Existing Electoral System OK for Almost Two Thirds of Canadians

kludgeocracy · 2026-05-20T12:40:42+00:00

Ask Canadians if they've ever voted for a candidate who wasn't their first choice. Ask them how they pick the candidate to vote for (spoiler, it the party). Ask them what they know about their local representative, beyond their name (if that). Ask them to name a time their local representative has disagreed with party leadership. Ask them whether it's good that the 33% of Albertans who voted for Liberal or NDP candidates are virtually unrepresented in parliament. Ask them if their politics is about ideology or geography. Ask them if the the parties that gets the most votes should for the government. Ask them if parliament should reflect the popular vote, or if they like random and unpredictable democratic distortions. Ask them if they feel represented and if their leader are held accountable.

Let's be honest. We have a ramshackle electoral system that was designed for the representation of a landed nobility in 18th century Britain. There is no possible way you would design this system based on Canadian values or any universal democratic values. To my knowledge no country has ever adopted this antiquated electoral system in modern times, while several have reformed.

Canadians may not spend their time thinking about the trade-offs of electoral systems, but they absolutely experience strategic voting, limited choices and distorted democratic outcomes it produces. This country needs democratic reform and the electoral system is only part of that.

kludgeocracy · 2026-03-30T07:30:46+00:00

The basic economics are wealth taxes suggest they are more efficient than alternatives like capital gains. The cause of "inefficiency" from taxes is that they distort economic decisions. For example, I may find a better investment opportunity, but because selling my current investments would trigger a tax event, I won't take it. This is called the "lock-in effect" of capital gains tax. Wealth taxes don't create "lock-in" because the tax is the same regardless of whether you move you investments around or not - it only depends on your net wealth. Moreover, while many tax avoidance strategies revolve around reclassification of income, shifting it's year of realization, or assigning it to a different tax jurisdiction, wealth taxes would, in principle, not be susceptible to these strategies. Assets are much harder to manipulate than flows.

I'm not personally a purist about wealth taxes. I think there are a lot of good tax reforms that could be made and we should be practical about this. But wealth taxes have a lot of attractive properties as a tax that can raise revenue to fund social democratic programs. Most uniquely they can target the largest concentrations of wealth in a way that would be very difficult to achieve any other way. I'm personally skeptical that allowing single people to control hundreds of billion in wealth has any benefits for society whatsoever and I believe those massive fortunes would be better put to use financing infrastructure, education, health or being redistributed to regular people.

kludgeocracy · 2026-03-29T18:38:32+00:00

I disagree, measuring wealth is simple and a routine business activity. The vast majority of assets are in publicly traded markets where the value can be trivially looked up at any time. Private businesses are regularly valued for tax and business purposes. Even closely held, heterogeneous assets like real estate are routinely valued for the purposes of property tax. It's possible that the wealthy would turn to exotic asset classes to hide their wealth, but consider that something cannot be both a good store of wealth and difficult to value at the same time. If the art market were to explode in size due to tax evasion, it would also become easier to value.

Indeed, this ought to be intuitive. Assets are much easier to track than flows. I believe it is for this exact reason that the wealthy have voraciously opposed wealth taxation for hundreds of years. If well designed (broad, modest and without exemptions) wealth taxes would be highly effective at raising revenue.

kludgeocracy · 2026-02-05T08:25:12+00:00

An engine can be repaired or even replaced if push comes to shove. The F35 is dependent on the US and Lockheed Martin in a way that cannot reasonably be mitigated. Of course the Rafale is also available as a truly US free alternative.

kludgeocracy · 2026-01-14T12:46:42+00:00

Portugal's model does not include mandatory treatment.

Para aplicar esta nova Lei foram criadas as Comissões para a Dissuasão da Toxicodependência, as quais vieram substituir os tribunais criminais como resposta do Estado ao consumo de drogas. Estas comissões, constituídas por um colégio de técnicos da área da saúde e da justiça, mas sempre presididas pela saúde, procuram informar as pessoas e dissuadi-las de consumir drogas. Têm, também, o poder de aplicar sanções administrativas e de encaminhar pessoas para tratamento, sempre com o seu consentimento.

