With apologies to my non-Canadian readers this time I am going to do a deep dive into Canada's electoral system. Just a few days ago we had an election where it turned out we dodged a bullet by not allowing the Conservative Party of Canada, Canada's answer to Donald Trump and the Republicans, to form the government. This came at the expense of losing representation in Parliament of the left, which is a serious loss for Canadian society in my opinion, and to make matters worse it is, as I show below, an artifact of the electoral system.
What if the different political parties were represented in Parliament in proportion to the number of votes they got? This is called proportional representation. It implies that everyone's vote has exactly the same weight. This is only fair, which is why it is also called fair voting. Fair Vote Canada is a national organization devoted to promoting the idea of fair voting. They have a lot of information which you may find interesting.
More specifically we can ask how many seats each party would have ended up having if the number of seats was proportional to the number of votes.
A couple of months ago I wrote about Bluesky and the promise of corporate social media here. I was curious about who actually owned Bluesky, and it was surprising:
For almost two years now polls in Canada have shown that the Conservative Party of Canada, led by Pierre Poilievre, Canada's answer to Donald Trump, have a commanding lead over the governing Liberal Party led until recently by Justin Trudeau. There is no doubt that this was a major factor leading to Trudeau's resignation, in the hope that the Liberal Party might recover lost ground under a new leader.
At the same time, I can't help feeling that the polls have a lot of influence on how Canadians will vote.
As Elon Musk continues to clear ascending levels of diabolical madness, many Twitter users are understandably disgusted with the whole thing and looking for alternatives. Many are flocking to Bluesky, an initiative of Jack Dorsey, the original creator and CEO of Twitter.
There are several reasons why I have started this writing project by focusing on the story of the Dalai Lama: for one thing, it's a great story and I love stories! But also, there are lessons here about politics: about power, how to allocate it, and what to do with it, a topic that I always seem to keep coming back to these days.