Comment by JumpCrisscross
12 hours ago
> emailed 9 senators and heard back from one
Good start. Calls are also excellent. Then get your neighbors to do the same.
For controversial stuff, you want tens to hundreds of outreach events recorded. It doesn’t take all that much for electeds to spell a festering primary threat.
electeds? primary threat? i think that might backfire in the canadian senate
i know i voted against the referendum question last week to consider moving to a US inspired elected senate system. i dont think we need that pageantry
> electeds? primary threat?
I'm familiar with American and Swiss elections. In both, the principal threat to an incumbent is from an own-party challenger to their seat.
For an incumbent, particularly one in a comfortable seat, an opposition candidate is usually not an issue. But someone from inside the camp is annoying and requires rhetorical contorting and lots of spending, spending that can then leave one vulnerable to an otherwise-benign opposition candidate. (Also, motivated activists are annoying in the best way.)
A smart elected–in these systems–will thus take a call to defuse anger before it develops into organized activism.
Ah, to clarify, Canada's upper house is basically a house of lords equivalent that we expect to be full of puffed up nobodies that get paid a too generous stipend to sit there and keep their mouths shut. Canada has one elected congress body (the one we all talk about) and then this vestigial senate which is generally expected to sit there and silently approve everything that passes through it.
It does technically have power, but it's like the King's power to veto UK legislation - he can do it precisely once and then he'll be stripped of the power.
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Yeah, I think it'd be excellent if we could just disband our upper house and while it's worth pushing them to act on this bill I loathe the senate's continued existence and would rather be in a position where this emergency call happened prior to it passing the house.
There are no primaries in Canada at all.
Parties select their representatives who run in the election.
The system basically guarantees that insiders cannot be removed.
That actually sounds crazy to me. At least for the House of Commons. I'm amenable to upper chambers of bicameral legislatures being indirectly elected. That's how the US Senate used to be before the constitution was amended.
I think you're misreading. MPs are directly elected. Anyone can run to be an MP (You have to collect 50 to 100 signatures from supporters and fill out some paperwork). Whoever wins the most votes in a riding becomes MP.
It's the property of a candidate being affiliated with a party - an indirect part of the election - that is run by the parties rules that are generally less than entirely democratic in nature.
The British system which Canada basically copied is entirely designed to prevent real democracy.
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Do you have several parties or just two?
Liberals NDP Greens Conservative
Liberals NDP and Greens would never form a government with the Conservatives so the liberals are effectively always in power.
Which means insiders in the liberal party are in charge and voting is partly irrelevant unless you're voting for the conservatives, but they would need an actual straight majority.
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