To the editor,
We are back where we started six weeks ago and $600 million poorer.
We had the federal election because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau thought he could get over 50 per cent of the seats with 40 per cent of the votes and gain 100 per cent control of Parliament if he called a snap election. It isn’t really his fault – it is our first-past-the-post electoral system that rewards this behaviour.
A proportional system, where the number of seats a party got in Parliament was proportional to their popular vote, would force parties to work together to pass legislation the majority of Canadians support – because Canadians would be accurately represented in Parliament!
If our first-past-the-post electoral system were an ATM, we’d have scrapped it long ago. Imagine an ATM where one customer deposits $180 but can only withdraw $75, another deposits $320 but can take out $470. We’d think there was something really wrong with that machine. The Conservatives received more of the popular vote than the Liberals, but got 30 per cent fewer seats. The Bloc Quebecois, with less than half of the popular vote of the NDP, got 30 per cent more seats. This is dysfunctional.
Six hundred million dollars is a lot to waste on an unnecessary election. Wouldn’t it have been great to have invested some of that money in a Citizens’ Assembly to develop an electoral system where we elected Parliaments that actually represented how we voted? Let’s do it now!
For more information on how Citizens’ Assemblies work, visit https://nationalcitizensassembly.ca/
Yours for a functional democracy,
Tony McQuail
Lucknow
