LETTER – Pro rep gives a voice to those shut out by first past the post

Re: U.S. Speaker fiasco gives us a taste of proportional representation.

Mel, under FPTP, the Democrats would have won the first-round vote.

But that’s not the point. A plurality is never enough to gain support for anything tabled at boards, committees, or commissions, as you well know. Nor is it sufficient for our government to select their HoC speaker.

We saw fractious discord in Washington because FPTP has always been used in 2-party systems to secure authoritarian plurality rule, with dissenting parties left out of the process.

The outliers of the Republican Party felt unrecognized and dug in for a 15-round battle. FPTP wouldn’t have made their discontent go away. It papers it over.

Pro rep doesn’t encourage fractures. They arise naturally in modern democracies, and pro rep gives a voice to those shut out by the binary archaism of FPTP. Pro Rep is a healing democratic model.

PAUL BAKER
Guelph, Ontario

EDITOR’S NOTE: Under First Past the Post, the Republicans would never have split their vote knowing they would lose.