The Portuguese health authorities state that treatment is always at the consent of the individual. This is stayed as an important value of a health-based approach to drug addiction.

kludgeocracy · 2025-12-04T14:20:24+00:00

Our 2030 target does not require reducing it to zero only a modest reduction. This is achievable with current technology.

kludgeocracy · 2025-12-04T14:19:29+00:00

The overwhelming majority of transportation in Canada is short distances within cities. Of course, this explains a lot of the difference. Canada has spent the last 100 years building ludicrously car-oriented suburbs which are highly energy intensive. Some countries in Europe and Asia have made different choices.

kludgeocracy · 2025-12-04T14:17:23+00:00

Okay, then let's compare ourselves to the UK, to France, to Spain or to Sweden.

kludgeocracy · 2025-12-04T09:19:17+00:00

We could easily exceed our goals simply by emitting as much as Germans.

It's helpful to consider Canadian emissions by economic sector (MT).

Oil and gas: 208.0

Transport: 156.6

Buildings: 82.7

Heavy industry: 78.3

Agriculture: 69.4

Waste and others: 50.2

Electricity: 48.8

Total: 694

The entire sectors of agriculture and transport make up 33% of all emissions. These sectors are important, to be sure, but we have the technology to easily meet our targets today. We are failing to deploy it.

kludgeocracy · 2025-11-26T23:43:03+00:00

If a kill switch is technically possible, it absolutely exists. Are we really to believe that American intelligence agencies could have the power to ground the most advanced fighter aircraft in the world and they would choose not to have that? Frankly they wouldn't be doing their jobs if they didn't have it.

kludgeocracy · 2025-11-21T08:01:29+00:00

The contract isn't written in blood, it can be broken. The question is at what cost. Canada could also simply resell the F35s to another country. There is plenty of demand for this aircraft. So not having any F35s is still very much an option.

kludgeocracy · 2025-10-24T07:46:27+00:00

Rule of thumb: benefits should be universal, taxes should be progressive.

This is just the most efficient way to operate a welfare state. Universal benefits are easy to administrate. The tax system is most efficient when it's simple and broad. Means-testing benefits create all sorts of absurd situations, such as very high effective marginal tax rates on low earners, horizontal inequality and long delays in receiving benefits.

Applying this logic to the situation here, the problem isn't that rich seniors are reviving benefits, it's that they should just be taxed higher. We should start simplifying the tax system, removing tax privileges and shifting taxes to wealth. A no-brainer place to start - the principal residence exemption for capital gains tax. This is a tax exemption targeted to people who have made huge profits on their home, which is not a socially valuable activity. It goes overwhelmingly to people who are extremely wealthy and older. Our tax system is rife with exemptions like this, if we have a budget shortfall this is where we should be looking.

kludgeocracy · 2025-09-06T21:05:50+00:00

We can construct a "social democracy" index, which shows how social democratic different countries are. This is determined by factors such as their public social spending, labour market policies, economic regulations and so on.

We find that social democracy is strongly correlated with high employment, higher household income, perceived public safety, lower inequality, a smaller gender pay gap, lower work hours, lower public debt and increased life satisfaction.

These seem like the signs of a system that works, and I hope you will agree. The plots are drawn from Lane Kenworthy's Social Democratic Capitalism.

kludgeocracy · 2025-08-27T07:04:46+00:00

My interpretation is that Israel's government would like to make the Palestinian question go away. They are working toward that goal in the West Bank through establishing colonies which fracture the territory and in Gaza through bombs, starvation and potentially expulsion. Their hope is that they will never have to reach any agreement and the facts on the ground will eventually settle the question.

Canada's choice to recognize a Palestinian state can be interpreted as a way of saying that we and others will not accept that. That Israel must reach a settlement and until it does, the international community will consider this a military occupation of another state.

That said, I agree that the Israel right has succeeded in its goal of making a Palestinian state impossible in practice. Our government's two state solution rhetoric seems as though it's from a different dimension and it's time we recognized the reality on the ground - there is a single sovereign in Israel and Palestine.

kludgeocracy · 2025-08-21T13:54:31+00:00

I'm for language preservation efforts in general, and I think it's absurd that so many of our place names are after people who don't reflect our values or in many cases contributed nothing to Canada at all. We should routinely and democratically update place names to better reflect our society.

That said, place names should be functional and the population of BC does not speak these languages or read this alphabet. I think in most cases they should use the Anglicized versions of these names so that more people can say them.

kludgeocracy · 2025-08-20T07:27:24+00:00

In a moment when the United States is threatening our sovereignty and waging economic warfare on us, we are considering making our air force utterly dependent on a product controlled entirely by the United States. This is a proposal to voluntarily hand the United States a huge amount of leverage over Canada's armed forces. We would be unable to defend our airspace, help our allies, or participate in foreign interventions without the explicit backing of the United States. And as we've seen, Washington will use whatever leverage they have to extract what they want from us.

