Fairvote Canada

Okay, I've been trying to be gentle but now you've actually used misinformation here and I can't just let that slide.

Slavery is a poor example to promote state reform as a solution, enslaved peoples couldn't vote and anti-slavery movements lasted hundreds of years without the state as an option for safety. Chattel slavery was only possible because it was codified into state law specifically to secure definition of personhood and race into the state. Resistance to enslavement did not begin or end when white citizens got uncomfortable with it, it was around the entire time and they knew it was wrong the entire time. Chattel slavery did not end because some white people in positions of power got the ick and listened to voters, it took centuries of bloody conflict and daily resistance to force them to concede. To suggest that the untold millions of people across the Americas who died defending their humanity did not use the right tools because the state was not a vector for abolition is cruel, self-serving, and markedly liberal in its orientation.

Even if what you said was accurate, it completely erases the fact that forced labour exists today in the United States and is still organised along racist lines. The prison industrial complex through the War on Drugs was a direct response to Black Liberation movements that correctly refused to accept civil rights and assimilation as the end of racism in America. Half a century later, African Americans are still a deeply oppressed group in the US and you're arguing that they should focus on voter reform before community action and mutual aide. Y'know, the methods that successfully achieved civil rights in the first place? You chose an example that demonstrates exactly why oppressed peoples cannot depend on state reform to end their oppression.

No, voting is not the "root cause" of our problems in a settler-colonial state where genocide and climate destruction extends beyond its own constitution. In order to say that it is, you argue that the state does in fact have absolute power over people. That is not only wrong, it is oppression. People are not limited to the state for solutions to their problems, and very often they are required to force the state to negotiate to even get an inch.

I do not doubt that STV would make people feel more trust in the voting system and it might even allow for a degree of social welfare policy that is currently not possible in Canada. It does not solve our problems and for many of us, it does not even address it. Ireland and Australia aren't magically decolonial because people have a more "nuanced" form of representation.

You are clearly privileged and I seem to be right that your focus is on policies that benefit you specifically. I said it is understandable for people to value STV because of its potential to reintroduce welfare liberalism into their life. Just because it benefits you more than me does not mean you have the right to try and dominate other people's actions by asserting whatever you want is also the most important thing for us to do.

Disappointing.