On Oct 22, 2015, at 3:00 PM, frank theriault <knarftheria...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Certainly, two of our best governments over the past 50 years have > been minority governments. In Canada, with three major parties, a > minority government's effectiveness often depends on who holds the > "balance of power". Often the third place party can have a very strong > voice in policy formation. We have two major parties (and only one house) but we make up for it with proportional voting where everyone gets two votes. One is for our electorate MP who gets in on a simple majority. The other vote is a "party" vote where we vote for whichever party we want to support (the MP is also a party member so you can double-up or mix your allegiances). This is good for electorates where the incumbent MP (or their party) is popular: the people who don't support them can at least get a voice. The party votes are collated across the entire country and any party that gets at least 5% of the party vote, or at least one electorate seat, will be allocated seats based on their proportion of the party vote. This works wonders for smaller parties, but not the ones that are too small (ie lunatics). It's a good system but it does tend to put a lot of power into the hands of smaller parties when a coalition is required to form the government. And it does make it impossible to get rid of the senior party members - anyone high enough up the "party list" in the big parties will get a seat even if they lose in the electorate. Cheers, Dave -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
