Don’t make complicated what is simple. Just mark your preference for the current first-past-the-post voting system. Nothing more. Then, down pens.
Of course FPTP is imperfect. All systems are. None will ever satisfy everyone on every occasion. It’s a fantasy that any change would end discontent.
John Horgan, Andrew Weaver and David Eby aim to muddle voters with their proportional representation – more accurately, misrepresentation – schemes. In the most common version, people-elected MLAs would sit alongside party-selected MLAs. Power from the people to backroom party hacks.
Prominent pro-FPTP New Democrat Bill Tieleman and others see PR as boosting not left-wing fringe parties but extreme right parties – whose zealots are too thinly spread to win seats under FPTP. But over a whole nation they could cross (and have crossed) the typical PR threshold of five per cent ballot support that allows them to “win” the appointed seats that the untrendy not-so-dumb voters declined to give them.
In fairness, I wish I had space for the civil PR views of Eric Godet Andersen of North Vancouver, a Danish native responding to another Dane cited here who had slammed Denmark’s system, under which the present prime minister’s party got just 19.5 per cent of the popular vote. Andersen properly pointed out that Denmark is widely admired, and that Danes are happy with their PR system. (The Belgians, who ran around in circles for a year to determine who won a PR election, might differ.)
That PR is being choreographed here by the NDP-Green coalition – which is punishing West Vancouver’s homeowners and others with its cunningly misnamed School Tax and Speculation Tax – should be enough to persuade them to decisively reject PR.
Above all, the PR backers’ claim that the change would produce a co-operative, more harmonious government is dreamland. Are they that ignorant of human nature? They must get their opinions from CBC Radio.
• • •
Nothing is colder than the scalpel for an election autopsy two weeks later.
In an election-eve email to a highly experienced political operative freshly back in West Van after a long holiday, I predicted a tensely close mayoral race between Mary-Ann Booth and Mark Sager, two ideologically similar scorpions in the same bottle. Right. I also told him Christine Cassidy could conceivably come up the middle and win. Wrong.
For a different take on examining election innards, I’ve since mused that each competed under a political liability:
Cassidy: It’s true – B.S. baffles brains.
Sager: So what have you done for us lately?
Booth: Over-produced.
The steely Cassidy (my choice) may have led the three in the brains department – none of them slouches. One-on-one, she’s an engaging conversationalist with wide interests including business smarts. Cassidy’s vulnerability with crowds: Little warmth. Disdained to ingratiate herself. Take it or leave it.
Sager carried the burden of having actually been mayor. And even though I’d say he was very good, much superior to his mayoral successors, a record sits there waiting to be shot at – or, worse, forgotten or unknown to a new generation. Someone uttered the most laugh-inducing line of the campaign: “He was even before the internet.” Right, shortly after the earth’s surface cooled.
Strangest, perhaps: Was I the only citizen who thought winner Booth’s performance was so over-produced that it would turn off the common run of voters? Reeking of money, sleekly professional direction, advertising listing dozens of supporters – like a social register of West Van elites drawn to the Booth cause. More Hollywood star-marketing activity than for any local candidate in this century, if not ever.
A Vancouver Sun story quoting only her on housing problems implied Booth was the sole councillor concerned about it; her earnest get-out-and-vote pitch as if she had invented the idea. To this observer, it was crassly over-selling a smart candidate with all the natural sunny charm and friendliness that she needed, without additional lipstick. (But wait: Booth had the best campaign promise: Public washrooms in central West Van.)
• • •
The WV Chamber of Commerce-sponsored mayoral meeting could have been designed to keep trespassers out. Attendees had to RSVP – combing out the computer-lacking – and the venue, the Kay Meek, is the most hostile to the mobility-constrained in the Western world. So a wide swath of older voters, many against big developments and candidates seen as favouring them, stayed away in droves.
As for the RSVP thing: You had to pre-register on a site meant for sales of C of C products or services. (I tried and was timed out.) Collecting your ticket was chaotic – an amorphous mob minutes before starting time resembled the Chicago stockyards. Genial meeting chairman and former councillor Ken Haycock, now a West Van businessman and University of Southern California professor, gently suggested letting in those still in “line” well after the mayoral pitches began.
• • •
The Wedding Cake School of Architecture mansion that towers over Marine Drive near Kew Beach Road is for sale.
The 17,000-square-foot edifice caused much local yakking, and, like many others in WV and beyond, was anomalous in a mellow neighbourhood.
Special Agent c7La5s reliably tells me the asking price – by the original owners – is $20.8 million. Anyone for a slice of that cake?
• • •
Question: Why is retiring Mayor Michael Smith mucking in with his challenge of the Oct. 20 election WV results? He didn’t put his head on the line. Why is he sticking his nose in now?
Joining Smith in the recount demand is twice-failed council candidate Jim Finkbeiner. He fell 20 votes short of the last council seat. If he succeeds, he’d bump very nice newcomer and his erstwhile slate mate Sharon Thompson. Nice guy!
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