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Monday, June 9, 1997 The case for proportional representation
In this country, every responsible adult has the right to vote for the country's government. However, the effectiveness of that vote is another problem entirely.
The way our electoral system is structured, a campaign strategy that appeals to voting blocks in a specific region of the country can lever a party into power despite the fact a majority of Canadians voted the other way.
Which is precisely what happened last week. The Liberals won a majority in Parliament with an historic low of 38 percent of the popular vote. The previous election the Liberals had a substantial majority of seats in the House with only 41 per cent of the national vote. In 1988 the Tories swept to power with 43 per cent.
This time around, 101 of the Liberals' 155 seats are in Ontario. And the Reform Party won 40 more seats than the Tories despite having the same percentage of the popular vote. The fracturing of the House of Commons is no mystery, it is strategy, one that leaves the voting public cynical and dispirited.
In Canada, we have what is known as the "first-past-the-post" system of deciding the winner. The candidate with the most votes gets the seat. With this system there is not enough representation of national sentiment on any given issue.
This year, Ontario's satisfaction with the Liberal budget was enough to return them to power. Results in Atlantic Canada and the West make it clear that the rest of the nation felt differently.
Small wonder that voters are uninterested (only 67 per cent bothered to vote) and disenfranchised. The time has come to restructure the political system so that the number of seats reflect the popular vote.
Had the popular vote determined the number of seats in the House, the Liberals would have had a minority government and Reform would have barely edged out the Tories for official opposition. And the voters might have felt that their vote mattered.
The primary thrust of the latest product of the Northern Contaminants Program is that there is discernible threat to unborn children from toxic chemicals drifting north from the South.
Without a better understanding of how those toxins travel through the Northern ecosystem, however, the study is incomplete and leaves many questions unanswered. Are wildlife populations at risk? Can we do anything about it if they are?
There is no sign of a commitment from Ottawa to fund the next phase of research, but we can only hope that our newly re-elected Liberal government won't leave an important job half-done.
Eight years and $4 million. That's how much the GNWT has spent trying to avoid awarding its female employees what they're owed in back pay.
Then, of course, there's the wages themselves, now well over $70 million, that the government will sooner or later have to cough up in the name of pay equity.
Finance Minister John Todd's reluctance to accept the decisions of courts and the Canadian Human Rights Commission was once financially understandable, if morally wrong-headed. But with the mounting legal bills, even his economic argument has evaporated. Give up now, John, and pay up.
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