Thank you, Dave, for your further writing. I am responding here, since the other article is about the Big Bang and not about politics.

There is no single Western Democracy, but there is an umbrella of systems, and your TDG also falls under the same umbrella.

You say there is nothing wrong with how politicians run the local level in Canada.

But thirty percent of voters show up for local elections? Wow, that is tremendously bad. I know folks aren’t interested in voting when it isn’t seen as important, but this percentage is really very low.

I only have data about the national levels. Nations with proportional voting have a lot more voters coming out to vote. The following is a review of 50+ years of voter turnout. You can see in yellow the nations that vote in districts. In green, nations are shown that vote proportionally. In blue, nations that have a system that incorporates both systems in one.

You can see Canada near the bottom of the list. That’s not a good spot of course. District voting kills the appetite to vote because the losers get nothing. Do that three times, and I wouldn’t show up the fourth time either.

There is one extremely good reason to have proportional voting at the local level: political freedom. Political freedom is the Western ideal, but one system is dishonest about political freedom while the other delivers. Every vote counts in the results of proportional voting, is simply translated into the actual outcome. Every voter is respected and represented at the table with proportional voting. Anything else is less free; any other system has incorporated severe voter restrictions.

Okay, that’s my response. You know I promote the proportional system particularly for the local level. For the larger level, four to six parties is what I’d like to see. And Canada does deliver that.