Calm Down, Cheer Up, Dump First-Past-Post

Sweet moderation - heart of this nation -desert us not, we are between the wars.

Less than one-quarter of us – 5.4 million of 22.8 million registered Canadian voters - marked an X beside the name of a Conservative candidate yesterday.

The only reason the Conservatives managed to do even that well was by hiding their truly right-wing candidates and policies, and by campaigning almost solely on the argument that they were the choice for moderation and honesty.

Roughly two-thirds of Canada’s voters chose parties of the centre-left. Even among the Conservative candidates there were many wrong-but-reasonable old-school Tories (they’re not all radical-right ravers).

Rick Barnes gets it. So does Dirk Buchholz.

We desperately need some form of proportional representation in this country. I’ve been bitching about this for ages.

After the 2004 election, NDP leader Jack Layton vowed to support the minority Liberal government we elected back then if Paul Martin would agree to hold a national referendum on proportional representation. Martin said he was open to the idea. “Our voting system is broken," Layton said back then, pledging to put his shoulder to the wheel of “a rebirth of our democracy."

What ever happened to that promise?