Dear Santa: All I want for Christmas is our votes to count

To the Editor:

The following is a letter to Santa, regarding electoral reform

Dear Santa: All I want for Christmas is our votes to count.

If our electoral system were a bank machine we would have replaced it years ago.

Imagine if you had a bank machine that refused to give over half the customers access to their money and instead transferred their deposits to the bank manager. How many studies would it take to change the machine?

Our electoral system, “First Past the Post,” results in over half the ballots cast in each election earning NO representation.  Worse yet - it regularly results in parties that got a minority of the votes (often less than 40 per cent) getting a majority of the seats in Parliament and effectively 100-per-cent control of the legislative agenda for Canada. 

This is the minority that ends up managing the “bank” for the majority of Canadians who did not vote for that party. It controls the Bank of Canada and decides how our tax dollars will be spent. 

The recent Parliamentary Committee on Electoral Reform is the 14th time a study or citizen’s assembly has come in with a recommendation that we change our electoral process to some form of Proportional Representation. But guess what? The bank manager has control over whether the bank machine will be replaced and he doesn’t want to change it despite having promised in the last election that he and his party would “make every vote count.” SHAME!

Go to www.mycanadiandemocracy.ca to learn how to tell the government you want your vote, and everyone's vote, to count every time in every election! When I was a kid, I thought that was how democracy was supposed to work - I still think it should work that way.

Yours hopefully, Santa,
Tony McQuail
RR 1, Lucknow