Topics in political institution reform

So the party has officially started! I like both the original topics, but I feel people will be a little more informed on electoral reform since we so recently had the STV initiative in BC. I do tend to agree with Deanie though that electoral reform is a little boring and might be arduous to get through. Building on Aaron's point, we could simply ask whether people voted to change the electoral system in BC (I assume most of the respondents in our survey will be from BC), we could also ask simply questions like "Do you think the current electoral system in Canada is fair?" or we could make a list of different electoral systems and inquire which one respondents would most like to live under. With regards to Senate reform we could ask questions that would give us obvious answers ("Do you think the Canadian Senate is effective?" I tend to think most people would say "no") and build more questions from there, simply because we will obviously have to analyze our data in later assignments. So for instance, we could eventually say something like "well 87.2% of people thought the Canadian Senate was not effective, their solutions were much more scatterd... 24% said abolish it altogether, 13.3% said implement the Triple E criteria, etc..."... I think easy questions like that will make our lives easier down the road.

In addition to the previous two topics I thought that questions regarding the House of Commons and the Judiciary might be appropriate. For example, issues over private member's bills and party discipline would be interesting because they are both more or less the status quo, in that private member's bills play a negligible role in Canadian policy making because of the huge emphasis on party discipline and confidence in the House. So it would be kinda interesting to see if people like this status quo or if they would like different, and perhaps more meaningful, types of discussion in the Parliament. I also think we could ask questions regarding people's views on MP expenses and whether these should be made public. Also, for the Judicial branch we could ask questions about whether people are satisfied with the role the Judiciary plays in Canada, particularly with respect to contentious issues (ie Prostitution, Gay Marriage, Narcotics etc), or whether they think the Courts or Parliament should be more or less active in Canadian life.