Dear Editor:
Elections for mayor, council and school trustees are only a few weeks away. We are already being encouraged to get involved, and we will soon be exhorted to get out and vote. Why should we? The one thing we can be practically sure of is that we will not get the council and school board we voted for. Unbelievable but true. Think about it.
At the last election, 51 per cent of the votes for councillors were for the eight candidates from the Burnaby Citizens Association (BCA). All eight of them were "elected." The other 49 per cent of the votes did not "elect" anyone, and those voters were cheated by the system.
At the previous election, in 2005, the largest number of votes were for TEAM candidates and "elected" three candidates to council. A smaller number of votes "elected" five BCA candidates. Yes, more votes elected fewer councillors. Again the voters were cheated.
There is nothing unique about Burnaby here. The same sort of thing happens in other jurisdictions. This is not democracy.
None of this makes sense. Do you care that we don't get the council we voted for? If so, speak up! Ask your MLA and the premier to require, or at least permit, cities and municipalities to use a system that gives us what we voted for. Ask the city council to press MLAs and the premier for this so that in the next election three years from now we can use a fair voting system.
The present council has shown no inclination to do anything about this, possibly because the BCA has been the beneficiary of these strange results. Next time the BCA may be the ones to suffer, so they should be interested.
Let us ask the candidates in the upcoming election to promise to press the B.C. government to give us a fair voting system.
There are a number of options, but the best would be one which would see each councillor elected by an equal number of like-minded voters; this can be accomplished if we use ballots on which we rank the candidates in order of preference.
David Huntley, Burnaby
