“This is an excellent time to be raising this issue again, and I’m hoping I can get some local people behind it.”
Jeremy Flatt hopes you’ll find time after work to talk politics.
Flatt, best known for the Fat Fox café that once lived on Yellowknife’s Range Street, will take up residence in another downtown coffee emporium – Birchwood – at 5:30pm on Friday, February 28 to discuss proportional representation.
Proportional representation is a system that gives parties a number of seats in the legislature roughly equivalent to the number of people who voted for that party.
The current system, dubbed first past the post, gives seats to the winners from each riding but doesn’t do anything with all the votes for parties finishing second and beyond.
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Fair Vote Canada, a group pushing for proportional representation, states: “Under our non-proportional voting system, in most elections, most voters don’t elect anyone to represent them. They don’t affect the election at all. Their votes are ‘wasted.’ This is what leads to distorted results.
“With proportional representation, almost every vote helps elect an MP. Almost everyone is represented.”
The Liberal Party had promised to change Canada’s first-past-the-post system prior to 2015’s landslide Liberal victory. No such change took place.
“It was a big betrayal. It was very disappointing for a lot of people, because there’s pretty broad support,” said Flatt.
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“This is a pretty familiar dance, right? A party will propose some change that they know everybody wants. When they realize that the current system benefits them, as it did with the Liberals, they quickly abandon that promise to change.”
This time around, he said, the New Democrats and Greens are expected to have proportional representation on their platforms.
“It’s really about reaching out to the leadership candidates for the Liberal Party right now, making sure that they know people still really care about this issue. That’s a really big thing that people can do right away,” said Flatt.
“Reach out to the other parties, look at what you can do to raise the profile of proportional representation in their messaging.
“This is the main reason I’m hosting this get-together – to get into more detail about how proportional representation might work in Canada and what people can do to advance the cause if they’re into it.”
