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Page 5, News, Tuesday, June 4, 1991 Political representation method is flawed The other day I was watching our fearless P.M. on T.V. stumbling and Stuttering his way through his latest self-inflicted crisis when I was struck by an awesomely frightening thought ..-l put him there! By 'T', I mean 'we' of course (which is actually even more frightening), and by 'there', I am referring to the big P.M.O. (Prime Minister's Office). And, incredibly, we not only put him there once but twice! Now this is the part I have trouble understanding. This is the man, the orchestrator of Meech Lake, free trade and the G.S.T., who has almost singlehandedly destroyed on six years, a great country that has taken 120 years to build. How could we have elected him to a second term? Mass hysteria? Temporary insanity? I don't think so (although the effect is the same). The problem is the restrictive parliamentary system that served up three clowns as candidates. The voters, a typically conservative lot, just chose Mulroney a clown whose act they already know. So what is wrong with our system? Haven't we, as Canadians, always been reassuredly stable in our belief that we live in a free nation with political institutions built on the fair and equitable notion of equal representation? Haven't we always been secure in the aknowledge that the government in power represents the will of the people? Well so the story goes... A few years ago I was travelling through Europe in a determined effort to flagrantly waste a year doing nothing absolutely nothing. I was character- istically sitting in a beer hall quaffing a few litres of particularly strong German lager with a few friends when first blood was drawn. The conversation had turned to politics when suddenly Fritz (really his name) turned to me and said in a cool years, we've been there for well over a century. I turned to face my adversary and with the maple leaf on my breast and an Anne Murray song in my heart, I said, with typical Canadian bravado, 'Why yes, we do use the parliamentary system of government. Why do you ask?' With that, the battle was engaged and I had my first face to face with the standard complacent attitude that Rudolph Canadians Hess -type a a share towards manner, 'Vat C h i H LS a ep ' d their political kind OV institutions. politics do Typically, you have in Kanada? It ees not like za schtupid British parliamentary system, nein?' You can imagine my outrage! Canadians had pursued the oldest continuous form of democratic institutions in the world. Our system dates back to that fateful day in 1215 at Runnymede, England, when a reluctant King John put his bloody 'X' on the Magna Carta, guaranteeing (for the nobles at least) the right to representative democracy. Why, just the image of our elected representatives engaging in time honoured methods like senate filibuster antics or the 'ol' slap your desk and make a lot of childish noise in order to disrupt the due process' trick made me homesick at once. And what the hell did the Germans know about democracy? They'd only had it for forty in Canada, we have lacklustre poll tum outs, and an almost completely disinterested attitude in political affairs. We complain a lot but we always end up meekly accepting the laws and decrees of our political leaders no matter how ridiculous and flawed they may be. This is kind of weird. People' are usually very interested in directly managing their own affairs, so why don't we give a damn what happens to us On a provincial or national scale? I learned a few interesting things from Fritz on that fateful night in Germany. The first was that a parliamentary form of government has a very basic flaw built into it ... regional representation. In Canada, on both a national and provincial scale, our elected members are chosen on a regional basis. Each region with a given population base, say 50,000, sends one representative to the House. Initially this sounds like a good idea but it is limited. The problem is that this form of representation leads to unfair or 'weighted' representation and a completely dominating mainstream party system. In each region the winning candidate needs only to carry the most votes to gain the seat. The other votes cast for the losing candidate are completely lost. It is therefore possible for one party to hold all 264 seats in the House of Commons while only garishing 34 per cent of the national vote (based on the three party system.) Imagine, one party, or for all intents and purposes, one man, could hold complete power while only having one- third of the initial popular support. Also, this means that only the mainstream parties (such as our Conservative, Liberals or N.D.P.) will generally send a candidate to the House. It is nearly impossible for any new fringe party to overcome the inertia of the system in order to gain a foothold in any given region. If these parties and their ideas can't break in, the stranglehold by the 'big 3' is complete and the voter is left with the same old choices year after year. Consequently, our politicians become predictable and mundane. No wonder we have become so disinterested and disaffected. Every Continued on page 13 Wawatay - Linking up and It was 7:30 in the morning. The technicians