Well, yesterday’s general election was certainly a waste of time and money for the Canadian people. Basically, it was an election that just shouldn’t have happened. It was called by Stephen Harper, against his own fixed elections bill, because he believed that he had the opportunity to get the majority needed to be the party in full power. He also claimed he called the election because the present government just wasn’t working. He made some gains and there were some surprising shifts in power in some ridings, but the real losers are the Canadian people, because the big picture is still a minority govenrment that, unless there is willing participation for cooperaton from the other parties, will end up being just as dysfunctional as before.
One thing the final results from yesterday show is that it is time for a real change in the area of electoral reform. Some form of proportional representation really needs to be looked at. There is something wrong when a party that gets just less than 10% of the vote ends up with 50 seats, whilst a party with close to 7% of the vote ends up with none. With proportional representation the former would have had about 30 seats, whilst the latter would have had 20.
The shame of the whole thing, not counting the waste of taxpayers money, is that we could be back at this within a couple of years again, which also means that I really need to get on with processing my Canadian citizenship.
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