Editor, The Times:
This week, I sat through a televised, 30-minute, debate on pro. rep. and it was nothing but a banter between two undisciplined juvenile delinquents! This was an opportunity for Premier Horgan to explain to the people of B. C. exactly how pro. rep. will be set up. Instead, all he did was belittle himself and the people of B. C. Horgan’s statement,”If we are just going to yell at each other, the people might as well dial back to the wheel of fortune”. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this whole process is nothing but a total disregard of the Privacy Act and a complete sham of democracy! In a normal election, you go to a polling station, show photo I. D., get your ballot, go to a private booth, mark your choice(s), fold your ballot, and put it into a ballot box. With Horgan and Weaver’s scheme, you receive your ballot in the mail, and question 1 asks: Do you want first past the post, or Proportional Representation? If you choose Pro. Rep., you then have three more choices, and two of the three have never been used anywhere in the world! It gets worse! Now you put your ballot into a folded piece of paper that Horgan and Weaver call a “Secrecy Sleeve”. (If Weaver considers this as part of the privacy act then maybe he should be teaching preschool, not university!) It gets worse! The sleeve is then put into the supplied envelope, sealed, and then you fill in your name, address, date of birth, and sign it. You then place the envelope into another envelope which goes in third class mail. We have no way of tracing it to see if the personal information even got to where it was supposed to go.This whole process is the type of “democracy” that I expect to see in a third-world communist country, not Canada.
Ironically, Remembrance Day was last weekend, a day to remember all the soldiers who fought and and others who gave their lives to protect Canada’s rights and freedoms. Canada’s voting system is one of the cornerstones of democracy and should be treated accordingly, not relegated to a sleezy back door, third-class mail-in during a Canada Post strike!
One other thing I find quite humorous is that when all this stupidity has been counted, the one with the most votes wins, also known as “first past the post”!
Jim Lamberton
The Rambling Man
Clearwater, B.C.
