But they're too stupid to realize that
The retirees have greater disposable income than the young people (read, most people in the labour market)
And of course the number of retirees is going up every day
I’m a Boomer with twelve years of post-secondary modern science education. My spouse, also a Boomer has spent her entire life in the academy. Your claim is false.
> They’re religious nutters due to memory of their neurological makeup
I’m an atheist Boomer. I haven’t a religious bone in my body. Your claim is false.
I’m sure there are other venues that will accept your ageist, angry and patently false generalizations as truth; but by and large this is not one of them.
Good start. Calls are also excellent. Then get your neighbors to do the same.
For controversial stuff, you want tens to hundreds of outreach events recorded. It doesn’t take all that much for electeds to spell a festering primary threat.
i know i voted against the referendum question last week to consider moving to a US inspired elected senate system. i dont think we need that pageantry
I'm familiar with American and Swiss elections. In both, the principal threat to an incumbent is from an own-party challenger to their seat.
For an incumbent, particularly one in a comfortable seat, an opposition candidate is usually not an issue. But someone from inside the camp is annoying and requires rhetorical contorting and lots of spending, spending that can then leave one vulnerable to an otherwise-benign opposition candidate. (Also, motivated activists are annoying in the best way.)
A smart elected–in these systems–will thus take a call to defuse anger before it develops into organized activism.
It does technically have power, but it's like the King's power to veto UK legislation - he can do it precisely once and then he'll be stripped of the power.
Honestly this old chestnut comes up time and time again.
As much as many people would love the King/Queen to put the politicians in their place sadly there are two problems.
First, the monarch's role is effectively only ceremonial these days. Even "The King's speech" during opening of parliament is actually a piece of paper written by the ruling-party of the day, the King just sits there in his fancy regalia and reads it verbatim.
Second, if you are referring to veto during the royal ascent process. As per Wikipedia, the King does not have pure veto power, his options are:
- grant royal assent, thereby making the bill an act of Parliament.
- delay the bill's assent through the use of reserve powers, thereby invoking a veto.
- refuse royal assent on the advice of his or her ministers.
Canadian MPs are electeds. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of the Canadian Senate being referred to as an elected body—it’s irrelevant to the above.
Parties select their representatives who run in the election.
The system basically guarantees that insiders cannot be removed.
It's the property of a candidate being affiliated with a party - an indirect part of the election - that is run by the parties rules that are generally less than entirely democratic in nature.
Liberals NDP and Greens would never form a government with the Conservatives so the liberals are effectively always in power.
Which means insiders in the liberal party are in charge and voting is partly irrelevant unless you're voting for the conservatives, but they would need an actual straight majority.
Th Bloc has 21 seats, and has had as many as 54. They would certainly ally with the conservatives. (Not the modern maple maga variety, but old school PC).
If they receive 100 calls of people saying they're strongly against a bill and no for they might reconsider their position.
Also calling is a better signal of showing you care then emailing.
Paula Simons has also been actively listening to Canadians on this subject. https://sencanada.ca/en/senators/simons-paula/
Marty Deacon (Ontario) Committee chair 613-943-3429 Tony Ince (Nova Scotia) Deputy chair 343-991-5540 Andrew Cardozo (Ontario) Committee member 613-996-9545 Katherine Hay (Ontario) Committee member 343-991-5536 Rebecca Patterson (Ontario) Committee member 613-995-2185 Hassan Yussuff (Ontario) Committee member 613-944-1108 Kim Pate (Ontario) Committee member 613-995-9220 John M. McNair (New Brunswick) Committee member 613-995-5060 Victor Boudreau (New Brunswick) Committee member 613-947-4110 Judy A. White (Newfoundland and Labrador) Committee member 613-996-2433
That's politics 101. Read up Mark Twain's Running For Governor.
Dial #lever and say “cut off”.
The difference can be used to bargain with incumbents to compensate for their current position, while installing a new type of government in its place that is better. It's a pretty hard problem but I don't think it's impossible. I'm pursuing this kind of thing in Finland presently.
They don’t need to. When the informed minority on an issue gets lazy, stupid or cynical, however, the system dies.
Anyway, this really needs an explanation of what your idea of "real democracy" is, and what "replace power" is supposed to mean.
Anyway, the answer to your question of "how" is likely: at your own peril. ;)
On what basis does someone make this claim? Authoritarianism is a broad stroke. Most of the time, they eliminate voting, not make it compulsory.
Classically, an authoritarian power only care about voting to initially take hold of power. Every attempt to coerce voting (one way or the other) after that is performative, not instrumental.
No, that is totally not true.
Even North Korea doesn't eliminate voting. People there still vote, just very controllable by the government. Compulsory voting is one of the instruments that makes voting more controllable for the government. Voting in North Korea is mandatory.
Like what?
Why not? Is it just that you have not experienced it, or is there a more principled argument?
My personal experience is that democracy feels to work much better in smaller (sub 10 million people) than larger, but it could also just be correlation not causation.
Let's ignore the "massification" of democracy (by which I mean entrenched power gaining leverage over the "demos" by targeting propaganda at the low-agency portion of the population, but this may be controversial?). Population scale has changed but Dunbar's number hasn't, and if the 0.1% of the population that is deeply invested in a topic manages to organize, there's a high likelihood that they can get critical reach. However, population scale has changed and Dunbar's number hasn't, so the first step of actually organizing 0.1% of the total population becomes a lot more difficult with scale.
Arguably, my distrust of modern democracy doesn't help, but I have no idea how anyone could manage to find and fish out 20k specific individuals from a pool of 20M people. And that's what needs to be done, IMO, not signing petitions (and in Canada, there's already a little bit of debanking-based chilling effect re: out-of-band political organization).
The only thing that will change their minds is taking their seat, but without electoral reform you can be quite certain that only those loyal to Liberal, NDP and CPC will get elected. And PQ, but they're just Quebec NDP.
The general public of Canada is more concerned with Trump than what any Canadian politician is up to, so good luck.