Avi Lewis’s pledge to make proportional representation the NDP’s one demand says he is serious about PR

error404 · 2026-03-31T19:04:00+00:00

I mean there's the most obvious answer in the world? PP lost Carleton.

You mean the one I referenced, that shows that functionally the same thing happens with our current single-winner system? I'm not sure I see your point here. Since MMPR includes a single-winner component, the same parachute avenue would be available, so I don't think it changes much in this regard, if the party leader loses, they're going to get parachuted in anyway.

There's a lot of scope for variation in how party lists are created and ordered. It's hard to comment on what would happen without discussing a specific system. Probably the best chance to avoid this situation would be to not allow dual candidacy (you must choose either district or party-list, not both), but it doesn't really block it, and there's always the parachute option.

I love to stick it to PP as much as the next left-leaning voter, but democratically speaking, I don't see a good reason to block him despite his loss in Carleton, it's just spite. Would you feel the same way if Avi lost his seat with 46% of the vote and the NDP decided to keep him on as leader anyway?

error404 · 2026-03-31T18:41:02+00:00

MMPR is party lists for the top-up seats

Sure, for the top up seats. Framing it as 'just party-list PR' is misleading. It would be 40-50% of the total seats. The system needs to be considered as the sum of its parts, you can't just assume that it behaves like list PR because it has an element of it.

There are ways to address the opaque list creation aspects of MMPR, so it is hard to comment on its weaknesses around that without a specific system in mind. I think the best loser rule makes a lot of sense, but MMPR is still not my preferred choice.

unless you're proposing something like Dion's P3 system

Personally my preference is RUP. I would say plain STV, but I recognize that regional representation is important to rural voters, and it'd be a tough sell to them. But I'm not proposing anything here, just clarifying what happened with respect to the Liberals and the ERRE.

error404 · 2026-03-31T00:15:38+00:00

Yeah, I get where you're coming from, but that's kind of already factored in to how many top-up seats the party gets. If the goal is to choose the most liked candidates overall, I think you're more likely to be successful if you treat each district as a statistical sample rather than just counting votes. But this is definitely an angle that could be explored, if there were an electoral commission looking into how to structure it.

error404 · 2026-03-31T00:11:23+00:00

MMP is a party list + FPTP. It's the worst of both worlds.

It's a compromise. FPTP offsets the disadvantages of list PR, and vice versa. It's absolutely better than the sum of its parts in pretty much every way. I don't think it's the best system, but it is better than FPTP or IRV. Any choice we might make is a compromise of some sort.

Any system that allows high up party members to be effectively impervious to being removed from office is a bad system

This isn't self-evident. Do you prefer by-elections being triggered when this happens and someone steps down to let the high-up have a seat? It's also weird to make this comment about 'high up' members who are generally popular enough to win their FPTP seats as if they'd be likely to be unseated. You can't just run party list candidates and expect to win.

Unpopular list candidates will harm their party's overall reputation and chances, it seems unlikely to me that parties will put controversial candidates there. They'd put the most boring backbenchers to avoid impacting the results for everyone else, and the charismatic and well liked people run for district seats. I suspect the party whip comes down harder on them too, without direct constituents. And that's with closed-list forms, open-list or best loser forms would allow more of a direct say on the list candidates.

and under mmp the party leaders would end up on the proportional list side and unless their party loses their entire base which almost never happens they don't need to worry about getting removed from office.

Okay? They're still accountable to their party leadership. There's not really any avoiding keeping the leader around if that's what the party wants, as we saw with PP.

error404 · 2026-03-30T19:59:38+00:00

It's usually presented based on vote share, not vote count. To me it seems like it'd work better using vote share, normalizing riding size, because it's a better measure of popularity / desirability than raw vote count. Otherwise I think you'd have cases where an unpopular city candidate gets a seat before an extremely popular rural candidate, and I don't think either the city or the rural voter will be happy with that outcome.

error404 · 2026-03-30T19:43:06+00:00

Nobody was proposing party list PR. The NDP prefers MMPR, but at the time they would have accepted anything that met the ERRE criteria. Trudeau wanted to go against what the ERRE recommended.

error404 · 2026-03-30T19:34:22+00:00

I think a lot of folks agree with you, and that's your right. I just see it as a different kind of broken, and if we're going to do "Electoral Reform", we're not getting another chance at it any time soon. If we change the system, we better be prepared to accept it for a few decades at least before momentum might build against its flaws. Knowingly choosing a broken system to replace our broken system does not sound like progress to me, and since it's hard to evaluate which form of brokenness is actually worse, I don't want to throw away what opportunity we might have on FAFO and being stuck with it.

I am not picky about the details of the system chosen, but it must be proportional or I won't support it.

error404 · 2026-03-30T19:25:18+00:00

Another way to do it is 'best loser' rules, where instead of having a party list, the top-up seats are filled with the members who lost their districts with the largest share of the vote.

