Bob Mackin
Add Vancouver developer Rob Macdonald to the anti-proportional representation campaign.
Macdonald says in a two-page commentary making the rounds that Canada is blessed with the first past the post system of elections and British Columbia would be foolish to switch.
“We could actually have a situation where the Saltspring Island Nut Job Party holds the balance of controlling power in our government, and we should ask ourselves if that is a prospect that is appealing,” Macdonald wrote.
Macdonald was the biggest backer of No Proportional Representation B.C. Society director Suzanne Anton when she ran for mayor in 2011. He donated a whopping $900,000 to the NPA campaign.
Developer Rob Macdonald
Macdonald has not responded to theBreaker. The commentary sent to Macdonald’s business associates urges them to pass it on and to vote against electoral reform in the NDP government’s mail-in referendum.
Macdonald’s note said PR breeds bigger government deficits, debts, taxes and “more pigs at the public trough.” Smaller, fringe parties would get pet projects and pay-offs to join a coalition.
“Do we really want to operate like Italy or Greece which are dysfunctional basket cases?”
Macdonald wrote that PR wouldn’t improve the country. Governments are known immediately after a first past the post election. Under PR, coalitions can take weeks and months to form. Under first past the post, he wrote, local people are directly elected. Under PR, those who would normally be unelectable could get into government on party lists submitted by party bosses.
Ultimately, Macdonald says the debate is really between the pursuit of power and good government. PR would create “a tyranny of a minority of people that could never win a majority government on their own and that we would probably not consider hiring to run a peanut stand.”
The left wing, he said, believes that PR would allow “them and their fringy friends to implant B.C. with their socialist agenda forevermore.”
“The leftists of this province are selling (PR) like it is the best thing since sliced bread, but as my father would say — they are selling us a big bucket of shit while trying to get us to believe it is tasty beef stew with black bean sauce.”
Boosters of proportional representation argue that the winner of a B.C. election tends to get all the power with only 40% of the popular vote.
Ballots are being delivered province-wide. The mail-in referendum runs through Nov. 30.
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