Electoral reform is extremely important to me. Why? To borrow a phrase, because it's 2016.
My wife and I are both political refugees from the Conservative heartland of Alberta. We moved here five years ago, looking for, among other things, a change of political scenery. Most of my life as a voter, I've had to live with the bitter disappointment of knowing that in a supposedly modern democracy, my vote, like more than half the voters in the last election, did not matter to anyone except myself.
We get phony majorities, no representation for my views, ridiculous results, increasingly aggressive politics, exclusion of women, and a general failure to truly represent all Canadians. I am tired of all this nonsense.
We have a profoundly broken democracy, which, not surprisingly, more and more people are disengaging from because of a sense of futility and hopelessness. Electoral reform and specifically proportional representation is the only acceptable outcome for this process. Why? Because it's fair.
Self-serving interests of politicians and their parties need to be set aside for this historic opportunity. In the last election, three of four national parties campaigned and were elected on platforms of electoral reform. Now they have an unarguable mandate to deliver.
I know there are Conservatives who support proportional representation, yet the party line repeated ad nauseam by them and the media is “referendum”, knowing full well that referendums block change and are disturbingly easy to manipulate, as we have recently seen with the Brexit fiasco.
We need more from you. Please do the right thing. We see all around us deteriorating democracies. We now have a chance to fix this very broken democracy. Bringing in proportional representation is just a start. There's much more to do. This is your chance to be on the right side of history. Let's make ours a kinder, gentler, real democracy.
Thank you.