The amazing thing is you can get within five seats of a majority with 28% of the popular vote. In the last seven elections the PQ lost, I believe their percentages were higher (but correct me if wrong on this point).
Yeah. Maybe you could get a majority with only about 30%- 35%???
I know way too little about Canadian/Quebecois politics to say if it’s happening here but this is IMO one if the most important pitfalls of FPTP. If everyone votes strategically and only considers the top two parties in their constituency based on polling you can get bizarre choices like the mainstream liberal/conservative party vs a party whos signature issue cuts entirely differently from the issues the lib/cons typically debate.
When issues like this end up becoming prominent enough, multiparty systems are much better at giving voters the ability to prioritize issues like that vs the more “normal” issues.
Having a referendum in cases like this is kind of the fix to this but IMO can’t fully compensate for the dynamics of FPTP.
You not believing in the statistical math behind sampling doesn’t make it wrong.
It seems like Quebec does this once every generation.
It’s exhausting and it’s why PQ hasn’t been taken seriously in 9 of the last 2 referendum votes.
They’re not fucking leaving Canada.
Not with Yes-No polls at 30-70% and trending down. There’d need to be a constitutional crisis event to trigger these “winning conditions” like the amendment failures of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords which revived support for sovereignty in the late 80’s to early 90’s.
ETA: If PSPP thinks he can spend his political capital engineering the perfect constitutional crisis to get his winning conditions, let him. He’s fishing already with his removal of the monarchy (which I’m for it). Anyhoo, Quebeckers know how to say “no” if he tries to pull the referendum anyway; its just sad that he has a chance to even do this crap.
As someone living in Ottawa just across the river from Quebec, there is definitely a love/hate relationship around here with the Quebec government. I know several people that would not be too upset if Quebec decided to separate.
As the city is officially bilingual, the vast majority of the government jobs go to francophones. Knowledge of both languages seems to trump every other skill required for a job.
The Quebec government also deliberately underfunds the healthcare system in Gatineau and tells the residents there to use the doctors and hospitals in Ottawa. This puts extra strain on our already overloaded system and makes it harder for Ontario residents to get a primary care physician.
That being said, I can understand some of the rules in place that are designed to protect the Quebec language and culture. The English language is a behemoth that can easily take over if left unchecked. Canada as a whole has protections in place to help minimize the effect of the American culture by requiring a certain percentage of all movies, TV shows, and music to be Canadian content. However, in my opinion, they are a little too aggressive in their approach. In most major cities there are enclaves of different cultures, like Little Italy or Chinatown, where it is not unusual to see store signs and advertising in different languages. In Quebec that is illegal; other languages are only permitted if they are secondary to French and the font is half the size.
I feel like this should be the bog-standard response to every Quebec referendum:
(clip from Mean Girls)
Funny you should mention. I have a cousin who lives in Ottawa and works for the Canadian government. He was brought up in Montreal with an anglophone father (my uncle) and a francophone mother. He speaks perfectly fluently in both languages. He has never had the slightest trouble getting a job.
This saddens me. I was once part of a large, vibrant anglophone community in Montreal. My extended family alone consisted of eighteen people there. In the years since, they’ve virtually all moved away (or died).
Anything anglophone is being legislated out of existence. Starting this year, 60 percent of the foreign and out of province students at all three English Universities (McGill, Concordia, and Bishop) will have to demonstrate a general comprehension of French before they graduate. They have been fighting this for years and, now that they have opened the door, I would not be surprised if the requirement increases in the near future. This requirement was part of a settlement between the universities and the Government after they tried to increase the out of province tuition by $8000 per year for the English language universities. This has since been reduced to $3000 and applies to all Universities equally.
We can check by doing a simulated rerun of the election, changing only the share of the votes across the parties:
There were 127 seats up for grabs in this election, but only 5 parties contested all 127 seats. None of the other 15 parties contested more than 52 seats each, and so couldn’t have formed a majority government even if all their candidates had won.
A total of 4,347,744 votes were cast, but the 65 ridings with the lowest absolute turnout recorded a total of 1,839,642 votes (anywhere from 7,606 to 34,602 each). If the vote in each of those ridings had been almost evenly split across the 5 major parties, with one party consistently winning by the narrowest possible margin, then that party would have captured 65 seats with only 367,930 votes.
So mathematically speaking, a party could have won a majority government in this particular election with only 8.46% of the votes. (The actual minimum is much lower, since almost all of those 65 ridings did have at least one additional candidate, running either independently or on behalf of one of the 15 minor parties.)
It’s interesting to consider that this time around, the PQ got 59 of 127 seats (46%) with 28% of the votes, whereas in 1973 they won 6 of 110 seats (5%) with 30% of the votes.
I was one of those who moved away, though at the time it was more a matter of leaving home for college and Ontario seemed like a good place. It was only later that I was very glad I made the move to Ontario.
Hmm, I did not know that.
Sad.