One Member, One Vote, Half a Country?
May 3, 2009 · By Adam Dyck
Much hubbub has been made about the Liberals planning to scrap their convention for a one member, one vote system, and nearly everyone agrees this is a good thing. No more Dions, no more smoke-filled back rooms, more power to the people, etc, etc. But if the Liberals ever want to become the powerhouse they once were, they need to avoid the 1M1V plan at all costs.
If each member in the Liberal Party were given an equal vote, guess which region would end up with all the say? Ding ding ding, we have a winner! And if Ontario gets to dictate party policy, the ratio of Western to Eastern in the party will become even more disproportionate, leading to a cruel cycle that can only end with the Liberals becoming a regional rump party.
So unless the Liberals want Canada to remain in minority territory from here into oblivion, they’d best trash the 1M1V plan, before it’s too late.
The LPC is already the party of Toronto, Montreal (in part) and Vancouver (in a small part). So the fear you express about becoming an Ontario rump party basically already exists in the Liberal Party of Toronto. The convention has in Vancouver but all the decisions were made in and by the Toronto group who brought the de facto foreigner back to lead the Toronto Liberal party and who run the show. The LPT has no need of member input, or democratic votes or anything else except give them money!
They do deserve credit for adopting a democratic voting system. But they deserve the boot for wanting to expand the scope of human rights commissions:
http://www.wernerpatels.com/20.....-back.html
From what I understand the Liberals adopted a “weighted” one member one vote system similar to what the CPC has which would prevent one region from dominating.
Weighted one member vote systems are pure garbage. They prop up the weak regions while punishing the regions who actually deliver votes and money. And the last time I check, votes and money are what politics are all about.
I’ve been at two national Conservative conventions and witnessed western delegates being marginalized by the “weighted” model of party “democracy.” For example, a Eastern riding EDA with a handful of members, a losing candidate and ZERO cash, can have the same voting power as a western EDA with thousands of members, a winning candidate and hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank.
That’s pure socialist garbage and if you truly believe in grassroots politics – incidentally which most national offices don’t – then you can’t support any policy other than one member one vote.
FYI: the weighted voting model is one of the poisons that infected the Conservative party via the Progressive Conservative after the merger. Unfortunately, now that it infected the party, it’s virtually impossible to remove. Support for this voting model is concentrated in the weaker ridings of the East, while the opposition is primarily in the West – hence the only thing keeping this “progressive” model of voting is that actual model itself.
I would argue that grassroots does not necessarily equate to absolute democracy.
The idea of giving all regions a say in party policy is the best way to ensure growth, accessability and representation of all members.
But this isn’t about democracy, this is about internal decision making process of a political party, not a national legislature. Political parties live and die by the strength of their membership. An argument can be made that the membership is the political party, that without the membership a political party would be an empty shell, devoid of ideas and more importantly, money. Now advocating anything outside of a straight one member one vote system of decision making is basically advocating a system where one member’s ideas are more important than other. That isn’t democracy, that’s elitism.
I’ve witnessed the votes on this issue at the two national conventions, if you take into consideration which regions are supportive of the one member one vote system, the majority of the membership of the Conservative Party of Canada does not support the weighted voting system that the party currently employs (I don’t have hard evidence of this statement, but I’ll see what I can do about finding more information). It was basically shoved down our throats by the leadership during the merger. Even with a concerted effort to remove this “poison” during the last two conventions, its survived.
No, regions don’t win elections, votes do. A political party that is representative of its membership is a party that will attract new members with the knowledge that their ideas (and votes) will have the same power and influence as the next member in a different region.
Brokerage politics is dying – the death keel started with Brian Mulroney’s coalition and it’s going to die a bit more with Stephen Harper’s pandering to the nationalist vote in Quebec – “Harper’s Quebecers as a ‘nation’ was a joke. I can assure you, it would not have survived a one member one vote vote of the membership, not a chance.
The further we get away from the core principles of grassroots politics, reinvigorated into the Canadian conservative movement by the Reform Party and its successor the Canadian Alliance, the close we become to being the Progressive Conservative of yesterday. And we all know how that story ended – bankrupt of ideas, struggling for an engaged membership and centrally run through the office of the leader, the Progressive Conservative party was dealt the death that it so greatly deserved.