Before you get to vote for a candidate or a political party in a general election much needs to happen. There are various aspects of our political system involved and they all have an impact on the quality of our democracy. And, on a scale of one to ten, our democracy has been at about four for the past 20 years.
The only reason that our democracy scores a four is that nobody has been successful in taking our right to vote from us. We have been allowed to vote. We saw where Stephen Harper’s Conservatives tried to manipulate the voting in their last-ditch voting rights bill near the end of their last term in office. They failed in their objective but there is still much to correct in that bill.
We even saw how the Conservatives manipulated the election period in hopes of gaining financial advantage. The extended election period worked against them.
But where we really fail is in keeping our political parties democratic is in citizen participation in determining the party’s basic principles and policies, the choice of party leaders and the selection of individual candidates. When we can solve these questions, we will be ready to consider how we should vote for who represents us. And First-Past-the-Post, proportional voting or ranked ballots are only some of the options to be discussed.
Our level of democracy has been seriously weakened over the past couple decades mainly by the control of the party exercised by the party leader. When we allowed party leaders to sign off on the individual candidates for the party, we took away one of the reasons why party membership was important.
And when we took away meaningful participation in party policy development, we said that party membership is not important. What we ended up with was lists of party supporters to constantly harass for donations to the party.
As things stand with the political parties, Members of Parliament find it more important to report to their party leader’s office than to their constituents. Where many MPs used to take time each month to hold an open meeting to talk to constituents, today they take part in some charity work in their electoral district if they are worried about getting re-elected.
Our MPs are somewhere between being elected because of who they are and what party they represent. We have some strong MPs and we have some nebbishes. We will have to decide what we want them to be before we vote on how we will vote.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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