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The Bold Idea of Representation in Politics


By Elsie Hambrook


New Brunswick, on a stormy winter night in 2003, drawing hundreds of women to hear her speak on electoral reform, she confided something that, years later, still strikes as important. She was over 80 years old, feisty as ever, and she said if she had it to do all over, she would spend all her energies on electoral reform. She had many causes and careers, several to do with advancing Canadian women’s equality, and she had become convinced that without an electoral system that better reflected the actual votes, women would not gain political equality. This fall, after the provincial election in New Brunswick, more people were commenting on the need for electoral reform than after any other election in memory. Not that this election was the worst example of skewed results from the archaic way of counting votes that New Brunswick shares with the rest of Canada. There have been worse examples, but more and more of us have heard about - and understand - the proportional representation forms of vote counting, which most other democratic countries use. With less than half of the popular votes, the new Progressive Con-


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servative government will get 76 per cent of the seats. The Liberals received 13 seats, not the 19 that their percentage of the vote should have given them.


hen Doris Anderson, the late former and famed editor of Chatelaine and lifelong activist, came to Saint John,


46 Campaigns & Elections | Canadian Edition


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