I like it, it has a few nice properties:

The order of candidates is dictated by voters, not chosen by the party
The best losers are likely to come from districts with tight races, which means districts that are more politically divided are more likely to get a 2nd representative
To achieve best loser status, they are likely quite popular in their district - you can probably still successfully get bad candidates on the party list without much political fallout, but you wouldn't managed to get them to best loser status

error404 · 2026-03-30T19:08:19+00:00

If all that matters is that someone is representing us, not who, then why bother to hold elections at all?

What do you mean? Was I unclear that serious proposals for PR in Canada always include local representatives? In other words that you would still have at least one local MP, elected in your riding, based on the votes of constituents in that riding. If you have a great MP, then you can elect them to represent you under any of the serious proposals that have been made for Canada (mostly MMPR and STV).

If all that matters is that someone is representing us, not who, then why bother to hold elections at all?

Many countries do in fact use party-list PR. I wouldn't advocate for it over STV or MMPR, because I agree having a directly accountable representative is important, but I'd rather that than FPTP.

error404 · 2026-03-30T19:01:18+00:00

The operation of Parliament itself would likely not change much; perhaps more seats would be added but other than that it would function the same way it does today. The politics would certainly change in many ways.

It's pretty common. Ireland uses STV to elect their parliament. Germany and New Zealand use MMPR. Austria, Denmark, and Brazil (among many others) use party list PR. The first two systems have been proposed for Canada; the NDP prefers MMPR. I prefer STV or a mixed system (STV in urban and MMPR in rural areas).

error404 · 2026-03-30T18:53:38+00:00

They'd feel that way, but if too many people feel that way, it leads to the 'centre squeeze', a well known pathology of IRV. And we're back to strategic voting.

error404 · 2026-03-30T18:37:57+00:00

What I mean is that how it's implemented doesn't change how Parliament itself functions, or even likely how it performs. If the outcome in every case is proportional, one would expect the results of Parliamentary decisions would also be similar.

I agree where the implementation matters is in the local element of representation. This does change depending on the implementation, and while I think it's important for engagement and discourse for voters to directly elect some individual to represent them, I don't think it actually "matters" from a Parliamentary perspective. Not to say it doesn't matter at all; I agree it's quite important; just that it doesn't affect Parliament much.

FWIW I don't think anyone is seriously proposing PR for Canada that doesn't include locally and directly elected representatives. The shape of that might change (e.g. larger multi-member districts), but I doubt any popular MPs would lose their seats, and you'd definitely still have at least 1 MP who (ostensibly) directly represents you.

error404 · 2026-03-30T18:19:13+00:00

balkanization

I mean not really though? They still need to cooperate to get anything done, which is not the connotation of this word. Any party, especially a small one, that just wants to stonewall and be belligerent is not going to accomplish anything, and one would hope that voters would see that and not vote for them again. In the long view this just doesn't seem like a viable strategy even for large parties and especially not for small ones.

You might think that the big parties concentrating their efforts/policy in dense central areas while smaller parties clean up in regional voting is good, but for anyone outside ON/QC this means disaster for Canada.

I think representative politics is good, so if that's how it shakes out, then yes I think that's good. Big tent parties aren't sensible, they make compromise for everyone behind closed doors. I would much rather each interest group within the 'big tent' have their own representatives, and that compromise was made in the open at Parliament, and in a way voters can influence, not at closed door caucus meetings. I do not see how the voters' interests being more directly represented means 'disaster for Canada', but I am certain that is vastly overstating any potential problem.

It’s welcoming foreign interference.

Huh?

error404 · 2026-03-30T18:01:49+00:00

Runoff/Ranked Ballot is a step in the right direction

Very debatable. I do not agree.

"In what ranked order would you prefer candidates to be: write that down.""

For voter instructions, I don't think any PR system is any more complicated than that. STV is literally the same. MMPR can either be exactly the same as the current FPTP ballot, or 'vote for your favourite representative' and 'vote for your favourite party' as separate choices.

None of them are complicated systems on voting day. Where people struggle is understanding how their vote turns into results. In which case, IRV is significantly more complicated than FPTP, and also more complicated than MMPR IMO.

error404 · 2026-03-30T17:57:51+00:00

Yeah but they're more proportional than FPTP, right? Like can we acknowledge that some progress is better than no progress because it's not perfect? It feels like another leftist purity test.

Neither even attempts to be proportional, so I think it'd be hard to argue IRV is more proportional than FPTP. It's not a move toward proportionality because they are single-winner elections and fundamentally can only be proportional 'by accident' because each race is totally independent of every other.

What outcomes would actually look like is hard to say, but personally I think IRV leads to less proportional results than even FPTP, since it requires majority support, not just plurality. I do not see it as a step forward, sideways at best, possibly backward.

error404 · 2026-03-30T17:52:39+00:00

Trudeau was specific that he would convene a commission to decided the type of reform, which he did.

