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OUR PSEUDO-DEMOCRACIES There are many definitions of democracy, but basically it
means that the majority rules, preferably with due consideration
for the rights and needs of minorities. One person (usually 18
years or older) = one vote. Allegedly every vote counts. 1. In both countries it is possible for a political party to win the largest number of votes and lose the election. It happened in the US as recently as 2000 when Al Gore garnered about 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush and lost the contest for the presidency. 2. The most powerful political decision-makers in the US are not elected, but appointed to the Cabinet and the National Security Council. Top appointees include the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney-General. Even the President and Vice-president of the US are not directly elected by the voters, but are appointed by the Electoral College. 3. In Canada Pierre Pettigrew (Minister of International Trade) and Stephane Dion (Minister of Inter-Government Affairs) were both appointed and installed as cabinet ministers by Prime Minister Jean Chretien on January 25, 1996 BEFORE they were subsequently elected in safe Quebec ridings two months later. 4. All members of the 105-seat Canadian Senate are appointed instead of being elected. They are appointed by the Governor General of Canada who --like the senators-- is appointed on the recommendation of the prime minister. Appointments are for up to the age of 75 and are basically a cushy reward for past political favours. When former Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney could not get major legislation through the Liberal-dominated senate in 1990 he appointed several additional conservative senators to change the political ratio in his favour! For more details about Canada's government see: http://www.parl.gc.ca/information/library/idb/forsey/fedinst-e.htm#Cabinet 5. In our FPTP (First Past The Post) political system the winner takes all. For example, if there are three parties, one needs only 34 per cent of the vote to win which leaves the MAJORITYof 66 per cent unrepresented. In Canada with five parties represented in the 301-seat House of Commons, the winning party needs only 21 per cent of the votes to form the government. In the US Ronald Reagan won a "landslide victory" with the support of only 27 per cent of the eligible voters. Hence, the majority does NOT rule--neither in Canada nor the US. 6. With the exception of the US, Canada, the UK and Jamaica other democracies in the world all use proportional representation in one form or another. With proportional representation when a party gets x per cent of the vote it gets x per cent of the seats instead of the winner takes all system in effect north of the Rio Grande. 7. On the grassroots level the majority is ignored as well. For example, polls and surveys have clearly shown that both in the US and Canada most people want any genetically modified food items to be labelled as such. Yet both governments so far have refused to enact this into law, thus protecting corporate wealth instead of public health. Proportional representation is an electoral system designed to produce legislative bodies in which the number of seats held by any group or party is proportional to the number of votes cast for members of that group during an election. The purpose of proportional representation is to reduce the power of a dominant political party and to provide minority groups with a degree of representation they are denied by the FPTP system. The idea of proportional representation originated during
the French Revolution. The principle was favored by British Philosopher
John Stuart Mill, who believed that in several of the new national
states it might protect the interests of ethnic and linguistic
minorities that were then seriously threatened by the domination
of the majority. The system was first used in Denmark in 1855,
and subsequently in such multi-ethnic countries as Switzerland
(1891), Belgium (1899), and Finland (1906). In the British Commonwealth, where FPTP was invented, the transition to proportional representation is well under way. Australia has used proportional systems at most levels of government for many years. In Britain itself, proportional representation is now in place for elections to the European and Scottish Parliaments and the Welsh Assembly. The Labour government has appointed a commissioner to examine a new voting system for the country as a whole, and proportional representation is high on the agenda. In both the US and Canada the current voting systems were
designed in an era when there were only two political parties,
which means there was always one winner and one loser. That was
fine until the early twentieth century when several political
parties came into being. The present system prevents any additional
party from making serious inroads into the political process
thus denying many (often most) voters the representation they
deserve. In the US: http://www.fairvote.org/pr/intro.htm and in Canada: http://www.votepr.org/ An interesting footnote is that both in the US and Canada federal elections were held in November, 2000. It took nearly two months, costly court battles and confusing ballot counts before the losers (George W. Bush and Dick Cheney) were declared the winners! In Canada it took less than an hour after the last polls closed before Liberal Jean Chretien was declared the winner. The US portrays itself as the world's leading democracy when in fact it has one of the most undemocratic political systems in the world. It is stuck with an antiquated and no longer relevant political system that is based on political realities which are more than two centuries old, e.g. the Electoral College. It doesn't even have a universal ballot design and voting system which further complicate the process and confuses and disenfranchises millions of voters. Both the Democrats and Republicans are more interested in preserving the political status quo (which favours them both) rather than making the process more democratic. Hence the vast majority of Americans are not represented by the politicians. As Ralph Nader and Ross Perot have found out, any additional political party hasn't got a chance to replace either the Democrats or the Republicans. Neither of the two mainstream parties is interested in serious election reform since the status quo serves both of them so well. Small wonder that at least half of all Americans don't even bother to vote.... |