<p>Welcome to Longform North -- a longform interview podcast featuring Canadian voices and stories about Canada.</p><p>In Canada, we pick our leaders through elections, where the person who gets the most votes wins.</p><p>But it's actually a little bit more complicated than that. And some people think that the way we do elections should actually be changed.</p><p>So what are the rules for how someone wins an election?</p><p>What does it mean to represent, or act on behalf of, the people that voted you in?</p><p>And what do you do when the voter participation rate gets as low as 45%? Less than half of the total amount of people who are eligible to vote.</p><p>Dr. Tom Bateman is back to help us out with these questions and more. He is a professor of political science at St Thomas University, and he is one of the co-authors of a book called <i>The Canadian Regime: An Introduction to Canada's Parliamentary Democracy</i>.</p><p>Some of the topics we discuss include:</p><ul><li>How we think about the role of a political representative in Canada</li><li>Representation and diversity - the idea that the government should be representative of certain identity groups, as well as some of the problems that can arise from that</li><li>How the country gets divided up into different voting districts</li><li>How and when elections are called (and why fixed election dates don’t work in our system)</li><li>Campaign spending limits and limits on 3rd party advertising during elections</li><li>Should we lower the voting age?</li><li>The reasons why the voter turnout rate among younger people is low</li><li>What does the low voter turnout rate indicate more broadly about the voting public?</li><li>Should we bring in online voting?</li><li>How do we pick the “right” electoral system?</li><li>How the First-Past-the-Post system works, and how it impacts the way our elections work?</li><li>How would a Proportional Representation system work? What are its advantages and disadvantages compared with our current system?</li><li>What happened with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s promise to bring in electoral reform back in 2015?</li><li>Is there any hope of changing our electoral system, or are we stuck with what we have?</li></ul><p>Links:</p><ul><li><a href="https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9781487525378" target="_blank"><i>The Canadian Regime: An Introduction to Canada's Parliamentary Democracy</i></a></li><li><a href="https://www.stu.ca/politicalscience/thomas-mj-bateman/" target="_blank">Dr. Tom MJ Bateman</a></li></ul><p><i>*Note: This episode was recorded on January 25th, 2025, a day after Premier Doug Ford called a snap election in Ontario, and a few weeks before Mark Carney won the leadership race for the Liberal Party of Canada.</i></p> <p><p>For more about the podcast, check out the website: <a href="https://longformnorth.com/" target="_blank">longformnorth.com</a></p><p>Music by Aaron Barth</p><p>Hosted and produced by Ian Van Harten</p></p>