When in Rome, do as the Romans do, they say. Well, we aren’t in Rome. Perhaps Ottawa is our Rome. Well, I’m not in Ottawa either. I don’t remember that idiom having a line to tell us what to do when not in Rome, but I think I will assume we can go ahead and be ourselves.
So I’m going to talk about a strange new idea. Don’t worry, my strange is very different than Ottawa election strange. It also isn’t actually a new idea at all, but a fairly old idea. Old enough that it counts as new because history in this day and age is ancient history.
Well, a chill is in the air. Not the weather, I mean the federal election. It could be that the chills are the thrill of living in a democracy and flexing our democratic authority like few in history have been able to do.
No. It’s the chill caused by measuring the reality of the election against that potential.
Given the timing of this posting you might worry that I’m going to blather on about Justin Trudeau in blackface. I won’t do that! Just kidding. Of course I’m going to talk about that.
This posting is like one of those weak flashback episodes that were always so disappointing on TV shows, where they just re-used old content with some weak plot to tie it all together.
This posting is to let you know what you might have missed during the year. It’s like a Table of Contents, but way more interesting. Well, a little more interesting.
It is three days since the PEI election and another attempt at bringing in proportional representation. It came very, very close, but failed. It lost with 49%. Had it been reversed, would 51% really be a win? We need middle ground. And we have it.
I hope the shiny new solve-all-our-problems HR department makes progress on Inuit employment. I hope they believe we can do better. I hope they do better. They’ve only had three weeks so far, but what will we be seeing when we look back in another 20 years?
We live our lives in the shadow of the walls we have not yet climbed.
Nunavut is 20 years old this week; when we are done looking back, let’s jump forward and look back on our future past, so we can see what we can accomplish in the next 20 years.
It is a stereotype of Canadians that we say sorry a lot. Many of us like the stereotype, presumably thinking that it means we are empathetic and caring. Maybe we are a caring people, but history doesn’t show that, at least not in these parts. So now, the government is getting good at apologizing.
We can learn a lot from election systems around the world. Then we need to build ours here at home. Canada glided into democracy 1.0 out of colonial rule. It is time to glide into democracy 2.0.
The Liberals came to power with a promise that 2015 would be the last election with the stodgy old electoral system. So here we are! On the dawn of a new age! A new and exciting election system this fall!
Well, something happened on the way to the bank, I guess. Proportional representation was just a bridge too far. Where we should be going is more like an intersection than a bridge.
BC seems to generally want to change electoral systems, based on polls over the years. But they voted to chose to keep the old first-past-the-post system and not move to proportional representation. As always, the electorate is actually saying something that makes sense. They just aren’t getting what they want.