A bad day for parliament

Ignatieff swears he'll never form a coalition:

What a disaster. I understand he's under pressure, but it's time to face the fact that there are five parties, and no one is winning a majority any time soon. We need electoral reform so badly!

A radical idea for Senate reform

Here's a radical idea for senate reform: How about we fill our upper house with a bunch of losers?

I was recently thinking about someone's* objection to list candidates for MMP, and their suggestion that instead of having a fixed list before the election, the parties sent their best runners-up. So, for example, if the Conservatives won places for 10 list candidates, then you take the ten losing Conservatives with the highest vote totals in their ridings and send them to Ottawa. In terms of MMP I think I like set lists better, but I thought it was an interesting idea, and today it popped into my head that if we wanted to switch to an elected senate this would be a really easy way to do it! After the election simply take the best runners-up in each province and appoint them (for a single election cycle only) to the Senate!

It's surely a terrible idea for all sorts of reasons, but hear me out for a second on a few of its positives:

1) It's not the way the Senate works now.

2) Senators would have a huge motivation to show up for work, in order to try to get into (or back into) the House the next time around.

3) It would somewhat balance the excesses of FPTP (ie. Conservatives in Saskatchewan won 93% of the seats with only 54% of the vote). With our three (four?) national party system this would encourage parties to stay competitive in all regions, rather than abandoning all hope in, say, Alberta.

3a) It would provide a reason for people opposed to candidates in "safe seat" ridings to vote (and also to run!).

4) It would provide a springboard for opposition candidates, helping them to better challenge incumbents. They could gain experience and name recognition while in the Senate, hopefully leading to credible challenges in currently uncompetitive ridings.

5) It would act as a "check and balance" in the case of a lopsided FPTP majority government that didn't have a strong popular mandate. (A majority PM's party would probably usually have fewer than half the seats in such a senate, depending on how the Senate seats are assigned).

6) It wouldn't be any sort of job-for-life, as long as the Senate is smaller than the House. In order to remain in the senate after losing again you'd still need to be remain among the most popular losers in your province.

Just for fun, here's what the senate would look like based on the best losers from the last election and the current rules for number of seats in the Senate per province:

Canada
Liberals: 39 seats
Conservatives: 38 seats
NDP: 17 seats
BQ: 9 seats
Green: 1 seat
Independent: 1 seat

West
Liberals: 9 seats
Conservatives: 7 seats
NDP: 7 seats
Independent: 1 seat

Ontario
Conservatives: 12 seats
Liberals: 10 seats
NDP: 2 seats

Quebec
BQ: 9 seats
Liberals: 8 seats
Conservatives: 7 seats

Atlantic
Liberals: 11 seats
Conservatives: 10 seats
NDP: 8 seats
Green: Elizabeth May


I welcome explanations of how this is worse than the status quo in the comments!


* I think it was Calgary Grit, but I can't find the post now.

Crowded public transit

Matthew Yglesias has an interesting post on the virtues of crowded public transit. Basically his point is that in off-peak times increases in ridership cost the transit agency (almost) nothing, so fares should be cheap (or free) when the bus isn't full.

so now what?

Know what would have been great? If when Harper walked out of the meeting to announce that he was shutting down the government that he also announced that in the interim the Conservative party would not buy any ad time, and urge the opposition parties to do the same. If the Conservatives spend a month and a half slamming the opposition parties how in the world will they possibly pass the budget?

The horrible horrible Bloc veto

I'm having a little trouble understanding why criticism of the coalition involves the BQ having a "veto". Surely the criticism should be more along the lines of the Coyne idea that the BQ will demand some concession that the other parties won't be willing to give, and this leads us to believe that the coalition is unstable. Really, if the NDP and Liberals create a piece of "good" legislation that the Bloc doesn't like and won't support, the Conservatives are always free to pass it.

As an absurd example, say that space aliens invade Western Europe, plunging us into war due to our NATO obligations. The fighting is fierce, and the coalition decides that a draft is necessary. The Bloc, however, is against the draft and threatens to veto. Well, presumably the Conservatives would support such a draft, and the legislation could pass over the objection of the Bloc. So operationally the Bloc doesn't have a veto over decisions that the federalist parties (in fact even just the Liberals and Conservatives) can agree are in the best interests of Canada.

We have a minority government, and in order to work the parties are going to need to compromise. Harper has shown absolutely zero willingness to compromise, so it's time for someone else to give it a shot. The Liberal-NDP coalition is free to try to produce bills that the Conservatives will be able to vote for, and indeed given their minority mandate they ought to. It's only if the Conservatives will simply vote "no" on anything and everything that they will need to resort to Bloc support.

If there is a Christmas election

I've seen some suggestion that the Governor General should decree a new election rather than hand power to the new coalition. While I don't think this makes any sense (coalitions MUST be formed after the election, when it's clear what combination of parties can achieve the confidence of the house), I think it's useful to point out that if the Liberals and NDP are serious about taking power they have the means to do it.

