Aspectre is haunting the land—the spectre of electoral reform. Once confi ned to small think tanks, political science departments, academic journals and addenda to royal commission reports, the subject has suddenly become highly visible, invoked in op-ed pieces, editorials, websites and weblogs, panel discussions and public debates, full-blown reports, and even in parliamentary motions and supreme court challenges. Several provinces have put it on the agenda, and in one of them, Quebec, it has already reached the stage of draft legislation. Noting this surge in interest, former NDP leader Ed Broadbent, one of electoral reform’s staunchest buttonholers, said recently on CBC Radio’s “The House” that 15 years ago, people’s eyes used to glaze over ten seconds into a conversation on electoral reform; now, he quipped, the glazing starts at 30 seconds.
There are signs that the rhetoric is heating up. The folks at Fair Vote Canada, one of the country’s broadest advocacy...
Paul Wilson is a writer and translator who lives in the Town of the Blue Mountains. His most recent translation is Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult, a collection of short stories by the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, published last year by New Directions.
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