Maybe Plato was Wrong After All

If voting systems were candidates in the Canadian Alliance's inaugural leadership race, Proportional Representation would be Stockwell Day - the flashy, charming, all things to all people solution to everybody's ills. You can just imagine it riding in on a jet ski and in a wetsuit. Sure, there are a few Negative Nancies deriding the idea, saying that it believes that the Earth is less than ten thousand years old and that the Jewish leaders were the children of their father, the devil, but every good idea has its detractors. . . and man, look at those pecs!

Just as I couldn't convince friends in the Canadian Alliance back in those days that, believe it or not, I had their best interests at heart when I told them to vote for Preston, I assumed that members of B.C.'s Citizens Assembly would ignore my warnings that PR would spell the end of representative democracy. To the great credit of the body's 159 randomly-selected British Columbians, I was wrong. To their even greater credit, they've instead recommended preferential balloting and a move to multi-member constituencies, two other moves that I've long-supported (though the fact that constituencies will be represented by different numbers of people is troublesome).

This, along with the election of Stephen Mandel in Edmonton, almost makes me wonder if citizens might be qualified to govern after all.