On procedure and politics

Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined

Quote of the day

In 21 years of invading people’s privacy I’ve never actually come across anyone who’s been doing any good. Privacy is the space bad people need to do bad things in. Privacy is evil; it brings out the worst qualities in people. Privacy is for paedos; fundamentally nobody else needs it. – Paul McMullan, former News [...]

The Speaker’s Seat

In an earlier post, I wrote about some aspects of the UK House of Commons Procedure Committee’s report reviewing the election process for certain positions in the House of Commons. One part of the report which I did not comment on concerned the brief discussion of creating a “Speaker’s Seat”. As I have previously mentioned [...]

Youth Voter Participation in the May 2011 Canada General Election

In an earlier post, I looked at the main reasons put forward by the 7.5 million eligible voters who did not cast ballots in the May 2011 election, as identified in a survey by Statistics Canada. Elections Canada has recently released findings on youth voter participation in the May 2011 general election, with “youth” being [...]

On floor crossing

There was a debate in the UK House of Commons today on a ten minute rule bill which would require MPs who switch parties to resign their seat and fight a by-election to secure the approval of their voters, if they want to remain in Parliament. For Canadian (and other) readers who aren’t familiar with [...]

Quote of the day

I don’t find it a place for a very healthy, open, constructive debate to start with. Most of my issues are around the quality of debate and the research and the fact that you can pretty well get up in the house of assembly and say whatever it is you like. You don’t have to [...]

Comparing UK and Canadian House of Commons procedure

Going by the keyword search activity on this blog, there seems to be much interest in comparisons of parliamentary procedure in Canada and the United Kingdom. I have written many posts about various parliamentary proceedings which differ notably in both countries, and so I thought I would regroup that information into one post, with links [...]

The LPC and “open” primaries

I have written a bit in the past on the idea of political parties in Canada adopting the concept of “open primaries”. I argued that this would help to empower backbench MPs and then commented on a proposal put forward by Globe and Mail columnist John Ibbitson that Canada’s federal Liberal Party consider open primaries [...]

Electoral Reform and DPR Voting, Part 2

(Note: Back in April of this year, I wrote about Direct Party and Representative Voting, an electoral voting system invented by Stephen Johnson. That post continues to get regular hits on this blog, and recently, Mr. Johnson contacted me asking if I would be interested in revisiting the topic. He provided me with a few [...]

Electoral Reform and DPR Voting, Part 1

(Note: Back in April of this year, I wrote about Direct Party and Representative Voting, an electoral voting system invented by Stephen Johnson. That post continues to get regular hits on this blog, and recently, Mr. Johnson contacted me asking if I would be interested in revisiting the topic. He provided me with a few [...]

Some interesting links

1. The Big Society The Canadian media has recently been reporting that the current Conservative Government is considering emulating the UK Coalition Government in adopting David Cameron’s Big Society. Some of what has been written here in Canada is critical of this, which is their perogative, but I found that they often failed to adequately [...]

keep looking »
  • Share |
Page 1 of 212