There was an item among progressive blogs the other day that said Canada needed to change how it votes so that what happened in the U.S. did not happen here. The writer seemed confused by the way Americans elect their President. The reality Tuesday night was that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by over a million votes more than Donald Trump. Trump won the state-based Electoral College. Now that question has been cleared up, why is it so urgent for Canadians to change how they vote?
We should be terribly tired by now with all the knee-jerk demands for change in how we vote from people who have never really thought through how voting works. A change at just the voting stage of the governing process can have major ramifications for how our political parties function and the kind of governance we get. We have enough problems with our political parties today. And it really does not hurt to remind people that under the supposedly safe proportional voting in the Weimar Republic, Adolph Hitler’s Brown Shirts gained control of the German Reichstag in 1933 with just a third of support from German voters.
One of the key benefits of the Canadian first-past-the-post system is that every member of the legislature or parliament has to be elected in a single-member constituency. It was very amusing that one of the possible systems voted on recently in Prince Edward Island was the idea of appointing party leaders to the legislature if their party got more than ten per cent of the vote. The idea was not a winner.
Academics love to give their advice to politicians on a variety of subjects but it does not necessarily mean they have worked with all these systems they suggest. The best advice heard in those elitist sessions of the Special Commons Committee on Electoral Reform was that no system is perfect.
The Canadian problem is not so much in how we vote but in the Constitution of Canada created for us by the British government 150 years ago. We have a non-elected Senate of Canada that is an embarrassment. We have tiny provinces and we have large provinces and we are a very large and diverse country. Before we change how we vote, we need to take a look at what we vote for. We cannot continue to use band-aid solutions to solve critical needs.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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