The Proletariat Congress

While I normally refrain from writing about personal matters in my blog, I’m going to take this opportunity to write about my newest decision. As of today, I’m taking a more active approach to politics in my country. I’ve become a member of the NDP (New Democratic Party of Canada). For those of you who aren’t Canadian, the NDP are the socialist party, that exists at both the provincial and federal levels.

I was particularly interested in doing this for a while but only decided today because of the upcoming provincial elections that will be happening in October here in Ontario, in which two of the hot button issues is faith-based school funding and electorial reform, which would see the current FPTP (first-past-the-post) possibly replaced by the MMP (mixed member proportional), if it garners enough votes in the upcoming election, which is also serving as a referendum.

For those of you who are wondering, MMP would give each voter essentially two votes. The first vote would be for the party of your choice; the party that you feel best represents you. The second vote would be for the actual MPP (Member of Provincial Parliament) who represents the riding in the legislature. This would defeat the old system of FPTP, where even if the elected MP (or MPP) didn’t have even 50% of the vote they still got the seat simply because they had the most votes overall.

The MMP system would give underdog parties a greater chance to represent a larger portion of their members and supporters in the legislature and it would give people a greater voice because the legislature would no longer be dominated by those who won their riding simply because they had more votes than their opponents, even if they took less than half of the votes in their riding.

This system would serve as a challenge to stagnant ideologies by allowing a greater range of input into a system that has for too long been dominated by those who hold wealth and power.

It’s easy to say, “oh I’d like to do that one day”, it’s another to actually make the move. My next move will be to find out what I can actually do to be active. I’ve been interested in this for a while, so I’m quite excited about this. It’s a great chance to learn more about what works in this country.

Stumble It!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 1:32 pm and is filed under ndp, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.