We talk about David Moscrop’s (@David_Moscrop) upcoming book: Are we too dumb for democracy?, Jagmeet Singh’s decision to run in Burnaby South and the war of words between Saudi Arabia and Canada. Plus our usual quick takes.

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Links/Notes

Feedback from Mac Lockhart on electoral reform:

Your guest called AV majoritarian and STV proportional, but AV is actually just a special case of STV in which the quote is 50%+1 and the districts are of size 1. I tweeted about this, but this is why STV really shouldn’t be considered PR and should be seen as a member of the broad threshold category that includes plurality and majoritarian systems. Majoritarian and proportional refer to goals – AV and STV try to generate results that account for deeper preferences using ranked ballots and some for of threshold while PR systems aim for PR.

Ireland isn’t a good case study for how many independents are elected because the constituencies are so small and politics are so local there. If we want to know whether STV will induce independents, we’d want to do some complex analysis that no one would care about, but we could do!

It’d be good to point out that every system will likely affect the party system so more people will throw votes at non-major parties. Lot’s of research shows the major parties will likely fracture or at least shrink. Hard to imagine the BC Lib coalition would exist under more proportional systems. So the idea that the BC conservatives wouldn’t pick up some seats or a further left party or Christian Heritage seems unlikely.

Denmark and Iceland just use list PR with districts smaller than the national level. It’s not at all like Rural/Urban where a different system is used across the two.

Canada has never used FPTP at every level of government since Vancouver uses the poorly named multi-member plurality (MMP but not that one). We just don’t used ranked ballots or PR.

Segment 1: Too dumb for democracy?

* DavidMoscrop.com

* Russian Twitter trolls story

Segment 2: JagMeet Burnaby’s likely new MP

at 33m16s

* Jagmeet Singh to run in Burnaby

Segment 3: War of Saud

at 43m37s

* Canada gets into war of words with Saudi Arabia over a tweet

Quick takes

at 54m19s

* Costs jump on Trans Mountain pipeline

* Red light cameras now run 24/7

* Study showing red light cameras do somewhat work

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