Author: Robert Bruinsma

I am not a political scientist but, it seems to me that, in a democratic election, it would be fair to assume that the number of seats won by the various parties would be proportional to the number of people who voted for members of these parties. Below is a chart that makes it clear that this has (again) not happened in the recent federal election. Proportional Representation voting results would have (barely) given us a minority Conservative government with the Liberals a very close second. In addition, there would have been far greater representation of MPs from the New Democrats and Greens, with six fewer members of the Bloc.

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to present a workshop for The King’s University’s Interdisciplinary Studies conference titled, “Should Private Schools Get Public Dollars?” I presented the workshop to two different groups of about 30 students each. Remarkably, before I began my presentation, I asked the students to give a quick response to the question posed by its title and about half the students in each session answered, “No.” I say “remarkably” because these were King’s students in Edmonton, Alberta, who are attending a “private” university at which they pay at least double the tuition charged to local “public” ones.

In 1951, my father immigrated with his wife and four children (including me) from Holland to Canada.

During the 1970’s, I was involved in editing and writing for a youth magazine called Credo. Recently I was browsing through my bound collection of Credo issues when I ran across an article I wrote about shopping for my nieces. Here’s an excerpt, edited slightly.