If you haven't filled in and mailed your ballot on voting reform here are a couple of thoughts for you.
One of the Trumped up (pun intended) reasons given to stick with the antiquated first past the post voting system is that we have always counted ballots this way so why change?
We certainly have always done it that way. The earliest I could find where first past the post was used was 1265 when Henry VIII gave the vote to wealthy landowners and knights.
Keep in mind this was prior to the English deciding that taking the occasional bath was a good idea so I am guessing not much time was spent in a closed room deciding how this vote thing should work.
Or perhaps it was just a simpler time so they settled on the simplistic first past the post concept and dashed outside for a welcome breath of fresh air.
FPTP survived as the picture was muddied by more and more of the population being given the vote, the parliamentary system evolved, political parties came to be and the country was broken up into ridings.
When Canada became a nation adopting the good old British parliamentary system, and its already ancient voting concept, was inevitable.
Pretty much everything has changed since the 1200s, but, by golly, we still count votes the same.
While most of the democratic world has successfully made the transition to a system that gives their voters a government that reflects the will of the majority of voters we are hanging in there with FPTP.
At least 14 commissions, assemblies and reports have recommended we change to a proportional system but we haven't.
Most of the countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development use proportional representation and nine of the ten best places to live in the world, according to the United Nations, are PR, but not us.
Those arguing against change aren't disputing the fact that what we have produced distorted numbers in our legislature.
We are staying with FPTP because that is how we have always done it.
Then there is the argument that PR is too complicated, too difficult to understand. Somehow we are being portrayed as too incompetent to understand something that the majority of democracies handle quite successfully. We have moved beyond the days of the Model T Ford and now most of us buy cars that somehow run very well without us knowing what is happening under the hood.
Nor do we understand how computers or cell phones work. But buying into a voting system that works well in almost every country that uses it is not good enough. People want it explained in minute detail.
Car manufacturers don't ask us how to get better fuel economy or longer life out of our car. That is left to the experts.
We should give the go ahead to what has been proven to be a better voting system and then let the experts in that field develop a made-in-B.C. PR system that will fit the unique political and geographical landscape that is BC. Just like we let the car manufacturers build a model of vehicle that meets our needs.
That is why there is flexibility in the vote on how PR will work if adopted. The experts and the all party committee shouldn't have their hands tied too tightly when deciding how our system will work.
All of the trumped up arguments against change distract from the basic question which is should we stay with a voting system that almost always gives us a government that only has the support of 30 some odd or 40 some odd percent of those who voted or should we move to a system that insists that the government we have has the support of at least 50 per cent of those who voted? What is a democracy?
Get your ballots in the mail so they will be in Victoria by Nov. 30.
John Warner,
Prince George
