My Democracy Push Poll

 

My Values

 

My Preferences

 My Priorities

 My Profile:

LEAP Links:

Leap Manifesto:  http://bit.ly/LEAPman
LEAP Frequently Asked Questions FAQ: http://bit.ly/LEAPfaq
15 LEAP Demands: http://bit.ly/LEAP15de
LEAP - Who's on board?: http://bit.ly/LEAPboard
Science Document LEAP is based on: http://bit.ly/LeapScience
Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives (CCPA): Can we afford LEAP?: http://bit.ly/LEAPpay
Macleans Interview with Avi Lewis:  http://bit.ly/MACaviLEAP

Proportional Representation Information Links

Proportional Representation for Canada

  

Court Charter Challenge:

Our Charter guarantees us effective representation, but the Prime Minister reneged on changing our discriminatory voting system. Pledge your support to take the government to court!

https://charterchallenge.ca/

E-Petition for Electoral Reform to Government of Canada: http://bit.ly/NCprPET

PR Information Links:

1. Why Trudeau Is Wrong, As He Declares Preference For NON-Proportional Ranked Ballot: #ERRE http://bit.ly/ARavVSpr
2. Fair Vote Canada (FVC): http://www.fairvote.ca/
3. FVC Frequently Asked Questions: http://campaign2015.fairvote.ca/faqs/
4. FVC resource section: http://campaign2015.fairvote.ca/resources/
5. Wasted Votes: http://wastedvotes.ca/
6. Law Commission of Canada Report, summarized: http://bit.ly/lawcompr PDF full report: http://bit.ly/LCCer
7. UK's Jenkins Commission Report, summarized: http://bit.ly/jenksum PDF full report: http://bit.ly/Jenkinspr
8. Professional Lijphardt's testimony at#ERRE Aug 22/2016: http://bit.ly/2bn1RZH
9. Rural-Urban Proportional - http://www.fairvote.ca/ruralurbanproportional
10. Summary of Rural-Urban PR - http://election-modelling.ca/rup-15pct/index.html
11. MMP for Canada: http://wilfday.blogspot.ca/2016/03/mmp-for-canada.html
12. STV for Canada: http://www.stvforcanada.com/
13. Overview of Different Electoral Systems: http://election-modelling.ca/overview/index.html
14. Vote For PR Now: http://voteforoptiona.webs.com/vote-for-pr-now
15. Wilf Day's Blog - in depth searchable info on all types of electoral reform: http://wilfday.blogspot.ca/
16. Whoa Canada Blog - List of PR Resources: http://bit.ly/WCprblog
17. Map of Different Types of Electoral Systems Around The World: http://bit.ly/electworld
18. Table of Electoral Systems Worldwide http://www.idea.int/esd/world.cfm
19. Electoral Reform Society of the UK: http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/voting-systems 
20. ARGH!!! What are 'Ranked Ballots'? http://bit.ly/RnkdBlts

#ERRE Committe Reports and Mandate  

1. Mandate for the Committee on Electoral Reform. http://www.parl.gc.ca/Committees/en/ERRE/About Right click and open link in new tab and then click on the word 'Mandate'.
   
2. Complete 348 page #ERRE Final Report STRENGTHENING DEMOCRACY IN CANADA: PRINCIPLES, PROCESS AND PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT FOR ELECTORAL REFORM
   Web Format: http://bit.ly/ERRErpt
   PDF Format:  http://bit.ly/ERRErptPDF
3. Link to all Meetings, Reports, News Releases & Documents http://bit.ly/RptsSum
4. Modelling Elections PDF includes summary table of various Canadian electoral systems under consideration: http://bit.ly/SumChrtPR
5. Gallagher Index Made Easy: http://gallagherindex.blogspot.ca/
6. Overview of Featured Simulations: http://election-modelling.ca/overview/index.html

  

Videos:

1. Our Democracy is Broken - A great introductory video to our current system and to PR: https://youtu.be/jZO_Wyy2zpo
2. Problems with FPTP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo
3. MMP: MMP Introduction Video & MMP Advanced Video
4. STV : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-4_yuK-K-k
5. More videos: http://bit.ly/vidsPRop

Other Links:

1. 10 Cdn commissions, studies & reports recommending PR for Canada: http://wilfday.blogspot.com/2014/01/ten-canadian-commissions-assemblies-and.html
2. The Difference in Allocating/Counting votes on Ranked Ballots in NON-proportional Winner-Take-All AV aka IRV and Proportional STV: http://www.mah.gov.on.ca/Page11118.aspx 
3. Flow Chart Comparison of vote allocation when using a ranked ballot in STV versus IRV: http://bit.ly/fcIRVSTV http://bit.ly/AVSTVcount 
4. Party List PR - Open List - Closed List - Definitions: http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/party-list 
5. Example Proportional Representation Ballots: http://bit.ly/OAballotspr or http://bit.ly/prBALLOTS or http://bit.ly/PRballots3 
6. Example Non-PR (Winner Take All) Ballots: http://bit.ly/WTAballots
7. How the wording of a referendum can affect the outcome: http://www.prvote.com/

Proportional Representation (PR) Example Ballots:

1. Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) with a Ranked Ballot on the Local side and Open Lists on the Regional side.