from Bell and Wawatay were scurrying around making their last-minute checks. At one end of the link-up was Toronto. It was easy to tell because someone from Bell had put up a slide of the CN Tower and Toronto skyline. At the other end of the hook- up was Thunder Bay - the new Bell Canada Conference room. As the technicians were completing their checks, at 10 minutes after 8, the Slide of the CN Tower suddenly disappeared, and there he was. Bob Rae. Canada's first Baby Boom Premier. He must not have known the camera was on. He took out a large white handkerchief and cleaned his glasses. Then he blew his nose, rather loudly. Then he took a sip of what looked like coffee - from a large styrofoam cup. Then he leaned back in his chair, put his feet up on the end of the board table, and read his Globe and Mail. Graciously, some technician restored the Premier's privacy and put up the CN Tower slide. With that rather inauspicious beginning on May 14, the Wawatay Communications Society began four days of live video hook-ups, examining the future of their organization. Over the course of the week, Wawatay hooked up their Thunder Bay board meeting with Toronto, Ottawa, London Ontario and Winnipeg. They also heard deputations in person and from pre- recorded video tapes. All English presentations were simultaneously translated into Oji-Cree for the benefit of the board members from Nishnawbe- Aski communities in the far north. Given the technical complexity of the exercise, there were remarkably few glitches. The only serious one happened Thursday moming during the link-up to London Ontario, to hear a very well-prepared lecture from Cliff Bilyea, the President of Telecollege Productions at Wilfrid Laurier University. There was bad sound at the line, so everyone looked like they were moving in short "jerks" rather than normally. It reminded me of dancing under a strobe light in a disco club - where the light only catches every other movement. If Wawatay had been willing to pay double the line charges - for double the quality (1.5 megabytes per second) then Bell claims the picture would have been like you see on "The Journal" - crystal clear. As it was, Wawatay had to pay about beginning, $150 per half then London NORTHERN hour of hook- could not INSIGHTS up. That see the might sound picture it yi expensive, was sending but if you out. That resulted in valuable link-up time being lost with Bilyea asking Thunder Bay "are we in focus now? How about now?" every time another adjustment was made in the camera. It was an experiment in applying new technology - fibre optics - to a real northern communications exercise. Several presenters and the Wawatay Board itself thought they were linked up with satellites, but that was not the case. Instead, Bell's fibre optic cables, run underground beside the Trans- Canada pipeline, were used to beam the sound and picture from Thunder Bay at 186,000 miles per second to the other end and get a picture and sound back from the other end. The picture that came back was not at "real speed" - Wawatay only had enough money to pay for a 76 kbs (kilobytes per second) consider the cost of flying around Canada, staying in a hotel, eating meals, etc. it's much cheaper to meet this way than in person. Besides, when you're asking busy people like Bob Rae and George Erasmus to make a presentation, it's much easier to ask them to go a few blocks from their office to one of the Bell studios wired with fibre optic cable than to take at least a day to fly to visit you. .- But what, you may ask, was the quality of the communications in an exercise like this? What about being able to shake someone's hand, or tell if there was sweat on their brow? Could you really look into their eyes and tell if they were being sincere, or under severe stress? Obviously, no one could shake hands through the fibre optic cable. Given the picture quality, it liking it wasn't always possible to tell if there was sweat on the foreheads of the presenters. So in those ways, it wasn't as good as being in the same room. But as Gerry Burland, Wawatay's administrator, put it: "It was the next best thing to being there. As soon as someone made a little mistake, or showed their humanity to the camera in any way, it broke down the distance and you realized there was a human being at the other end, and communication happened." Most of the presenters said they had "never done anything like this before". They weren't sure whether to behave like they were making a lecture, or meeting friends over a picnic table. Some of the bureaucrats and professors responded with the "lecture" mode, while others took the time to joke and laugh and treat the occasion more like it was - an opportunity to break down the vast distances between each end and talk as one human being to another. Wawatay used the Forum as the start of a planning process. None of the live video hook-ups exceeded half an hour, so the electronic meetings were more of a chance to introduce subjects and ideas, rather than explore anything in depth. Longer hook-ups would have been needed if they had wanted in- depth treatment of the subjects discussed - aboriginal politics, government programs, broadcast regulations and policies, native culture and languages or economic 'Continued on page 16]