To the Editor,
Re: Television spots cool election fever, Feb. 23.
Chris Hamlyn’s column raised some very real questions for me on the subject of the upcoming election.
If the “electorate isn’t stupid” and “the facts are out there on what the Liberals and NDP have done in the past,” as Hamlyn writes, why have we, the electorate, kept these two parties sharing the power in turn for the last 20 years?
“Off with the old, on with the new,” the old saying goes, but we have only been able to throw off the old and to bring on the older.
Would these parties benefit from keeping the two-party system quietly alive? Would it not be then only a question of biding one’s time as opposition until the next election?
Does our first-past-the-post system of election not firmly entrench this obsolete, two-party system? Does this system make it impossible for us, the electorate, to achieve anything more intelligent than what we have done in the last 20 years?
As for looking at candidates, why not look at someone who would be willing to reform this system of election, has a well thought out plan for the future, and has everything to prove to the electorate?
Off with the old, on with the new.
Michelle Catley
Nanaimo