Last week’s election led to a torrent of democratic rage. One mild example: “It is going to take me a long time to overcome my disgust with the Liberal tactics, the unfairness of much of the media and the gutlessness of the Toronto electorate.” Most of it moved from West — i.e., Alberta — to East — i.e., “the drawing rooms of Toronto,” as one columnist described the focus of western fury. (Toronto has no drawing rooms; during the election, everyone was out on the Danforth or College Street watching the European Cup.)

The media stoked this rage, then derided it. “Dear Hothead,” wrote Ian Brown. “I sulk therefore I go,” said Rex Murphy about separation threats.

Every election result has the ability to provoke a feeling of abuse. I first experienced democratic rage in Grade 12 at Forest Hill Collegiate, when jock Steve Levy courted the know-nothing vote and beat the earnest and eloquent Syd Goldenberg for student council prez. I sulked to my room and wrote, “The people are idiots,” in my “journal.” That election, with its populist undercurrent, still awaits a more nuanced analysis.

What distinguishes the current version is that a solution for the rage waits in the wings like a soothing shrink: proportional representation. PR is being seriously promoted in B.C., PEI, Ontario, Quebec and Ottawa, where the NDP endorses it. Under PR, there would be no majorities of seats when a party has a minority of votes, as occurs in almost every election. The Bloc Québécois, with 11 per cent of votes, would get 38 seats, not 54. The NDP, with 16 per cent, would have 48, not 19; the Greens, 13. Presto: a Parliament that embodies rather than mocks the votes of the voters.

Everyone always says, This is not a panacea. But, hey, maybe PR is . . . Not quite. It would be way better than what we have (it’s hard to think of anything worse). Yet even as an official supporter of Fair Vote Canada, PR’s lobby, I want to note its limits. PR would solve some problems around representation, but not the problem of representation itself.

For even under PR, you would still hand off your political responsibility to someone else, like an MP. You’d still end up feeling existentially shortchanged, though it might manifest in unfulfilled grumpiness rather than murderous rage. The real trouble with voting for reps, in the system we have or under PR, is that it isolates people as voters rather than bringing them together to deliberate jointly to solve mutual problems.

An impractical dream? Only if you have not experienced it in some context, political or otherwise. But a polling booth separates you from your fellow citizens, precisely as you exercise what is supposed to be the common interest. Of course you get frustrated when they win and you don’t. You could say the system we have — isolated voting plus skewed results — is pretty much guaranteed to produce homicidal fury. Like flying Air Canada.

Isn’t the rage just a result of losing? No, you can lose politically without getting bitter. First, it takes a genuine, open debate. Then, if a solution emerges, people can move off their fixed positions to the new common sense of what’s right, without feeling they knuckled under. That’s a different kind of democracy than mere voting involves. (By the way, the election result I personally felt as most catastrophic — the free-trade victory of 1988 — was the one about which I felt least bitter. That’s because I had been deeply involved for once as a participant, though not under a party banner. The effect was a strange mix of desolation and exhilaration.)

I have recently been wearing a T-shirt with Republic of Alberta on it, given me by some kind and ironic left-wing Albertans. I wear it because it is a terrific shirt (crest in gold braid, crossed rifles over the slogan); but also, in sympathy with the political frustrations it connotes. After all, it was the folks in Alberta, where the Reform Party began, who first raised some disturbing democratic challenges to all of us — in their own way, to be sure: referendums, recalls, a Triple-E Senate — long before Prime Minister Paul Martin started fretting over democratic deficits, and the NDP got passionate for PR.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.