Thursday, October 31, 2024
October 31, 2024

Viewpoint: The future has to change

By BILL MAIN

Minority governments have one tremendous advantage over majority governments: more of the ideas of the electorate are tended to than is the case with majority governments.

It’s one — and perhaps the best — reason for abandoning the first-past-the-post — us and them —electoral system, which for a very long time now has handed power to parties supported by significantly less than the majority of the electorate. In our case in Canada, our current system of choosing governments has resulted in power centralizing to an enormous degree in the hands of the prime minister and the premiers and their offices. A kind of oligarchy has evolved. Minority governments prevent this by essentially diluting the unchecked power of these central offices, as would proportional representation, which would result, often, in coalitions much more reflective of the voters’ choices and wishes than our current system. 

Clearly, parties, themselves, are coalitions. But the management of these coalitions is in the hands of the central authorities (prime minister, premiers and their central offices). The electorate never gets much of a glimpse at this management — really a set of compromises developed behind closed doors. Minority governments are much less opaque in their management, as are coalitions, and this lessening of opaqueness is hugely desirable, because it makes the sort of dictatorship of the oligarchy which we currently have less possible. 

There are those who say that we have to have clear winners and losers in order for our governments to function, but there is no evidence to support that. It’s what Aristotle would call a belief rather than the truth supported by facts. And while it’s true that enormous centralized power in the hands of some people can result in very good government — Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lynden Johnson, Teddy Roosevelt in the U.S., Lester B. Pearson and Tommy Douglas in Canada, and Winston Churchill at least for a time in the U.K. — the odds are great that this power will end up in the hands of other people (Donald Trump, Pierre Poilievre, Boris Johnson, etc.) or, at the least, ideologues (Ronald Reagan, Maggie Thatcher, Stephen Harper, etc.).

Anyone with the time and interest and willingness to think it through will realize that our current, first-past-the-post electoral system has led to the us and them world we currently have to live in. This is the simple, binary world that has caused us so very much grief, has confounded reason, has eroded our belief in the world of fact-based truth and has unleashed the tribalism that threatens our very commitment to democracy. It’s the world we’re handing to our children and grandchildren — a sad, dangerous and utterly destructive world that we can’t seem to see a way out of. Poor children, poor grandchildren, poor world. 

Our propensity to tribalism is something that we must create bulwarks against, and proportional representation can be one such bulwark. Adam Olsen is right: the Green party’s price for supporting an NDP minority government in B.C. has to be the imposition of this electoral system. It isn’t the complete answer, but we have to start somewhere limiting the binary, tribal world that prevents rational thought and action, and this is likely the simplest start we can make. 

The writer is a Salt Spring Island resident.

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