Love_young:
During the Federal elections, you vote for your member of parliament (MP) who represents your district / riding in the government. The MPs are usually members of a national party (there are some 'independents' or some who are members of small more localized parties). The party with the most MPs forms the government - their leader becomes the prime-minister, and he designates the members of cabinet. A possible exception to this is if the party has the most MPs does not have more than 50% of the MPs. In this case, the opposing parties could combine to form their own government. One would assume in this case the cabinet would be formed by a combination of MPs. More likely, the government is still formed with the party with the most MPs and is referred to as a 'minority government'. Ideally, in a minority government the parties are forced collaborate on ideas and proceed with government duties with a true mixed representation of the public values, it has worked well in other countries. Unfortunately, over the past couple of years, this has not been the case, but instead the Harper Conservatives have not shown any openness to collaboration, and the opposition has been too nervous to use the power that they could have had. It's been a mess.
I still hold out hope for minority governments though as I think they have the potential to best represent the varied public opinions.
The electoral reform I was hinting at was moving away from the 'first-past-the-post' system that is in place in Canada whereby a candidate wins an election even without 50% of the vote. This is in addition to the fact that there may be a minority government. The minority government could in fact be formed by candidates who only got say 34% of the votes in their riding (or even just 21% if we assume 5 equally supported parties!).
I'm going to give you a pretty far-fetched example just to illustrate the problems with the first-past-the-post system: Making a bunch of improbable assumptions and assuming just 3 parties nation wide, a government could be formed by a party who has 104 of the 308 seats (MPs). That's 32.5%. Then assume that each of those MPs only receive 34% of the vote, and none of this party's members received any votes in any district they didn't win (remember i said i was being a little improbable)... that means said government would actually only represent about 11% of the voting public! Yes, completely improbable, and somewhat unrealistic, but it's a (far-fetched) possibility with the current system (and goes down to 4.3% if you consider 5 nearly equally supported parties). I am completely guilty of fear-mongering in this case only to illustrate my distaste for the system - which I normally deplore... so i'll go back to reality for a bit: We do have a government that only 37.7% of the voters supported (and that was with only a 58.8% turnout at the polls in 2008)
http://www.elections.ca/scripts/OVR2008/default.html.
So, you do indirectly vote for the prime-minister, but my point was more about the lost impact of the votes of a majority of the Canadian voting public.
STILL VOTE THOUGH! The only way to change the system will be to have the statistics to support the need for a change! And also, if you have a favorite party that is unlikely to win in your riding, the funding they receive from elections Canada is somewhat dependent on the actual number of votes they receive.
I'm sorry if this turned into a bit of a rant on my part. I just wish my vote would actually count for 1/24,000,000 instead of 0.
