salvius
Active Member
Sure, parties can team up any different way; there's just no guarantee about how they may do so, or to what ends. That means no guarantee to you, the voter. So your concern that the NDP will never see status as a government may be offset by them teaming with Greens, or cobbling together smaller parties with some limited set of platforms that match their own. You might not be getting the whole NDP platform, and the Greens may identified as king-makers who are more worthy of respect because they were given respect through forming a coalition. In other words, changing the voting system could easily alter the party landscape simply because fringe or protest parties would then have a chance of acquiring a seat and being courted by vote-hungry coalitions.
With a political cap, we don't get a ton of protest parties, even with a 3% cap. One just needs to look at Germany--which uses MMP--and what do we see? Five parties; not terribly different from 3+1 we have now (or 4+1 federally). So any coalitions would be between parties already well established. And, of course, I'd much prefer a coalition, which encourages compromise, than the current absurdly anti-democratic winner take all system.
Any system which awards absolute majority to a party without majority vote has something very deeply wrong with it.