayers Federation Troy Lanigan, on the benefits of proportional representation. Lanigan compares MMP with STV, which both prefer. 



Yesterday ERRE committee members CPC Scott Reid, NDP Nathan Cullen, and GPC Elizabeth May sent a letter to Democratic Institutions Minister Monsef requesting a move towards more concrete models of three different PR systems:

“Canadians will want to know how the various proposals for electoral reform would work and what they would look like in practice.”

They have asked Monsef to relegate some of her $10.7M public awareness budget to produce visual aids like potential ballots and electoral maps for three proposed systems - mixed member proportional representation (MMP), single transferrable vote (STV) and former Elections Canada CEO Jean-Pierre Kingsley's hybrid rural-urban system. 

The committee begins their cross-country road trip, hopefully with these materials in hand, starting next week. 

And no, I don't know why there's no signatory from a Liberal and Bloc committee member on the request for materials to Monsef.

PR proponents have criticized Monsef's cross-country road trip as being too strictly focused on 'values' to the relative exclusion of discussion on different electoral systems -which are more rigorously discussed and debated at MPs' electoral townhalls. 

So now we're going to get into specifics. In the meantime, you can find them at CPAC, in the appendices of FairVoteCanada's submission to ERRE, or Samara 

Happy International Democracy Day. Hoping to get more of it here in Canada.

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Fiscally conservative at $3.9-million an hour

"From June 2nd to September 4th, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) tracked 293 pre-election spending announcements totaling $8.8-billion made by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. That is roughly $94-million a day or about $3.9-million every hour."

The CTF, formerly Steve's very good friends, have been pissed with him for some time now and have published this handy chart of spending gems from which to more accurately get your hate on. My personal fave has to be the admittedly rather smallish grant to create a festival in Shag Harbour, N.S., to commemorate a 1967 UFO sighting. According to their website, someone will be on site painting aliens on rocks.

Meanwhile, amidst all this largesse, the Attawapiskat kids in northern Ontario are expected to wait another eight years before they can have a school. Maybe they should start looking around for some UFOs.

h/t Challenging the Commonplace