(I am providing my blog space to my fair voting colleague John Deverell. Cross-posted from deverell.ca – Gary)
By John Deverell, Green Party candidate, Toronto Centre by-election
Montreal politics is a den of difficult-to-uproot corruption. The PMO in Ottawa, enabled by a phony majority in the House of Commons, bribes a corrupt senator without any direct consequence to the PM. Toronto Council finds itself legally incapable of removing, even temporarily, a lying, blustering and criminally compromised mayor.
What is the response of Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, National Post and Toronto Sun – all pillars of the establishment and all active opponents of democratic voting at any level of government?
They unite in a call for the resignation of Rob Ford – but still have no critique of the political system which made Ford the improbable mayor and Harper the unpopular PM. When will the establishment and its newspapers finally allow the citizenry to protect itself from political scoundrels by the normal democratic method – the casting of equal effective votes?
In our floundering major cities, Montreal and Toronto, the mass media continue their blind defence of a US-style division of powers featuring a separate mayoralty. For coherent and effective city government the mayor should be chosen by and serve at the pleasure of a council majority.
Council could then replace a mayor who loses its confidence within a few days. That’s the obvious strength of Canada’s parliamentary tradition and Toronto, Montreal and other municipalities should be allowed to use it.The corollary is that the council must represent all citizens – not merely that fraction of the electorate which votes for the winning candidates in single member wards. A truly representative council exists only when every citizen has an equal effective vote and gets a representative of his or her choice. Why do the elites of a free and democratic society find municipal democracy so unthinkable?
In Ottawa PM Steve Harper, never supported by more than 39 per cent of voters, holds a phony majority in the House of Commons. He killed the democratic per vote grant to hamstring the opposition political parties. He appointed his chosen bagpersons to senate sinecures so they could organize, at great public expense, the continuous Conservative milking of the political tax credit (a rich ongoing grab from the taxpayers of Canada).Now that some greedy Harper senators have been called out, PM Steve implausibly pretends to know nothing and be offended by their self-serving activities.
A disgusted Canadian majority cannot hold Harper responsible through Parliament — because so many non-Conservative voters have no representation in the House of Commons.
It will also be nearly impossible for Canadians to hold Harper to account at the ballot box in 2015 – because Justin Trudeau and Tom Mulcair are so busy quarreling over which of them should be Canada’s next undeserving dictator.
This atavistic Liberal/NDP death dance, spawned by the winner-take-all voting system, will likely deliver the same result as the general elections of 2006, 2008 and 2011 – Dictator Steve, chuckling quietly in the PMO at night as he works on the next round of cuts to environmental protections and the next hockey book.
No wonder many Canadians turn away from electoral politics in disgust and despair. The game is rigged, the placebo ballot isn’t worth much — except as a symbolic protest– and the corporate media show no remorse for promoting the sham.
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