I urge you all to have your parties vote for Mr. Chong’s private member’s bill.
I think the move toward a “presidential PM” started with your father’s government, Justin Trudeau. Being old enough to remember governments from Diefenbaker and Pearson’s era, I recall some press to that effect.
We need to go back to the UK system which gives Parliament more power than the PMO has. Stop copying the Americans. Otherwise we just might end up with an elephant with a beaver tail! Or a beaver with a donkey’s rump? You get the picture, such a beast sounds very much like something Monsanto might come up with, but like GMO’s in general, it just won’t be digestible, and will make our democracy even sicker than it already is.
The U.S. system is really cumbersome, and I would argue not all that democratic. If we wanted to make improvements on ours, I would urge that we bring in proportional representation. In the current first-past-the-post system, you get a situation where sometimes 75 per cent of voters don’t have their votes count.
And then you wonder at voter apathy? My vote hasn’t counted since sometime in the 1960s.
Eva Lyman,
Celista