A letter to the editor of the Kingston Whig Standard of March 5, 2010. Excellent refutation of arguments for the presentt votting system.
When the Ontario referendum on proportional representation failed in 2007, one of the arguments in favour of our existing first-past-the-post system was the importance of our local representatives. Paul Schliesmann's article "We're being punished" (Feb. 24) shows how shallow this argument is.
The "punishment" in the title is the closure of the Bridge House, presented as Kingston's punishment for not having a Conservative member of Parliament right now. According to this point of view, we elect members of political parties that, when in power, reward the districts that vote for them and punish those that vote against them.
In this case, the election of Peter Milliken in the 2008 election did not help. Instead of voting for whom they think is the best representative, Kingstonians should have read the surveys, guessed that the next government was to be Conservative, and voted accordingly for Brian Abrams, the Conservative candidate. So much for freedom of choice.
With this view of our system, even voting for the right representative at the wrong time can be bad. Indeed, Kingstonians will remember a 2006 town hall meeting when mayor Harvey Harvey Rosen read a letter of Milliken, our Liberal representative in a Liberal government. The letter stated that federal funding for the Kingston Regional Sports and Entertainment Centre would be given due consideration, and drew considerable applause. The vote to proceed with the project was passed with the hopes that such funding would materialize.
Later, the government had changed, and with construction underway, no federal money was forthcoming.
Thus, if we view our MPs as local representatives, it is hard to find any benefit to free elections in a multi-party system, that is, democracy as a whole. Another point of view presents our elected representatives as policymakers grouped in parties sharing common views. The two roles -- local representative and policy maker -- are sometimes incompatible. For instance, if Abrams had been elected as Conservative MP for Kingston and the Islands, would he even have listened to the pleas of the board of Bridge House? And if so, would he have gone to his party to ask that it change its views and policies?
According to the article, the Conservatives (called the Stephen Harper government) have tough-on-crime policies, under which the prison system has seen a swing to a more punitive orientation. This is contrasted with the view that "family visits are important for helping prisoners prepare for release and reintegration into their communities," which was presumably shared by the previous governments who established and maintained fundings for the Bridge House.
Along with MPs with conflicting roles, our system has brought us mostly fake, single-party majorities and a growing emphasis towards adversarial stance rather than compromise and consensus- seeking. Thus it is common to see a government destroy the accomplishments of its predecessor, be it for ideological reasons or because their beneficiaries voted on the wrong side.
The alternative would be proportional representation, under which the absence of a single-party majority would be standard rather than a chaotic interlude between artificial majority governments. The parties would have to adapt, and coalition governments would become the norm rather than a pretext for prorogation. So, the policies of previous governments could be revised and adjusted, but there would be neither the incentive nor the power to destroy them for no reason, to have them replaced by something that would in turn be destroyed when the next government comes.
Claude Tardiff Kingston