The PR consensus

It shouldn't come as any surprise that the NDP continues to push PR as an election issue, today through Bill Blaikie's appearance on Question Period:

"The way our current electoral system works exaggerates regional tensions," NDP candidate Bill Blaikie told CTV's Question Period Sunday.

"It creates Parliaments … which lie to us about the Canadian people. It gives us the impression that all people from Quebec are separatists, that everyone in Alberta is a Tory. If we had proportional representation we would have national caucuses that had representatives of all regions, so there'd be less of a tendency or a temptation to play regional politics, and we would have a Parliament that would be more representative."

Proportional representation gives parties seats in relation to their total national vote count, instead of by the number of electoral ridings won. Blaikie said such a system would cost the Bloc party several seats in Quebec, where it wins many of its ridings by a slim margin.

What might be more interesting is that neither other party representative seems to have bothered presenting an argument against PR. Peter MacKay's take focused on giving more seats to Alberta and B.C. (repeating Harper's erroneous view that it would be possible to alter the number of Senate seats). Meanwhile, Anne McLellan merely doubted that the racial violence now seen in France and Australia would occur in Canada.

It surely has to be the mark of a good idea that even the parties which might seemingly have the most to lose from it don't dare to argue directly against it. Indeed, it could be that the sense of PR's inevitability is accepted as much among current Parliamentary higher-ups as among the groups dedicated to promoting it. If so, then the main question now is how to make sure that sense of inevitability gets turned into action.