I just sent this to the TC. Fingers crossed! Gentlemen: Last Friday I had the great pleasure of attending an event sponsored by Murray Rankin of the Federal NDP in support of electoral reform. While I have long been a fervent believer in some form of proportional representation, I nevertheless found the proceedings extremely interesting. For years I’ve been appalled by the total injustice of our traditional first-past-the-post voting system. It serves to create an elected dictatorship where one party frequently wins a healthy majority of the seats with a minority of the votes cast. It is often claimed that first-past-the-post gives us stability. However, I recall that when I lived in Spain in the 1960s during the fascist dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, the first thing our neighbor said to us was that “Franco gave us stability”. A further problem that is often ignored is that first-past-the-post stifles new parties with new ideas. Most voters are afraid to “waste their vote” on a party with innovative new ideas because they are afraid the party that they really hate will win the election. So in British Columbia a good chunk of the voters hate and fear the trade union oriented New Democrats and while another chunk hates and fears the big business oriented BC Liberals. BC voters have been locked into this dilemma probably since the 1930’s. A similar problem exists at the Federal level. I would also like to point out that there are many versions of proportional representation and a straight party list system is the only one where we would not get to vote for our member. The New Democrats are proposing a mixed member proportional system similar to that found in Germany. There the voter casts two votes, one for the party and one for his local representative. That seems to me a pretty reasonable compromise. Yours truly, David Pearce Victoria (250)-294-3556
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:57:30 +0000
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