Collaborative Proposal Creation
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Committee on Internal Electoral Reform
- Proposal text
- BE IT RESOLVED THAT Federal Council strike a Committee on Internal Electoral Reform to, if determined appropriate, recommend by-law or constitutional changes for members to adopt internal proportional representation at the 2024 General Meeting. BACKGROUND: This party believes in proportional representation for several reasons. Chief among them is that proportional representation makes space for the true will of all those participating in elections. Currently, the Green Party does not use proportional representation in its internal governance. The Federal Council has one representative per province, and each councilor's vote is equal. As a party with regional strongholds across a large and diverse country, this is problematic. It means that the Federal Councillor from Newfoundland and Labrador, representing 76 members (as of September 2022) has a vote that is equal to the Federal Councillor from Ontario, representing 9614 members. Attached to this proposal is a spreadsheet that details how far from proportional our council currently is. Clearly, party members are not being proportionally represented. At the same time, the pool of potential candidates for governance positions is being limited.
- Type of Proposal
- A directive to ask the party’s Federal Council to consider an action
- Objective / Benefit
- The committee should consider questions such as: 1. How do other parties (both nationally and internationally) select their board of directors? 2. How do we ensure that regions with smaller membership numbers are still represented while preserving proportional representation? 3. Should we have vote-weighting? Amalgamation of regions with smaller membership numbers? Should we do away with regional representation entirely?
- If your proposal replaces an existing policy or policies, which one does it replace?
- N/A
- List any supporting evidence for your proposal
- N/A
- Does this proposal affect any particular group and what efforts have been made to consult with the group or groups?
- N/A
- Jurisdiction: Is this proposal under federal jurisdiction?
- Unsure or Not applicable (e.g. directives and constitutional changes)
- Please indicate the language the proposal is being submitted in.
- English
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Conversation with David Hitchcock
This proposal strikes me as opening up an unnecessary can of worms. The analogy to proportional representation in legislatures if flawed, because the point there is to get a distribution of political perspectives that reflects the distribution among the people who vote. Tying the number of Federal Council seats allocated to a region to the number of paid-up members in that region would make the number open to fluctuation as numbers rise and fall. The disproportion between a province's population, number of paid-up members and number of designated seats (1) on Federal Council is automatically compensated for by the tendency for most of the Federal Council members elected by the whole membership to come from the areas where there are the most members, as a matter of statistical regularity. Why give our overloaded Federal Council one more task?
If NL has only a small number of members ( or any EDA outside of Canada's Southbelt) the active members should not be penalized by having their vote diminished in my opinion . I am fighting for proportional representation in Federal and Provincial elections, but if the number of electors in any organisation is small and the goepraphic spread huge, proportional rep becomes problematic. Every member of a small group will have disproportionally a lot of work. Perhaps members should consider abstaining from a vote ,they are not well informed about.
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