Conservatives are right to ban the Longest Ballot Committee nonsense. #cdnpoli #canadianpolitics
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
180.37761
Summary
In this video, I tackle the idea that electoral reform is even popular, because the Longest Ballot Committee has been trying to disrupt the voting system for years, and the system is not listening to them. In order to do so, they need 60% of the vote in order to change the electoral system, which is why they re-run referendums on the same issue every single time, and they always lose.
Transcript
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Hey guys, so the Conservative Party is currently planning on tabling legislation in order to crack
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down on the activities of the Longest Ballot Committee, but in this video I just want to give
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a bit of a precursor for something I'm going to be making a longer video on tomorrow, so make sure
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you're subscribed to the National Telegraph if you want to see it, and I want to tackle the idea
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that electoral reform is even popular, because a way that the Longest Ballot Committee justifies
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its shenanigans is by claiming that what it's pushing forward is very popular, and the fact
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that the system is not listening to them requires them to try and disrupt the system by putting more
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than 150 candidates on the Battle River Crowfoot ballot, where Pierre Polyev's running in the
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by-election, and they've been doing this for a few years now, and it's all been justified because
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we need electoral reform and the system's not listening to us. Okay, well maybe you haven't
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heard, but there have been referendums on electoral reform on a provincial level in three separate
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provinces, and it shouldn't shock you, but the pro-reform position got beat every single time.
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Naturally, in all these referendums, you need 60% of the vote in order to change the system. We're not
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going to change the entire way the electoral system operates with, you know, 51% of people wanting to
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change it, and 49% not, because depending if there's a rain shower in a certain part of a province,
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you know, turnout could be different, and one side could win, or one side could lose because of that,
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so you want it to be decisive. The closest they've ever got is in 2005 in British Columbia, where they
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had to redo it, even though they could have just said, you guys didn't win, they didn't quite get to
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60%, they were 2.3% off, they let them redo it, but they changed the rules to make sure that the no side
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was able to have a representative organization who could actually, you know, spend money pushing for
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the no vote, basically arguing why people should vote no, because in 2005, the yes side for, I believe,
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single transferable vote, basically, like, if your first option goes down, you at least get one more
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party you can vote for. They were running unopposed in 2005, it was just one organization telling people
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why they should vote yes, and nobody on the other side, and they still lost. In 2009, when they re-ran
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the referendum, they got crushed, and then not being satisfied with being crushed in 2009 with more
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fair rules, they then pushed it forward in 2018, had the backing of the premier of BC at the time,
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John Horgan, and they got crushed again. So, I don't think that they actually care about democracy
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when they've not listened to the voters in the three provinces where they keep losing. The other
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two provinces were Ontario and PEI, and if you can't win in PEI, and you can't win in British Columbia
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with the pro-electoral reform issue, it's because it's not popular in the entire country.