Puck’s Blog

So the Conservatives “won” a minority government.  I voted Liberal, though to be honest I felt badly about it.  I was uncomfortable about supporting a party that had become so corrupt, but I’m not a socialist so the NDP is out and the Conservatives and their neo-con ideology concern me.

I think the election results are about the best we could hope for.  There aren’t enough Conservative seats to carry out their neo-con agenda, and the Liberals have to take a long hard look at themselves and clean up their act for the next election.  I’m glad Paul Martin has stepped down — it’s something he should have done at the outset of the election to give his party a chance.  If they’d some housecleaning of people connected with the scandals the election may have turned out quite differently for them all.

In my own (new) riding, Burnaby-New Westminster, the NDP candidate was re-elected with 29% of the vote.  I find it very odd that more people can vote against someone and he can still get the position.  Perhaps it’s time Canada adopt some form of “tiered voting” where you can enter (if you desire) your first choice, then second and so on.  The first round votes are tallied and if nobody has a clear majority the losers are dropped off and all the entries that voted for them are then checked for the #2 vote and so on until someone actually has 50%+1 of the vote.  Something like this (I’m being very general about it — I’m sure there are problems with my basic description) would eliminate the drawback of multiple party systems where two similar parties split a vote and a third one gets in that most people dislike.  You know, like how Nader took votes from the Democrats in the 2000 Election, allowing Bush to win.  In a tiered voting system, people could have voted for Nader and then voted Democrat as their #2 (if they desired).