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Politics : Canadian Political Free-for-All -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: 49thMIMOMander who wrote (3997)	4/20/2004 8:55:01 PM
From: Michael Watkins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 37256

The rest of the world has been fairly happy since those funny days, and now there are only some few complaining ones left. Proportional representation via the FPTP system may not be perfect, but on the otherhand, PR systems and "the rest of the world" (which I know you take to mean Europe in particular northern Europe) suffer from many of the same problems that we tend to complain about in Canada, including: 1. Decreasing voter turn out. 2. Declining participation in political parties. - voter apathy. Lets look at the European example: ssb.no Participation in the Storting (parliamentary) elections peaked in 1965, when 85.4 per cent of the electorate voted. In 2001, this figure had fallen to 75.5. There has been an even sharper decline in voter turnout at municipal elections. In 1999, more people stayed at home than voted for any party. Only six in ten cast their vote, compared with almost eight in ten in 1963, a 25 per cent decrease. BUT WAIT LETS LOOK AT FINLAND You know Finland, so this is relevant: ssb.no Finland (with PR) has about the same voter turn out as Canada (with FPTP). Finland has the lowest turn out of all Nordic countries and barely above Portugal and the United Kingdom at the bottom of the list. And here you are billing PR as a panacea. Its not. I concede that PR might be interesting and useful indeed, but declining voter participation will not alone be "fixed" by the introduction of PR, nor an elected Senate (in Canada) nor any of the other electoral reforms typically suggested in this country and others. Ilmarinen - its well past time for you to bake another idea, this one has gone off a little.