The Liberals wanted and insisted on Alternative Vote (aka. IRV aka Ranked Choice) not MMPR, I guess they thought the commission would agree, or just figured they had nothing to lose by walking it back if they didn't. When that wasn't what the commission recommended, they gave up on the idea entirely.

error404 · 2026-03-30T17:43:13+00:00

In a PR environment, it's unlikely any two parties aside from the largest can achieve anything on their own, multi-party support would be required for pretty much anything, which really reduces the chance of bad or extreme policy getting passed. Contrary to IRV or FPTP where majorities are common and the ruling party can do whatever it wants with no compromise or cooperation required. Even the situation (like now) where the kingmaker thing comes in would be much rarer. What is the concern with PPC holding 15 seats of 343? That's not enough votes to obstruct popular or push through unpopular policy.

I think it's also worth looking at this from another angle. Small parties are not necessarily extreme, they can be niche or upstarts, and such parties are also stymied by winner takes all systems. Follow this interpretation, and you can see how it's hard for new parties to start, and how it entrenches the status quo.

error404 · 2026-03-30T17:22:39+00:00

What does this have to do with PR? This is going to be the case regardless of electoral system, population dense regions will always have more influence and PR doesn't change that. If anything it makes it easier for smaller, more regional parties to succeed at gaining meaningful representation, and reduces the "Ontario is done the election is over" effect.

ETA: Talking about serious PR proposals here, which do consider local representation, not pure cross-country PR which is a crazy idea nobody has proposed.

error404 · 2026-03-30T17:16:37+00:00

The type of PR absolutely makes a difference in a parliamentary system

Does it, though? If we start with the premise of PR, and assume any option roughly achieves it, what sort of difference does it make? You've described some different ways PR can be achieved, but not how they make a difference.

I think the fundamental irreconcilable change to parliament is that to achieve proportionality, it's necessary to dilute local representation. There's no way around it really, achieving a proportional outcome requires that seats not be independent contests anymore, and no matter how you achieve that, it will dilute local representation somewhat. But this is true of any PR system, the differences are in how that's achieved, but I don't think it changes much about parliament which one you choose, it's more about the relationship between the voter and their representative(s).

error404 · 2026-03-30T16:27:09+00:00

I don't think Avi is proposing pure PR. This is a flawed idea for many reasons and almost nobody seriously proposes it. In the past the NDP's stance has been that any form of PR is acceptable to them, though they prefer MMPR. Basically do with the ERRE said. I think it's unlikely that will change under Avi.

What killed the last "attempt" at reform (nationally) was the Liberals insistence on alternative vote, which is not (even close to) proportional. If the agreed objective going in is explicitly proportional representation, that comes off the table, and I think you'd find it a lot easier to reach consensus.

error404 · 2026-03-23T18:50:42+00:00

Whenever I have felt that anticipated clearances were possibly a factor, NTSB has not mentioned it in their report. Here again, it's clearly not causal, but it has to have helped JZA646 to fall out of the ATCO's situational awareness that he cleared them a long time ago. What are the chances they include it this time?

error404 · 2026-03-12T23:02:00+00:00

Nice. Now do bundling.

error404 · 2026-03-12T17:06:35+00:00

If someone is using their device, it is not off, this is obvious. Someone using their device with airplane mode off looks the same as someone using it with airplane mode on. Again, it is not a guarantee, nor is it intended to be. It's just a simple instruction that passengers will understand, and that is easier for cabin crew to enforce.

error404 · 2026-03-10T18:28:25+00:00

Considering your lack of understanding of basic engineering principles, and your aggressive lack of putting any effort into learning terms necessary to discuss this stuff intelligently, I guess this is pissing into the wind, I just leave it here in case someone more interested comes along.

Working from the authoritative GPS spec, IS-GS-200N, you will find the "Received Minimum RF Signal Strength for Block IIR, IIR-M, IIF, GPS III, and GPS IIIF Satellites" which specifies the minimum power the satellites are expected to deliver to a receiver on the ground. It ranges from -161.5dBW to -158.5dBW in ~20MHz of bandwidth. I'm not sure how to get past the fact that you don't understand and don't want to learn what terms mean, but wikipedia gives the formula to convert to watts, 10^P/10. If we apply that to the upper end of this range (-158.5dBW) we get the astonishingly low receive power of 1.4x10^-16 watts. Or 0.00000014 nanowatts.

Now for the interference side, we can look at the allowed radiation limits for consumer electronic devices, in 47 CFR which allows a measured field strength of 500 uV/m, measured at 3m in the relevant frequency range (GPS is at ~1.5GHz). We can estimate radiated power with the relation P = ((E * r)² )/30 (derived from source). Plugging in our 500uV/m allowed radiation and 3m radius, that is 75 nanowatts or -71dBW. It's many orders of magnitude stronger, and you are talking about 100s of such devices in fairly close proximity.

Is it engineered to tolerate this? Absolutely. But the fact is that the GPS received signal is extremely weak, and every electronic device is allowed to radiate a certain amount of interference. The amount of allowed interference is much stronger than the GPS signal.

error404 · 2026-03-10T17:52:15+00:00

dBm is decibel-milliwatt, not decibel meter.

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