30 000 children die every day from poverty-related causes [www.freethechildren.com]
That's one child every 3 seconds! That means in the time it takes you to read this post, 20-50 children will die, depending on how long it ends up being and how fast you read.
However, this poverty could be prevented! All it would take is 0.7% of the national income of 22 developed nations. This would raise the $195 billion needed to combat poverty effectively.[1] They pledged to do this in 2000, and many nations have already reached this goal. Canada has no plan whatsoever, and is currently only giving 0.28%.
Stephen Harper is doing nothing about this, and yet he gets re-elected - despite the conservative government having only 37% of votes. These extremely disproportionate results highlight the growing problem in Canada of the outdated plurality voting system. The Green Party (which, not incidentally, does have a plan to meet the 0.7% aid) had 900 000 votes nationwide (out of 13 million) and yet got not a single seat, where fewer than that number of voters in the west produced 27 conservative seats. Add to that an all-time low of 59.1% voter turnout,[2] and there is clearly something wrong.
...so we need a change. Forget potential change in governing party – we need a change in government policy at the electoral level. Canada's voting system dates back to the 12th century! It is outdated and does not work in a country that is no longer composed of just two parties. I still don't know exactly what we need, but the solution is out there. Here are some links for your readage:
- [1] http://www.poverty.com/internationalaid.html
- [2] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canadavotes/
- http://www.freerice.com/
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Transferable_Vote
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_democracy
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_politics
No comments:
Post a Comment