When laughing at Prime Minister Harper the other day for being a royalist, it is likely that we all ignored the reality of what he is afraid to do. Whether addressing a change in the British Law of Succession or the changes he wants for the Senate of Canada, Harper cannot do it effectively without opening the Pandora’s Box of Canada’s constitution. It is the same with MP Joyce Murray trying to win support for her Liberal leadership bid with promises of support for proportional voting. They are working hard for half measures. And they will fail.
Half measures usually do fail. It is like renovating an old house by starting with the basement. You have to prop up a lot of crap to make the changes in the basement.
Mr. Harper’s problem with his wish-list of changes is that he has to involve the provinces and get them all to agree. That might take the wisdom of Solomon to accomplish and that, Harper does not have.
MP Joyce Murray thinks she has only agreed to changing how Canada votes. Like many people, she has not carried her thinking past the voting stage. Proportional voting represents a drastic change not only to how Canada votes but how our government and legislatures function on our behalf.
Thankfully, both British Columbia and Ontario voters have firmly rejected proportional voting in referendums. The voters realize that this is no panacea.
At a time when voters are starting to realize that they have not been paying enough attention to the people they are electing, why would we switch to making the people we elect more remote? Canadians are used to voting for people to represent them. To just vote for parties is to destroy the level of democracy we have developed in this country.
Obviously people are dissatisfied with the fact that Prime Minister Harper is not the choice of the majority of Canadians. What they can do to solve that is go to a system of preferential voting that creates a virtual runoff election when no candidate gets a majority. Under a preferential system, we would ensure that individual Members of Parliament and legislatures are, at least, the first, second or third choice of the majority in their electoral districts.
But we are not going to make a change that serious without a Constitutional Conference and then a referendum to verify it. Okay, step up folks. Who is brave enough to fight for real change?
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
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