ted's bed

The camera pulls back to reveal your true identity
Look! It's a sheep in wolf's clothing
A smoking-gun-holding ape
-It's a Hit, Rilo Kiley

Well, I was allowed to vote, but it wasn't easy. I'm still not really sure what the problem was. The volunteer initially tried to send me to Nanaimo, but I eventually won her over. I think she bent the rules for me, but in the end, she told me she wasn't sure if my vote would "count". But I marked an X and put it in the box, so take that Duncan-Cowichan Electoral District.

So. Whoop-Dee-Doo. Nothing happened. And we're still stuck with a bunch of monkeys. I read a headline today... "Harper Pledges 100M Towards Climate Change". What a joke. How can you oh-so-totally-miss-the-point? I guess it's really more like make-people-feel-like-we're-actually-doing-something. Depressing.

If you can't tell, I'm angry about the whole thing.

Anyhow, I feel somewhat compelled to talk a little about Proportional Representation (PR). This subject has come back on the radar recently, considering this election summoned the poorest voter turn-out in Canadian history, and that despite most Canadians not wanting Steve to be Our Guy, that's who we got.

Proportional Representation is a system of voting that is somewhat more nuanced than our current First Past The Post (FPTP) system. There are different forms, but it essentially makes individual votes actually "count" and it reflects the actual wishes of the electorate much more accurately. Here is an example based on our recent election as demonstrated by a table on my cousin Jeffy's blog.

Party	Conservative	Liberal	New Democrat	Bloc Québecois	Green	Christian Heritage	Independent
Popular Vote (%)	37.6	26.2	10.0	18.2	6.8	0.2	0.7
Parliamentary Seats (#)	143	76	50	37	0	0	2
Number of Seats under a System of Proportional Representation (#)	116	81	56	31	21	1	2

This nicely demonstrates how under a proportional system, things make a little more sense. Like, considering that almost a million people voted for the Green Party, they would end up with 21 seats, rather than 0. But there are arguments against this system, of course. Here are some of those arguments, as laid out by a guy who would stand to lose some of his influence under the new system.

British Columbia and Ontario both had referenda to see if we wanted to switch to this method for our provincial elections, but we both blew it. In BC, the form of PR they chose is called Single Transferrable Vote, shortened to BC-STV. Despite the acronym's uncanny ability to conjure up images of genital lesions, 58% of people in BC voted to change to this system, which didn't quite reach the 60% cut-off. Luckily, we get another chance in May 2009.

Anyhow, I won't blather on. But if you're interested....

Here is good argument for proportional representation by some guy called Ed!

Here is a site about BC-STV