Democracy never a waste of time

An article form the CP suggests that the Ontario election was pointless because it might not lead to any major change.

They are wrong. Democracy is never a waste of time.

Of course, in Canada we have a distorted version of democracy because of our primitive, 19th-century voting system, First-Past-the-Post.

It awards absolute power to arbitrary minority parties on 40% of the vote, leaving the actual majority excluded from government. Or leads to short-lived minority governments where parties jockey for more power instead of govern.

Coalition government

In the rest of the developed world, multi-party coalition governments are the norm and they usually serve out the entire 4-year term without incident.

In Canada, coalition government is either a dirty word or political ploy, although certainly a legal form of government.

We should have more coalitions. If the Liberals and NDP have enough combined seats for a majority, they should put together a coalition that commits to an entire 4-year term and do what voters put them there to do: govern.

Voting reform

We also need to modernize our voting system with either ranked ballot voting or proportional representation (true voting) to ensure an actual majority is represented in government like 31 of 34 developed countries.

Ranked ballot voting fixes our existing system, locally, by ensuring politicians are elected by a majority. It stops vote splitting and ends 4-year dictatorships on 40% of the vote.

PR true voting ensures parties get the same percent of seats they got in votes by redistributing votes at a federal or provincial level. It’s the most-widely used system in the developed world, embraced by 29 of 34 countries.