 

2.  Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) with Open Lists on the Regional side.

 

3.  Mixed Member Proportional Ballots with Closed Lists on the Regional Side 

No one is advocating for this type of PR

4.  Single Transferable Vote (STV) Ballot - from the BC STV site found here: BC STV

In order for STV to work as proportional representation system you should rank all candidates.  In a riding with 18 candidates such as the one below, it IS possible to waste your votes if you rank only 5 candidates but don’t rank the 5 that won.   In STV, the voter should always rank every candidate to prevent potentially wasted votes.

 

How Leadnow betrayed their principles and lost their way. Could they be headed home?

Leadnow recommends NDP-Mira Oreck over LPC-Jody Wilson-Raybould (Vancouver-Granville) despite the CBC b.s. poll-tracker/marketing strategy

Leadnow has endorsed the NDP candidate over the Liberal candidate in Vancouver Granville.

A little History: Leadnow started out as an activist organization - at that task, they were awesome. They organized and coordinated many successful and well-attended demonstrations and events. Leadnow was very much an evidence based, supporter driven, social and environmental activist organization trying to influence politics to stop Harper and improve Canada.  They have championed many different campaigns, all within their 3 main principles of: 1 - Open Democracy, 2 - Fair Economy; and 3 - Climate Justice.

Read these principles and keep them in mind when you are reading through the rest of this blog.

• The Inter-web was abuzz with stopping Harper and lots of peeps were talking about cross-party cooperation. *Full confession - we wanted cross-party cooperation. 
• The NDP & Liberal leadership conventions happened one after the other. Activists joined the NDP to vote for Nathan Cullen.  Mr. Cullen was/is a progressive, he defends indigenous rights, wanted to defeat Harper and he was very much pro-environment over corporate profits and pipelines. *Nathan was and is awesome; but I am glad that Mulcair won, even though I voted for Cullen. Mulcair has proven to be the dude for the job at hand.  The Liberal convention came next and lots of activists joined the Liberals for a month to vote for Joyce Murray's pro-cooperation and pro-environment platform. Murray grew up in Point Grey in Vancouver (one of the richest postal codes in Canada, a daughter of a UBC prof mum and Survey company owner dad.  She and her husband started a very economically successful tree farm company in B.C. 
• We were all naive. *full disclosure - I'm a member of the NDP now.  We had hoped that maybe the Liberal party gave up its old ways of back door deals, scandals and rich white privileged back-room corporate control.  *sorry too many adjectives but I couldn't resist - maybe a rap tune. 
• Lead now 'took the lead' and tried to promote cross-party cooperation for the purpose of defeating Harper. If my memory is accurate, they may have organized the 'Join the NDP, vote Cullen and then join the Liberals and vote Murray action'  When that failed they decided to do their own polling and promote an ABC strategic voting approach to stopping Harper.  There were many of us who were either too young or not politically astute enough to realize that 'vote strategically' has been code for 'vote Liberal' for many, many elections.  *I can't remember where I left my keys, never mind what happened in elections 2011, 08, 06, 04, 2000, 1997,... They lost a few supporters over that. 
• Then the Liberals voted in favor of C51 (think big brother & George Orwells -1984), - more supporters left.  LeadNow continued to support keeping the LPC as a possible choice depending on the polls. ie they supported polling (fortune-telling) over principles. *articles & research all over, verifies that polls, especially large polls, are inaccurate and are really only used for a type of self-fulfilling prophecy marketing. 
• S-7 the #BarbaricCulturalPractices Act blew up on Twitter and Liberal, Green, and NDP supporters were all tweeting the hashtag.  It was largely the announcement of the CPC #BarbaricCulturalPractices Tip-line that resulted in looking into where exactly, this name came from - Bill S-7 vote 456.  Twitter then responded with 'But hey, wait a minute, the Liberals voted with the cons in favor of the #BarbaricCulturalPractices Act and the Tipline, 1-800-Muslims. (Kidding, sort of.  Dear Leaders party duzn't have a number yet and won't unless they win the election and get their RCMP task force set up. ;-) LeadNow lost more of their base.  Activists will mostly choose principles over polling. We each have our personal threshold of how many principles we will sacrifice to stop Harper. 
• THE BIG POLLS: The corporate polls looked good for the NDP initially, but many of us NDP supporters were skeptical.  We had already seen this play out in the BC provincial election. Polls look great in the beginning, everybody gets lazy and decides - 'maybe if we are just quiet, these great polls will stick?'. 
  
