For immediate release
October 12, 2011

The Yukon Party has won its third straight “majority” government—with barely 40% of the votes.

“Once again, Yukon voters did not get the government they voted for,” says Shoni Field, president of Fair Vote Canada (FVC), a national citizens’ group that promotes proportional voting reform.

“With a phony majority in the territorial legislature, the Government can do what it wants, and no one can stop them. As long as they maintain rigid party discipline, nothing bad can happen to them. The Yukon Government is simply not accountable to the Yukon Legislative Assembly for the next four years. The same is true wherever we have phony majority governments, and we have them all the time, at the federal level and in every province and territory.”

“And the politicians are not accountable to the voters,” adds FVC Executive Director Wayne Smith. “With, essentially, a three-way split in the voting, the number of wasted votes is maximised. Most Yukon voters have voted for candidates who did not get elected, so most Yukoners are once again ‘represented’ by somebody they voted against. We call these ‘orphan voters’, and they are a feature of our current, winner-take-all voting system.”

“There can be no accountability when the election results do not match the way we voted,” says Smith. “Our voting system is the primary tool we have to express the will of the people, through choosing our representatives. But our first-past-the-post voting system is a ‘broken telephone’, and the message is not getting through. It’s no wonder Yukon voters are increasingly dissatisfied with politics and politicians, and voter turnout is plummeting.”

But help is on the way, says Field, who had two important announcements to make about extending the campaign for fair voting into the Yukon.

“First,” said Field, “Fair Vote Canada is endorsed by a National Advisory Board that comprises an impressive list of prominent Canadians.

“Fair Vote Canada is pleased to welcome Yukon resident and former NDP leader Audrey McLaughlin as the latest addition to our National Advisory Board. Her experience and commitment to democracy will be considerable assets in our campaign for a better democracy in Canada.”

“Secondly, we are delighted to announce the formation of Fair Vote Yukon, the Fair Vote Canada Yukon Chapter. This group of Yukon citizens has been active for some time promoting fair voting reform in the territory, and they have now been formally accredited as a local chapter of FVC, joining over a dozen other local chapters across the country.”

Whitehorse resident Danielle Daffe is the newly elected president of Fair Vote Yukon.

“I want everybody's vote to count, says Daffe. “I want to see us move from an adversarial based electoral system, to a consensus based electoral system. I believe that it is possible to work together and that democracy is best served by a proportional voting system as opposed to a majoritarian electoral system. I would like to see an electoral system wherein people do not feel pressured to vote strategically, and wherein voting is exciting because each vote counts!

“A friend from Ireland told me yesterday, in Ireland voting is like going to the races—you get excited because every vote counts. Here in Yukon a lot of people are disappointed. It’s not about the parties who win or lose—it’s about the fact that the parties should be running the legislature collaboratively—having been elected in proportion to the votes they received.”

-30-

Contact:

Shoni Field, President
Shoni.Field@FairVote.Ca
604-720-0541

Wayne Smith, Executive Director
Wayne.Smith@FairVote.Ca
416-407-7009

Danielle Nadine Daffe, President
Fair Vote Yukon
Yukon@FairVote.Ca
867-335-4358

http://FairVote.Ca