In class over the last week or so, me and a group of my piers have finally started our task to create our own political party. There are virtually no restrictions to what we can do, as long as it is possible to do in real life. With these constraints in mind we have been brainstorming and have come to create in my opinion a very interesting party. Let me lay out some of the things my group and I have done.

Our detailed party press release.

 

Our party is named “The Dominion Revival Party”. We chose this name because it conveys the idea that this party will revive equality and participation in Canada (which is a dominion). One of the main ways our party will create more equal participation in government is by reviewing federal political ridings. We believe that federal ridings should be reviewed every five years with each census . This way drastic changes in a ridings population won’t be as common, meaning that the population to MP ratio will be more Even across all of Canada. This way everyone’s vote is equally valued. 

On the topic of voting, the DRP will keep the current voting system in Canada. In my last blog post, I talked about how proportional representation might be a good thing for Canadians. I brought this up in discussion with my group and we decided that our party wouldn’t focus on proportional representation as we already had decided on some other aspects of government that we wanted to change more. 

One of these serious changes we wanted to make to the government, is reforming the senate. The senate of Canada has 105 members. The senate considers and revises legislation. According to our constitution the senate also importantly should give the regions of Canada an equal voice in parliament. We believe that this is not happening right now in our senate. Right now some provinces have more seats then other provinces on a population to seat basis. Go checkout Brenton’s blog post to learn more about this in-depth. We believe this is not acceptable and that is one of the main things our party would change.

A graphic which shows distribution of seats in the senate across Canada. Focus on the maritimes and how they are over represented.

On the theme of reform our party will also change the Supreme Court. Right now some provinces are over represented in parliament to an extreme amount. This is because of regional quotas that say how many seats in the Supreme Court provinces should have. We would eliminate these quotas. We would also like to reform equalization payments. Although some equalization payments can be good. Certain provinces consistently benefit from the payments, and some provinces have almost never benefited from them. We would lower the amount of money being transferred between the provinces during the equalization payments. 

The values of our party are very centrist. We believe in a government the supports transparent and responsible spending. Our party fully supports democracy and will defend it at all costs. On social issues our members of parliament will get much more independence to vote on issues based on the ideas of the people they are representing, instead of voting based off the ideas of a party. Hopefully this way the concerns of communities will be more represented in the federal government. 

Overall I think we have created a very realistic party that is set apart from the others running currently. I think that by taking a very centrist and reasonable approach to issues in government our party would be seriously considered by voters. 

Also be sure to check out grace and alexees blog post to learn more about our party.