Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!utcsri!utegc!utai!ubc-vision!fornax!chapman
From: chapman@fornax.uucp
Newsgroups: can.politics
Subject: Re: Free Trade (really Democracy)
Message-ID: <208@fornax.uucp>
Date: Thu, 26-Feb-87 04:28:20 EST
Article-I.D.: fornax.208
Posted: Thu Feb 26 04:28:20 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 27-Feb-87 00:20:59 EST
Distribution: can
Organization: School of Computing Science, SFU, Burnaby, B.C. Canada
Lines: 27

> 
> 	You have confused two issues here.  Firstly democracy is defined as :
> 	a form of government for the people, by the will of the majority of the
> 	people, a state having this form of government.  (from the first
> 	dictionary I grabbed.)  
>	
>      To paraphrase : one person, one vote, majority rules; plain, and simple

Just an aside but by this definition, which I don't particularly dispute,
we do not live in a democracy.  It is quite possible, both federally and
provincially, for party A to get more of the popular vote than party B
and yet have fewer seats.  BC is almost an example of this - more than
once the NDP has had a popular vote within a few percent of the Socred
party but the Socreds end up with an overwhelming majority of seats.

Also while it is one person one vote within a riding the votes in some
ridings count for "more" since it has a small number of people but still
has a seat.  The worst case of this is a small riding in BC which has 10%
of the population of the larger ridings and yet has the same say in
running the goverment as the 10 times larger ridings.

> 
> UUCP  : {decvax|ihnp4}!watmath!watdcsu!brewster    of success but rather  try
> Else  : Dave Brewer, (519) 886-6657                to  become a  man of value.
>                                                          Albert Einstein

*** REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR MESSAGE ***