Still, reading about his cabinet team and the overwhelming majority government they'll be heading up brings to mind the sad state of affairs found with our electoral process, which has been getting a lot of attention in the press lately.
In 2006, Bernard Lord claimed he was going to initiate a referendum on voter reform as a result of the 2005 report by the Commission on Legislative Democracy. He promised to do this once he was elected, Scout's honour. I have my doubts as to whether he would have gone through with it or if it would have become part of the PC government's traditionally high number of broken promises,* but it's all academic because the fact remains he wasn't elected. Instead, we received a Liberal majority with a minority of votes.
This last election was even worse, with 76% of the seats going to the PC party, while only receiving 49% of the votes. Of course, nothing will ever quite match the hilarity of 1987's election, where the Liberals managed to turn 60% of the popular vote into 100% of the seats in the Legislature. That was really something.
And yet, it still wasn't enough to get New Brunswickers to agitate for a change to the system.
Credit where it's due - I had no idea that Lord had promised any such referendum until it was pointed out to me recently. It still surprises me... And even if it was an empty promise, that's more than I would have expected from either of our big two.
I wish that Alward would follow in Lord's footsteps and call for a Referendum on the Commission's recommendations.** I'm not going to be holding my breath, though. While the system as it stands is pretty fundamentally broken, it's broken in a way that works for both the Grits and the Tories. They've both been bitten by the system, but it's also benefited them greatly in turn. Fundamentally, neither party likes having to compromise - governing from common ground, making deals with other parties to form and enact legislation, these things are much harder than just holding out until you get the majority (which you'll do eventually, you just have to be patient). Then you can get all the stuff you want pushed through without much problem.
What's the answer? Well, amazingly, the papers I've been seeing lately have been helping - a number of editorials have been calling for Proportional Representation. But that's not enough. I tend to think that, absent a sudden NDP/Green welling of support in New Brunswick (two parties that support PR and the Commission's recommendations), Elsie Hambrook is correct in that it really needs a champion.
I'd be ecstatic if it turned out to be the current Tory government, or even elements within it, that became that champion. It would prove most of my thoughts about them wrong. Like I said, though... I'm not holding my breath.
If you feel like I do, you might want to consider joining the Facebook group New Brunswickers for Proportional Representation. Not that Facebook groups count for much, but at least it's somewhere to start.
* = Not that the Liberals are much better. About the only major party in New Brunswick that's never broken its promises is the NDP, by virtue of never having won more than a single seat at a time. Ugh.
** = For those interested, Elsie Hambrook wrote what those recommendations were:
In the mixed-member proportional representation that was recommended for New Brunswick by the Commission on Legislative Democracy in 2005, about 35 MLAs would be elected as per usual, from ridings, and 20 regional seats would be filled from a list of candidates presented by parties, according to each party's share of the vote. Voters would cast two ballots, to elect a local MLA and to choose a party.
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