Canada better off with a stable political system

Editor: MP Stephen Fuhr’s June 2 letter to The Daily Courier to explain his vote on the electoral reform report is not only lame, it is also an insult to the people who elected him to office and all other eligible voters across the country.

The essence of Fuhr’s explanation is that ordinary voters are too stupid to make the right decision if asked to express their opinions on possible electoral changes by way of a referendum.

He, loftily, prefers that important issues, such as this, should be left to the more intelligent segment of the population, such as himself and his colleagues that have been elected to Parliament.

Fuhr is sadly mistaken on both counts. Furthermore, he doesn’t seem to have a sound understanding of the political landscape across Canada. For his edification, I will provide the following summary.

Roughly 65-75 per cent of the votes cast in a federal election are divided between the centre-right Conservative Party and the centre-left Liberal Party.

The balance of the votes are divided between the, far-left New Democratic Party and the lunatic-left Green Party plus a few scattered votes for fringe parties and independents that may have either left or right leanings.

The first-past-the-post electoral system generally delivers a stable majority government for either the Conservatives or the Liberals; however, it virtually guarantees that neither the socialists nor the lunatics will ever come to power except as a coalition partner to support one or the other of the major parties in forming a minority government.

Were we to abandon the first-pastthe-post system in favour of a proportional representation system that Fuhr seems to favour, we would be condemned to perpetual short-lived minority governments similar to the current, tail-wags-the-dog situation that we are now looking at here in British Columbia.

Is this the kind of government Fuhr would like for Canada?

The unstable governments we have seen in Israel and several European countries are sufficient to to convince Canadians that we are better off to stick with the old tried-and-true system.

But quite apart from the perspective of Canadian voters, it is almost unbelievable to think that Fuhr actually thought that the Liberal Party of Canada, which has benefited more than any other party from the first-past-the-post system, would actually kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. William Taylor, Westbank