PR means no dictatorships

I’ve been involved in politics for 62 years and for about 40 of those years lived through unbearable dictatorships. One of the worst was the father of the current PM who bragged that he didn’t pay much attention to any of his MPs and certainly never any to the opposition members. He ran us into debt by hundreds of millions of dollars. Now his son managed to increase our debt by several billion dollars buying a 70-year-old pipeline that may fail or blow up at any moment and spill millions of litres of oil in our major river which it runs parallel to.

John Warner, in his brilliant letter of Nov. 1, mentioned FPTP started in 1265 when the British King gave the vote to wealthy landowners. Then in 1605 a man by the name of Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the parliament buildings because the system was so dysfunctional and non-representative of what the people wanted. They could not get any Catholics or other minorities elected or in power. Here we are 400 plus years later with the same dysfunctional electoral system. In Summit Lake, we have acknowledged Guy Fawkes for 50 years but we do it to prevent summer forest fires, by having the cottage owners bring the dead trees and rotting dock boards to a giant pile not far from our community hall and have a huge bonfire on Nov. 5. (Previously they burnt their debris by their cabins, which caused a couple of them to burn down.)

I am always sad that Guy Fawkes was unsuccessful so we may have had a functional system of caring people to rule over us. My reason for telling you this is because if we had a proportional representation system, these dictatorships would never happen.

The first point I want to make is about John’s math. Some of these parties and their leaders get 100 per cent of the power with between 15-25 per cent of the eligible votes because, as you well know, only between 45-55 per cent of the eligible voters actually cast their ballots.

So my second point is that any of the PR systems will be 1,000 per cent more representative of the wishes of the 50 per cent of the people who do vote. My third point is we don’t want to be the second last in the world to make our so-called democracy more democratic. As most people know, by watching what happens in U.S., if you spend enough money and spread enough “fake news” you seem to be able to get people to vote for the dumbest of the dumb. Floyd Crowley Summit Lake

Here we are 400-plus years later with the same dysfunctional electoral system.