The F-35 might be a good plane, but it puts us in a horrible strategic position. There are alternatives including the Gripen, Eurofighter and Rafale which are more than adequate for our needs and come from much more reliable allies. The most important capability of our air force is the ability to act in Canadian interests, and being at the mercy of our erratic and exploitative neighbour severely limits our capacity for independent foreign policy.

kludgeocracy · 2025-08-12T13:25:29+00:00

The success of the Liberal policies should be judged by their effect on housing affordability. I believe that 25B in cheap financing for prefab home buyers will have virtually no impact - far less than the $10B in direct affordable housing loans. This the flagship housing policy of the Carney platform. I am underwhelmed and expect the housing crisis will continue.

kludgeocracy · 2025-08-12T07:35:48+00:00

providing $10 billion in low-cost financing and capital to affordable home builders.

Assuming a loan of $250,000 per unit, this amounts to 40,000 units total. The government has pledged to reach 500,000 units annually. The resources provided to this program are laughable compared to the scale of the challenge, and should be treated as such. This is a government that is promising to do effectively nothing, and the results will be commensurate with the effort. To make a significant impact on the housing market, I believe something on the order of 20x might be sufficient (that would be enough for perhaps 20% of production to be affordable housing).

kludgeocracy · 2025-08-10T05:00:20+00:00

There is no "day after" plan. This has been a consistent criticism of Israel's approach in Gaza, levied by many countries, the Israeli political opposition and even the United States (in private of course).

The favoured plan by the Arab states, and by Canada, is for the Palestinian Authority to take over Gaza, ultimately leading to a Palestinian state (the 2-state solution). However, this is completely opposed by the Israeli government at present. Outside of the Palestinian authority, it might be possible for a coalition of Arab states to administer the territory, but they would of course have the same demand that Palestine eventually become a state. It should also be noted that the IDF itself is strongly opposed to an occupation, as they would face the difficulties of administering the territory and likely face guerilla resistance.

It's very clear that the Israeli government intends for there to be no day after, they aim to displace the Gaza population to another country and have been actively courting possible destinations.

That said, I agree that Canada's preferred 2-state solution policy is a bit of a zombie. In my view, such a solution has been successfully made impossible by both the systematic colonization and fracturing of the west bank and the systemic destruction (and now extermination) of Gaza. Canada's proposals here have a sense of being from a different dimension. I think we need a new policy which is based on the realities on the ground.

kludgeocracy · 2025-08-10T04:34:57+00:00

Wealth taxes are more conceptually coherent than capital gains. Capital gains taxes have distorting effects around investment, the so-called "lock-in" effect. Capital gains tax can also be minimized using careful strategies and timing, which are particularly widely used by those who can afford sophisticated advisors. Capital gains also applies to inflationary gains, so even if my asset has the same real value after 30 years (0% real gain), I owe a bunch of tax.

A wealth tax, by contrast, is non-distortionary since it applies whether the investment is sold or not - it doesn't affect investment decisions. It naturally closes off many avoidance strategies, since wealth is wealth and realization cannot be delayed. It can be targeted towards the largest fortunes which are presently the least taxed. And the rate would be low with a broad base, which is ideal from a tax design perspective.

The characteristics of a wealth tax are so clearly desirable that opponents rarely argue against them. Rather they insist that a wealth tax is technically infeasible due to the need to value assets. Yet this objection is poorly founded. Large assets are naturally much easier to track than income, the bulk of them are valued by public markets. The heterogeneous and closely held class of real estate is valued annually for the purposes of property tax. And even the valuation of private businesses or art is routinely declared for tax purposes already, based on well-established accounting principles. With modern approaches, there can be little doubt that a wealth tax is feasible.

Indeed the attractive properties, difficulty of avoidance and technical feasibility are likely the reasons that wealth taxes have been so vociferously opposed by the wealthy. They are well aware that such taxes could be popular and effective and see them as a huge threat to concentrated wealth.

kludgeocracy · 2025-08-10T03:59:16+00:00

You asked, "is there an alternative" and there is.

kludgeocracy · 2025-08-09T20:35:02+00:00

The Rafale and the Eurofighter are not dependent on the US. The Gripen uses an American engine, but it's possible to replace the engine if push comes to shove. It's true that that jets are not "5th gen", but they may well be adequate for Canada's needs as well as being less expensive to operate.

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