Listen to the music

What is the difference between first past the post and proportional representation as electoral systems?

Well, what is the difference between a silent puppet show and grand opera?

Most of us would probably say “music.” And we would be right, because both these art forms are simply distillations of the conflict between what is good and what is bad in our lives. There is always a villain and a heroine (usually supported by a hero).

The villain is often deceptively disguised until stripped of his falsities, his entrance on stage usually preceded by ominous base overtones. By contrast, our heroine/hero are often simple country folk introduced by lighthearted music one might hear at a country fair. 

Their loving relationship is threatened by the deceit of the villain.

It is the music that usually reveals the differences between characters by its lightness or darkness because our ears can often reveal what our eyes are too innocent to see.

It is the music that immediately identifies the winner-take-all FPTP system as the electoral villain, an adversarial system which inundates listeners and voters with dark and distasteful campaigns of falsehood, manipulation, and fearsome predictions of doom. 

The heroine/hero combination represents those of us who believe we are all inhabitants of the same village, each one as important as the other because proportional representation will give us all an equal voice in the village square. 

Ian MacKenzie, Kamloops