I believe the following changes will result in a MORE democratic
government:
¶ I am in favour of
proportional representation, that is, Legislative seats should be
assigned based on the percentage of popular vote for a particular
party, even if that can lead to a minority or coalition
government. The candidates picked should be
picked from the highest percentage votes in decreasing order.
¶ Elections should be held on
fixed dates every 4 years.
¶ ALL votes in the
legislature should be FREE votes, with NO party discipline
imposed. This implies that the non passage of a bill by
the legislature will never bring down the government.
ONLY the expiry of a 4 year term will bring down a
government. If a bill is not passed, then that implies
that this bill will not be imposed against the wishes of the
majority of MLAs. Free votes on everything will stop us
from having a 4 year dictatorship run by the Premier or his
cabinet.
¶ All candidates who wish to
be part of the MLA pool, should be nominated by their local riding
members and voted on by them. In other words, parties
should not be able to appoint people to stand as
candidates. This will give more power to party members
rather than party leadership.
¶ In order to curtail
judicial tyranny (as we now have), ALL provincial judges should be
appointed ONLY if they receive a majority of votes from all
MLAs.
¶ NO ONE should be allowed to
be signed up for a party by someone else (with the exception of
Power of attorneys). This will invalidate bulk signups,
which some groups in our society seem to like to do and which are
counter productive to participatory democracy. - We should have a
Provincial Charter of rights which takes precedence over the
Federal Charter of Rights. This will curtail some of
the outrageous judicial activism at the federal court level by our
totally unaccountable Supreme court justices.
¶ Many (if not all) of the above
major points should go to a referendum and a 50% + 1 majority would
suffice to implement these new policies.
Thanks for allowing me to suggest ways to make our system truly
democratic.
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