The Written Word: Rafe Mair Oct. 4th
By Rafe Mair
Wednesday, October 04, 2006 03:40 AM
British Columbia has a right to complain. It is consistently short the MPS its population warrants. The reason that there are no decent British Columbians in the Liberal leadership race is because there aren’t any. The Liberal party is a party of Central Canada and that’s what will win on December 2.There are grumblings of course that now that Alberta and BC have collectively exceeded the population of Quebec that we should have more MPs. That will never happen for two reasons – by the time the redistribution happens were are miles away from the past census and because of legislation the game will be crooked and getting crookeder by the day. This legislation in effect says that no matter what the population of a province bears to the rest of the country, no province can lose MPs. When you add in the four seats PEI constitutionally holds it’s not hard to see why Ontario, Alberta and BC will always be short of MPS. One can only be thankful that the Charlottetown Accord, which would have given Quebec 25% of the House of Commons no matter what the population would otherwise give her, was soundly beaten.
The really sad part is that if BC were to lose all its seats it wouldn’t really matter. All the goodies, the government procurement, Immigration money and so on will go into Quebec and Ontario all out of proportion to their population. That’s never going to change for while Prime Minister Harper is calling for fairness across the board he has already effectively shut up his MPS. If he gets a majority, the notion of democracy in the House of Commons will be no better than it was under the Liberals. If the Liberals get back in it will be business as usual, Liberal version.
The sad part of our so-called democracy is that unless there is a hung parliament 40% or less of the popular vote confers 100% of the power.
Canadians should think about these things if they want the country to stay together.
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BC should also think about these things if it wants to stay together.
Cnaada needs an elected Triple E senate and an elected head of state that is directly accountable to every citizen of this country equally and not to party delegates that are all bought and paid for by multinational corporations.