To the Editor,
Re: Question of the Week, Are you happy with the results of B.C.’s proportional representation referendum?
It is quite interesting that your Dec. 26 Question of the Week indicates that 62 percent of respondents are happy with the proportional representation referendum; that mirrors the province wide result at 61.3 percent preferring the current FPTP electoral system. Yet so many of the folks who wrote to your newspaper and posted on social media seemed to favor a change to PR voting system.
The result is that the silent majority of voters had seen past the complex questions and decided to vote for the status quo.
Further, I am of the opinion that Premier Horgan outsmarted those who were duped into believing that PR would be a better system. He assigned the task of designing the referendum question to David Eby, who followed his bosses intention of phrasing the question so that the referendum would fail. A basic question of whether you want FPTP or PR was rejected as too simplistic for the voters; on that question the referendum may have succeeded.
When the results came in, I’ll wager that Horgan had a wry smile and a good chuckle at his success in cutting the Greens out. He likely had a glass of good Scotch, sat in an easy chair and contemplated NDP future successes against the Liberals.
Bob Kanngiesser,
Port Alberni