The first past the post election system is a poor proxy for the people's will at the best of times, and at the worst of times (uh, now) it produces extremely bad results. Roughly two in three Canadians voted Conservative, Conservatives won 46% of the total seats in the house. Roughly two in three Albertans voted "not Conservative", "not Conservatives" make up 4% of the house seats from Alberta.

As much as I'd love to see electoral reform it's not going to happen in time for a Christmas election, so let's see how the Liberals and NDP could try to make parliament more representative of the two thirds of Canadians that voted against the Conservatives.

Start with Saskatchewan, where despite almost half of the population voting "not conservative" the conservatives won 13/14 seats. The Liberals and NDP could make a deal to not run candidates in the following ridings:

Palliser: NDP wins 50.7 to Conservative 44.0
Rosetown-Bigger: NDP wins 48.8 to Conservative 45.4
Desnethe: Liberal wins 48.1 to Conservative 46.7

Assuming that Elizabeth May is up for it she could pull candidates from close races in return for the NDP endorsing her in Central Nova. Then the Greens win 51.8 to 46.6

Elsewhere in NS:

West Nova: Liberal 53 to Conservative 40
South Shore: NDP 57.4 to Conservative 36.1

So our new house so far is:

Cons: 137
Lib: 79
NDP: 40
BQ: 49
Ind: 2
Green: 1

Ok, on to BC:

Vancouver Island North: NDP 49.4 to Conservative 45.8
North Vancouver: Liberal 48.1 to 42.2
Fleetwood: Liberal 49-45
Surry: NDP 51.2-49.4
Saanich-Gulf: Liberal 50-43

Nunavut: Either NDP or Liberal, 57-35

Manitoba:

Winnipeg South: Liberal 46-49
St. Boniface: Liberal 48-46

PEI:

Egmont: Liberal 53-44


Time to update the house count:

Cons: 128
Lib: 85
NDP: 43
BQ: 49
Ind: 2
Green: 1

And we have a tie! Liberals+NDP=Conservative=128. If we throw in Elizabeth May then the Coalition has more seats than the Conservatives without including the Bloc. But we're not done yet because we still haven't come to Ontario!

Kenora: Liberal 55-40
Essex: Liberal 56-40
Huron: Liberal 48-45
Bruce-Grey-Owen: Green 51.1-47.6
Ottawa West: Liberal 47-45
Ottawa-Orleans: Liberal 49-45
Brant: Liberal 50-42
Haldimand Norfold: Liberal 44-41
Mississauga-Erindale: Liberal 51-43
Oak Ridges: Liberal 51-42
Oshawa: NDP 50-41

On to New Brunswick:

Miramichi: Liberal 54-42
Fredericton: Liberal 47-43

And finally Quebec:

Pontiac: Liberal 39 to Conservative 33
Brome-Misisquoi: Liberal 41 to Bloc 35
Alfred-Pellan: Liberal 41 to Bloc 39
Laval: Liberal 40 to Bloc 38
Ahuntsic: Liberal 49 to Bloc 39
Jeanne-Le Ber: Liberal 48 to Bloc 35
Saint-Lambert: Liberal 43 to Bloc 38


Giving us a final seat count of:

Cons: 114
Lib: 103
NDP: 44
BQ: 43
Ind: 2
Green: 2


So the Liberals and NDP now have 147 seats, more than the 143 seats that the Conservatives started out with, and the NDP get to break their old record number of seats. Lets break the seat totals down by fraction of the house and (fraction of votes):

Cons: 37.0% (37.6%)
Lib: 33.4% (26.2%)
NDP: 14.3% (18.2%)
BQ: 14.0% (10.0%)
Green: 0.6% (6.8%)

The Liberals and BQ still out-perform their fraction of the vote due to first past the post, but the Conservative numbers are much more representative of the "will of Canadians" than the 46.4% of the house they currently control.

Now this whole analysis is obviously simplistic, but it serves to show that if the Liberals and NDP are serious about taking power with a coalition government they have a way to co-operate and take a whole lot of seats away from the Conservatives. As I see it the three biggest problems are likely to be:

1) The NDP will (reasonably, in my opinion) want to take a larger share of these seats, but they might have a harder time winning some of these ridings than the liberals.

2) Voters might have trouble plugging their noses even harder than normal to vote for their second choice party.

3) Taking seats away from the Bloc in Quebec will probably make them less likely to support an NDP-Liberal coalition government.

As far as 1+2 go, I get the feeling that the "Anybody but Harper" feeling is so strong right now that for at least this election Liberals, NDPers, and Greens might go along with it. Additionally, in most of the analysis I left out the Green vote, and if the Liberals and NDP are willing to give up three or four more ridings to let the Greens have a good shot they might reap a huge benefit in a lot of other tight races that I didn't include.

I have very little feeling for how the Bloc is likely to react to losing a bunch of seats due to NDP-Liberal co-operation. The Liberals and NDP could decide not to do strategic running in Quebec, I suppose, although I doubt that would play well in Saskatchewan...

My personal hope is that the Governer General gives the coalition a chance to try to govern, but if there is another election I hope that the Liberals and NDP will finally consider removing their guns from each others feet.