By Mike Zettel, Staff
St. Catharines This Week
Oct 03, 2008
The dominant mentality in the early ‘90s that Communism had its time and discredited itself is changing, said the leader of the Communist Party of Canada.
In St. Catharines for a campaign stop with local candidate Sam Hammond, Miguel Figueroa said young people especially are rejecting that mentality, a product of the Cold War, and are, if not willing to vote Communist, then at least seriously consider the issues the party is raising.
Figueroa said a big part of the reason for his party’s lack of votes is the concern people have about wasting their votes. With the first-past-the-post system, any votes not cast for the winner in each riding do not count for anything in the final tally.
As a result, he said, people don’t necessarily vote for the party they agree with the most. Often, they hold their nose and cast their vote with the party that can most easily defeat the one they are most against.
“The current system of voting is going to encourage people to vote for the party that is least offensive to them,” he said.
While the idea of some kind of proportional representation is appealing, especially among younger voters, there’s much keeping the current system in place, namely the mainstream parties which have benefited from it.
“There’s vested interests that don’t want to see it change at all,” he said.
Figueroa said the Communists are the ones most consistently discussing issues that matter to Canadians, from the erosion of our health care to the loss of our manufacturing sector and the war in Afghanistan. These are not being discussed enough by the main parties, he said.
Instead the focus is on leadership qualities and who is best to have at the helm, he said.
“The policy discussions and the concerns of Canadians are getting the short shaft,” he said.
Figueroa is touring the 24 ridings the party is running in. A former labourer and cook, he turned to becoming a student and labour movement organizer before becoming the party leader in early 1993.
