Bob Rae joins Fair Vote Canada

This is good news. Rae is an exceptional Parliamentarian, shrewd and politically savvy. Maybe he’ll bring some much-needed political experience to the organization.

Rae once quipped Jim Flaherty was taking the Pollyanna approach to the economy. Now he’s part of an organization loaded with blind optimists:

A recent Environics poll, backing up a decade of such polls, showed an all-time high of 76% of Canadians support proportional representation for Canadian elections.

As I pointed out, most of this support is soft. It’s senseless to count on soft support which tends to evaporate in a referendum. In fact, if one looks closer at the numbers, hard support for PR fell over the past decade: from 29% to 24%.

Wishful thinking won’t bring PR to Canada. It will only bring about another failed PR referendum, driving the final nail in the electoral-reform coffin. We need a better, more realistic strategy.