Of Elections and Other Mass Hallucinations

On CBC yesterday (or was it Wednesday?), they had someone doing one of an interminable number of post-mortems of this week's election results. However, they got into the conversation over different schemes of representation, and they proposed one that actually made a lot of sense to me:

Take the current 'Representation by Population' model, which allows individual regions to explicitly select their representatives, and split it into a two part vote:

Vote #1 - Elects the local representative.

Vote #2 - Is a "party vote", intended to reflect political leanings rather than individual candidates. This becomes the input into a 'Proportional' representation vote.

The winners of the local representative races are, of course, elected to the House of Commons. Based on the outcome of Vote #2, each party then is permitted to add a certain number of seats 'by appointment'. This would make up approximately 1/3 of the seats in the house - enough to sway the balance somewhat as long as an Alberta-style landslide didn't occur in the regional representation.

It's an intriguing hybrid that might serve to break the regional deadlock that seems to routinely polarize the voting in this country. (Thus relegating the Conservative party to the status of 'regional protest' party, and making the Liberals the 'natural ruling party' simply because they have made themselves appeal to Central Canada)

The other aspect of this model that I like is the idea that the local representative selection can be treated somewhat less along 'party-lines'. This would make it much easier to get rid of particularly noxious MPs that people are electing not because they are good MPs, but simply based on the party they belong to. By coincidence, it would also remedy the rather frustrating 'headless party' syndrome that happens every time a party changes leaders, and the new leader isn't a sitting MP - the party could elect to change one of its 'appointed' seats around.

Whether such a scheme would do anything to revive the interest of the electorate so that more people actually get out and make informed voting choices (aside from political junkies like me) is a whole different kettle of fish. The numbers that came out yesterday suggested that only 60% of registered voters actually cast a ballot this time around. The most hotly contested election in some 25 years, and only 60% of the voters exercised their rights??? (* sigh *) Of course, it is difficult sometimes to see how what Ottawa decides affects us day to day. (Most of the time, I can't tell how City Council's decisions affect my day to day life!)

I've been deliberately staying away from looking at articles about what King Ralph thinks we should do with Medicare. I don't need my blood pressure to skyrocket right now - I have enough stresses in my life without adding that one to the list. Optimistically, we can hope that what Ralph wants to do is posturing for another pissing match with Ottawa - but I'm not feeling overly optimistic today. I suspect that Ralph owes a few people some serious political debts, and it's payback time.

The good news is that we are due for a provincial election - soon. Let's get the whole smelly bag of issues out on the table, and hopefully Alberta's voters will wake up enough to send back a minority government. The PC's in this province have been in power so long that I think they believe themselves to be anointed royalty, governing by some perverse divine right. It's time for Alberta voters to remind them that they govern AT OUR COMMAND.