Bill Russell's letter to the editor on Oct. 13 discusses MP Dick Harris's attendance in the House of Commons at sometime in the distant past. The reason it is the distant past is because electors in the Cariboo riding have been electing Mr. Harris to Parliament for the past 20 years with a huge majority, so he actually has a history of going to Ottawa.
Votes for Harris in 2006 were 19,624, 22,619 in 2008, and 24,443 in 2011. So you can see that he actually increased his vote in each election in the past 10 years. Hardly the results you would expect from an electorate that was dissatisfied with his attendance.
In any event, Russell should have looked at attendance records for the past three elections to get a better sense of who's missing in action in Ottawa. For the period 2008 to 2012 those MPs who missed the most votes (absent) were Liberals - Jim Karygiannis, Keith Martin, and Ruby Dhalla - who missed close to half of the 300 votes during that period.
Michael Ignatieff, Liberal leader at the time, missed 182 of 311 votes, the worst voting record of all MP's in the house.
Furthermore when we look at the records for the present Parliament we see that the top 11 MPs with the highest absentee record are eight NDPers, one Bloc, one Liberal (Bob Rae) and 1 Conservative (Ed Fast Trade Minister) So that's an interesting statistic.
Harris lived in this riding for the majority of time he was in Ottawa. In the the past few years, he has had an apartment here, the constituency office is here, and he has been available for anyone who wished to discuss meaningful issues with him.
To suggest otherwise would be foolish.
The red herring in Mr. Russell's letter is to try and connect some distant attendance record of Harris, with the present day campaign of Todd Doherty.
This election is not about Harris, it is about issues that affect all of us: the TPP, security, the Softwood Lumber Agreement, etc. We need to be sure that in these world-wide economic times, that we elect a government that can deal with, and play hardball with other countries, and not be intimated. This is not the time to be changing horses in midstream.
Eric Allen
Prince George
