[fvc-wat-disc] [fvc-wat-announce] BC Needs Our Help

[Peter KH]

Hi, In the unlikely case that this is not already in a document somewhere, here is the reason that I am personally interested in proportional representation:

I feel like every federal election boils down to a debate on government spending, taxes, and austerity.

Some issues that I think should be "election issues" but which aren't:
- Trade policy
- Antitrust enforcement
- Regulating social networks (Preventing future Cambridge analyticas, does Facebook have the right to censor content?)

- Peter
-------- Original Message --------
On Oct 30, 2018, 2:47 PM, Donald Fraser wrote:

Hi Everyone,

Just for your info, My Brother in Law, Chris, and his wife Lynne were just visiting us in Waterloo from Prince George,BC. I made a point of asking them how they would vote and why.

Chris (retired) was the chief librarian for BC, reads constantly and is very well educated.

Lynne is a retired General Practitioner (medical) , travels the world constantly with Chris and definitely has a world view.

This is important because their views represent those of intelligent, well educated and informed BC citizens.

I informed them that I was 'interviewing' them to present their views to FVC, and they were OK with that.

I presented:

(1) my favourite argument for PR; namely, better long-term-planning for big projects taking more than 4 years to complete

(2) fairness ... every vote counts

(3) better and more robust legislation because the present government (coalition) participated in the legislation of the previous government, so it gets tweaked and improved rather than being scrapped as happens in adversarial FPTP

(4) more participation (voting) since every vote counts

(5) strategic voting becomes unnecessary ... you can vote for the party of choice

Lynne said she isn't voting for PR because nobody is telling her what she is getting specifically ... she wants the details of how PR would work in BC ... of course I tried to tell her that there are many ways to implement PR and that we deliberately avoid getting into this because it tends to turn off voters and that the benefits apply to all forms of PR ... I explained MMPR, with both open and closed list top-up methods, but she wouldn't budge ... she wants to know the exact method.

Chris was less rational and got his back up to my arguments (typical male to male).

He brought up the usual argument of fringe parties disrupting government ... I explained that PR countries typically use 'threshold' rules about participation to avoid this problem.

He argued with:

(1) in that all governments chug away as usual regardless of who gets elected ... true, I agreed, about tax collecting, snow removal etc but not for specific problems like London-to-Oshawa transportation ... but I didn't persuade him.

(2) he didn't acknowledge the difference between votes being 'counted' and every vote 'counts'. Intellectually, of course, he no doubt could grasp that, but perhaps didn't listen and just wanted to argue

(3) (4) (5)I don't recall a coherent answer ... he had become bored with the discussion by this time.

So you can see what we're up against ... let's hope they are not in the majority of respondents.

cheers,

Don

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