Metro and the Ottawa Citizen each published their own mini-profiles of Carleton riding candidates this weekend.
Metro has four articles:
…and The Citizen has all in one post.
You can find all of StittsvilleCentral.ca’s election coverage here We’re also working on a questionnaire for the candidates. If there’s a question you’d like answered, please send it along to feedback@stittsvillecentral.ca
I find this so ridiculous about our federal elections. All those local politicians at federal election times are so meaningless, because it is not those local politicians that people are voting about. People are targeting their vote to the leader of the party, the party as a whole. Harper, Trudeau, Mulcair, and Duceppe, mainly. May has too little influence unfortunately, because of our ridiculous first past the post electoral system.
And that is exactly what is the problem with the ridings as well. The country might be overwhelmingly stacked against the conservatives this time, but in certain ridings there is going to be a conservative “winner” no matter what.
Those local politicians can help communicate the message of their party, but it isn’t really them that people are voting for. One might be pro NDP, say, or pro Conservative, whatever, and not at all like the person of that party that is in one’s local riding. Is that going to change the vote? No, of course it isn’t.
Our system needs a lot of fixing. The first and foremost problem is first-past-the-post. We really have to change to proportional representation. No political leader should ever be able to get a majority through just 40, or 33% of votes. A majority should only be possible when a party gets 51% of the votes