Quote:
Originally Posted by oilers_fan
A federal party should absolutely be forced to run at least one candidate of every province and territory within Canada. I am sick and tired of the provincial Bloc Quebecois being allowed to call themselves a federal party.
Despite that, Gilles Duceppe has always been my second favorite person in the leadership debates.
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That would change nothing though. The candidate would just lose and they'd have the same number of seats (and thus federal votes) as they would otherwise.
The BQ are taking advantage of the Canadian electoral system where the results of many small regional elections combine to determine makeup of the federal government. Their voting base is concentrated over a relatively small geographical area where they're popular enough to beat out candidates from any of the other federal parties.
It's easy to see when you look at the popular vote which the BQ gets about 10% of and control 54 (~18%) of the seats. Compare that with the NDP that doesn't have one big concentrated area of support (with maybe the small exception of the automotive manufacting sector of southern Ontario) and the results are exactly reversed. They get about 18% of the popular vote and gets about 10% (29) of the seats.
If you don't like the BQ being a federal party the solution is much more complex than just running one party per province.