Grappling7155
somebody should be modelling and providing detailed pricing analysis.
This sounds like what MPAC should be doing in Ontario. The last assessment was done in 2016. Ever since Doug Ford’s PCs got elected, the Tories have been delaying them for years, even before the pandemic was a convenient excuse, and now they’ve delayed indefinitely. They also closed all of the field offices. Even when MPAC did do assessments, they didn’t track market prices well because they only did them every 4 years. For comparison, Denmark calculates these values every 2 years.
Another organization in this space in Ontario and Manitoba to be aware of is Teranet. They’re a private, for-profit company that has exclusive contracts with the Ontario and Manitoba governments. Seems shady to me that Ontario and Manitoba have allowed one company to monopolize and hoard our land registry data. In contrast, in BC, a crown corporation manages land registries data.
It always surprises me that when making the biggest purchase of their life people put so much trust and blind faith into realtors who aren’t required to have any formal education nor required to have any credentials to do the job.
Maybe they should be required to get a degree that covers topics like geography, land use planning, architecture, and trades related to home construction.
The other comment is not quite right. The lieutenant governor, a mostly ceremonial figure, always gives the incumbent the first opportunity to test the confidence of the legislature, even if they lost the election.
In 2017 there was another close election, much like this one, with the BC Liberal Party (a now non-existent centre right party) as the incumbent retaining a plurality of seats, but not quite a majority. The BC NDP at the time was only a few seats behind. When the legislature returned after the election, the BC Liberals established a new cabinet and then tested the confidence of the legislature. The BC Greens and BC NDP all voted them down. At that point the lieutenant governor could have either called another election, or give a chance to another party to test the confidence of the legislature. Almost always the latter happens. The BC NDP had been in contact with the BC Greens in the background and it was then that the supply and confidence agreement was established so the lieutenant governor gave them the chance to test the confidence of the legislature and the BC NDP had enough to pass and form government.
I’m Canadian. I can’t vote for Stein. Nor would I under your current system if I was able to. It’s tragic though that your federal system funnels your people into just 2 options.
Canada’s electoral systems are not much better but at least we have viable third party options up here that have been able to exert pressure and influence our governments and bring attention to important issues. It’s still first past the post, and that should change. Third parties can do good work in the right environment if you let them. We recently got the beginnings of a national pharmacare and dentalcare programs from our social democratic / democratic socialist / progressive party working with the liberals.
At lower levels of government, the US does have third parties other than the Greens that have been putting in work between presidential elections. Vermont’s Progressive Party and New York’s Working Families Party are worth checking out.
It doesn’t need to start with the federal level. There’s a growing amount of states that have already adopted some form of ranked choice voting and some of those have also adopted a proportional variant. Progress is being made in some places at lower levels, but it’s slow. Other states have banned it unfortunately.
North America’s electoral systems are so broken. It’s painful to see so much negativity, frustration, and fear directed at third parties in general. If that same energy was directed towards building a ranked choice voting system with proportional representation, like single transferable voting (STV), the duopolies would crumble and we could all actually vote for whoever we want without having to worry we might end up with the worst candidate winning.
