Trotted out against PR is the specious and bizarre worry about "backroom deals" or something (yes, alas, it is Chris himself who told me this!), as though this doesn't already happen in spades in FPTP. Thing is, however, no one is forcing you to vote for a party that behaves that way. If you don't like it, you can form your own! And you have a very good chance of seeing yourself represented by it! In fact, if you're really so addicted to regional parties, you can even vote for a regional party under pure PR. But, delicious irony (mmm...irony), anyone can vote for your regional party. Imagine, the BQ suddenly discovering that some of its seats depend on votes from BC... (This may even have happened if PR had existed in the last federal election.)

And thus, my friends, we come to the crux of the matter. FPTP is flawed because it submerges minority interests in a very tenuous sense of regional solidarity. If people with severe problem X are spread thinly throughout the country, they never have the power to influence legislature. It is clearly set up under the expectation that those who need to be represented are large landholders; then it is a lot more obvious that representation by region makes sense. It seems reasonable that people whose major interest is their land and the rents they collect from it should share interests by region.

But these days, a lot more people vote than major landholders/real estate rentiers---in whose number I do not count the owners of small and medium-sized single family homes, among others, who make up the bulk of the middle class. The interests of most people these days is far more likely to be tied to their economic situation. Among others, the poor in one area have far more in common with the poor in another area than they do with the rich who live in the same area. And that is only one extreme example!

So here we come to my simple, brilliant proposal: a compromise between PR and FPTP that leaves the defining feature of FPTP intact---that feature being representation by constituency. This proposal: representation by economic status. Economic status meaning total wealth, or income. I haven't decided which, but it doesn't matter for the sake of this argument; let us take income for the rest of this discussion. We simple divide up the income scale into percentile-like brackets, say, 300 of them with an equal number of voters in each bracket. And we assign each one of these brackets a seat in the House of Commons. Then voters in each bracket will vote for an income-bracket representative! That way, everyone's major political interest---their economic situation---is far more properly represented than a residence-based system of representation. And we still have voters represented by single individuals, so that my friends on this blog can sit back and sigh, "Ahhhh, we are represented by a SINGLE PERSON! That feels gooood!" (What pleasure organ is activated by this sense, I still cannot imagine.)

Of course, I still far prefer some PR variant, since this system also submerges all kinds of other possible common interests that people may perceive for themselves---while PR allows all kinds of interests, including regional ones. But it is still far, far better, and much less arbitrary, than the FPTP system we are saddled with today. So anyone willing to take me up on my Modest Proposal? Somehow, I think not. And I think that this is telling.