LETTER: US shutdown should push Canada toward proportional representation
By Contributor
Dear Editor.
Colonial rule raises its ugly head again.
The failure of the US government to continue to operate is yet another example of how screwed up our colonial style governments really are:
While we have democratic elections, we do not have democratic governments.
Our politicians do not want democracy and arrogantly insist on forming one dysfunctional minority government after another.
They also insist on using an electoral system that continues to award political parties the majority of the seats in the legislatures while representing only about a third of the people.
To make matters worse, Party Discipline has such a lock on our legislatures that we have become a virtual dictatorship.
Party Discipline has stripped all political powers from the people who should be spearheading the process of political reform we so desperately need.
Instead, they have been transformed into useless puppets that are compelled to serving their political masters instead of the people they were elected to represent.
What a disconnect.
In the US, lobbying is so entrenched that ‘Corporate America’ controls the political system, and Wall Street can continue to rape and plunder the middle class with impunity, as legislation that would provide much needed transparency and regulatory safeties in the financial sector are stuck in a gridlocked Congress.
To insist on Colonial rule is to insist on living in the past.
It has devastated Canadian Indians and Inuits who have been denied the opportunity to transition into the twenty-first century socio-economic future of Canada.
Instead, they have been segregated and locked into a lifestyle of abject poverty without a glimmer of hope for relief anytime soon.
What we need is an electoral system like proportional representation that will fairly represent all our political ideologies in our legislatures and at the same time produce democratic governments.
Honest democratic governments that represent more than 50 per cent of the people have a clear mandate to govern, and they do not need a Senate to provide balance and stability.
We have to get rid of our outdated, corrupt, and dysfunctional colonial electoral/political system before it destroys us socially, economically and politically, and we have to start the process now.
The last thing we need in Canada is a disaster like the one currently playing out south of our border.
Andy Thomsen
Summerland, B.C.