  NOPE, if you get lazy and don't fight back, jabbing with:
• every historical scandal, every contrary or hypocritical vote in parliament,
• every poor budget, dismal economic figure,
• jobs lost, economic inequality stat,
• public institution sold off or given away
• social & environmental cut and resultant tragedy... 
• you'll lose, no matter what the polls say. We can't afford to be kind; we have to be brutally true.  These are not subjective attacks of personal character, they are objective facts of political character - Big Difference.
• Humans have short memories. Articles and studies all over the internet show that Polls, especially large polls, are not representative and are really only used today as a kind of "self-fulling prophecy advertising scheme".
• I mean, come on:
• cell phones,
• call-screening, 
• too many advertising and marketing/survey calls 
• combined with cutting costs to increase or maintain the polling company's bottom line....
• result in  a 9% response rate compared to a 70% + response rate.  
• Yep, back in the day when pollsters went door to door; and we had a mandatory long-form-census, they would get a 70%+ response rate.
• So think about it, pollsters don't know what 91% of the population are thinking plus they don't know what the demographics of the population they are trying to sample - looks like.  NO LONG FORM CENSUS - NO DEMOGRAPHY STATISTICS.

• Then the Liberals came out in favor of the TPP.  They described the trade agreement as historic but said they couldn't comment because they hadn't seen the deal.  

  

  Screen Shot of TPP statement

• Funny thing is, Wikileaks had leaked so much of the secret TPP agreement over the last 2 to 3 years, that experts around the world had time to weigh in and reveal how the TPP will benefit multi-national corporations to the detriment of us regular folk - the 99%.  Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and even Donald Trump are among the politicians, south of the border, who came out against the TPP. Sure, the LPC announcement gave them a certain amount of plausible deniability, but the rose wasn't only losing it's blush, it was starting to smell rotten. No doubt, Leadnow lost more supporters.  This is what the LPC web page description left out:
  
  

  

      

  
  

• This latest scandal - #Pipegate, #LPCknew - where we have Justin Trudeau’s campaign co-chair, Gagnier, advising Big Oil on how to get Energy East approved in the event of Liberal minority or a Liberal majority may be the last straw for LeadNow and maybe for the Liberal Party in this election.  I mean you have a known oil lobbiest working as the campaign co-chair f-f-s.  Seriously, this is so bad, even the Harpercons are yelling 'SCANDAL'.*To me, that is the most hilarious part - Pot meet Kettle.      

#PipeGate #LPCknew

Perhaps Leadnow will finally stop chasing the unicorn and realize that a Leopard rarely changes its spots and the fairy dust didn't take.

I hope so.  If Lead Now turns back to it's 3 principles over polls, they will gain back supporters. Until I know for sure that they have their P's in the proper order, I won't even set up a link in this Blog for them.  

The Problems with Polls - Often Wrong and Not Representative.

Get out the Vote and Vote with the Courage of your Convictions

Don't let this Happen:  

UK Election 2015 - Polls completely wrong.

Who answers polling phone calls on their cell? 

I am still a relic that has a landline & a cell phone & I hang up or don't answer Polling calls.  Caller ID allows everyone to screen calls.

• Much of the population don't have land-lines.
• Many Canadians (on landlines, VOIP, cellphones) have call screening.
• Cell phone only citizens don't want to waste money on minutes answering poll questions.
• Most cell-phone-only citizens don't want to waste their battery charge on answering poll questions.
• Most cell-phone-only citizens represent a younger demographic. 
• 9% is considered a good response rate (by Nanos) - so that means ***91%*** of people hang up, or don't answer. You have to wonder how those 91% would have responded.
• So, even aggregates of polls are still not contacting 91% of their target. 
• We no longer have a Mandatory Long Form Census, so it's difficult to discern the demographic of the Cdn population. 
  
  In A First Past the Post System, Polls do not translate into seats won eg:  Nanos poll May 02 of 2011 put Liberals at 20.5% support but that didn't translate to the 34 seats they won which represented only 11% of the seats in the house 34/308

 Link: From Michael Harris's article: Even Nick Nanos is reported to have run biased polls.

How do pollsters even know what Canada looks like demographically? Thanks to the Conservatives, we know longer have the statistics from the Mandatory Long Form Census to answer those questions.

Link: From Laurier Prof:  The Polls are Bad -- Their Accuracy, that is.