If there was one sure sign of the desperation of Thomas Mulcair and his federal New Democrats, it is the promise to institute proportional voting in Canada’s elections. What we know for sure at this time is that if there were proportional voting for the 2015 election, we would end up next year with a minority government and few solutions to Canada’s problems. That is the mediocrity that would prevail under proportional representation.
And what is particularly offensive about the New Democrats promoting proportional representation is that the NDP is the political party that tries to tell us how democratic it is. All that proportional representation can promise is constant back-room deal making to prop up unpopular governments.
Proportional representation takes the power from the people and delivers it to the political parties—particularly the minority parties. It takes the power from the voters to choose their Member of Parliament and lets the parties appoint their representatives. It is bad enough today with the insidious top-down management of the parties. Why encourage it?
The New Democratic Party resolution on proportional representation favours what is known as Mixed Member Proportional (MMP). This allows voters to choose a candidate in greatly enlarged electoral districts while the political parties appoint additional members to reflect their popular vote. It is supposed to be a compromise. Instead it gives the voters the worst of both situations—poor representation from a greatly overworked local member and party hacks—that you never voted for—running the government.
One of the amusing results of discussing the various voting ideas with people is their resiliency when it comes to ideas they have not worked through. If you explain your arguments against MMP lucidly, they will nod sagely and blithely ask, “Well, what about a preferential ballot?”
This is supposed to stop you cold. They tend to look a bit puzzled when you explain that all preferential balloting does is allow the people who made the worst choice to begin with to choose the winner. Why should we allow losers to choose the winning candidate? The facts are that run-off elections are the only way to ensure everyone chooses.
What all parties are missing in this argument is the ability we have to use the Internet to choose our politicians. We need to bring this entire discussion into the 21st Century.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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