Category: Minister Karina Gould

Both the Honourable Maryam Monsef and the Honourable Karina Gould ~ the past and present Ministers of Democratic Institutions ~ have claimed the reason their party has chosen to pull the plug on their Electoral Reform process, is that there is no consensus on how to reform the system.  

[This contention has not been born out by the facts.]

The first question is: why do Canadians need to arrive at consensus? We elected a majority government to make every vote count.

Canadians might not know the right words, but a majority of Canadians are most certainly unhappy with First Past The Post.

Democracy isn’t supposed to be about winning or losing, it is supposed to give citizens a say in our own governance. 

In a representative democracy, that means electing representatives. 

But for decades (at least) Canadians have understood we can’t afford to vote for the representative who will best represent us in the system we have. Instead, we have to figure out how everybody else is going to vote so as not to allow someone awful (like, say, Mr. Trump) from winning absolute power.

This isn’t very democratic, and it certainly isn’t fair.  To fix that, we need Proportional Representation.