Dear Editor:
I hope everyone noticed that in this week of bad news there was one standout piece of good news: B.C. residents will have the opportunity this year to get rid of a voting system which produces false majority governments.
The no group that opposes the referendum on electoral reform keeps claiming that the present system has produced stable governments for many years. It has done no such thing. It is a broken adversarial system that has produced ping pong policy-making: one government funds librarians, counsellors and class sizes approved by experts (teachers); the next one reverses those policies and then spends a student generation defending their changes in the courts. First past the post is a broken system, expensive and inefficient, using in any given period primarily the wisdom of only one part of the community (rarely even a majority).
Lots of us fear change, even if we know that almost 90 other countries have adopted systems where every vote counts. We don’t like our representatives yelling at each other, but we have no confidence that they can learn to listen and co-operate for the general good.
I hope we will take advantage of all the learning opportunities that will be available over the next few months. Our government has kept its promise and if we do our part as citizens, 2017 might actually have been the last unfair election in B.C. provincial politics.
Donna Stewart
North Vancouver
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