Besides the certainty of both death and taxes, there is always carping about the weather. And the inevitable post-election debate over changing our electoral system.

With the federal election just over, the papers are full of hand-wringing articles arguing that our firstpast the-post system is broken. Most of the people making this argument - practically all of them as far as we can tell - tend to vote for parties which can't win a majority, i.e. the left, understanding they can never form a national government the old-fashioned way - by getting enough votes - so let's slant the system so that they can exercise more power than the electorate wants them to have.

The panacea, of course, is the much-ballyhooed concept of "PR," or proportional representation, a system used in many countries around the world. Advocates claim it is "more democratic." It's not.

The main argument people use against our current system is that the percentage of votes received by the various parties usually don't represent the percentage of seats awarded each party in the Commons or the Legislature.

To wit: Stephen Harper's Conservatives got 38 percent of the popular vote and won 143 seats, while Stephane Dion's Liberals picked up 26 percent of the popular vote and only 77 seats, barely more than half the Tory total with just 12 percent less of the vote. With PR, we're told, i.e. seats awarded to the parties in the same proportion of their votes, the Conservatives would have won just 116 seats, the Liberals, 80.

Then there was Elizabeth May and her Green Party, which across Canada picked up close to a million votes, but didn't win a seat. All of this assumes that under a different system people would have voted the same way, an assumption which is, to be kind, absurd.

In a recent Toronto Star article, University of Toronto emeritus professor David Beatty wrote, "On every criterion PR makes for better democracy."

No, it doesn't.

At first blush, it's a compelling argument. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

For one thing, PR systems feature politicians who are not elected directly by the people. Instead, they are chosen from "lists" compiled in the back rooms of the various parties without any public input.

That's not exactly "better democracy" in my book.

PR adherents claim our pathetic voter turnout - under 60 percent - is another reflection of our unfair system. They say countries with PR have better turnouts. Well, some do and some don't. Then again, other countries with our first-past-the-post system have better turnouts than we do too. There is even a huge disparity within Canada, under the same system. It's not the system that determines voter turnout.

Beatty writes about the "disproportionate influence" of regional parties such as the Bloc Quebecois under our system. With PR, he says, the Bloc would have 30 seats, not the 50 they now hold.

Talk about irony. The issue of "disproportionate influence" is far more acute in PR systems than it could ever be under our system. In Israel, for example, the 120-seat Knesset has 12 parties - PR always leads to more and more parties splintering the vote and complicating governance - which includes at least six parties which have an extremely narrow focus yet, because the main parties can never win a

majority they can - and do - use their "disproportionate influence" to blackmail the governing party into catering to their narrow focus. That's a reality with PR, and perhaps it's biggest flaw.

Beatty says Germany enjoys "one of the most sophisticated PR systems in the world and its governments have been as stable and open as any."

Not quite. What he doesn't say is that following Germany's last election, it took a month before a coalition government could even be formed, a month in which the main party was running around making backroom deals, with no public input, with the lesser parties, so that it could gain enough support to form a government. Again, not exactly "democratic."

But beyond all this, PR advocates have a basic misunderstanding of representative democracy.

In my own riding of Beaches-East York, alas, the voters re-elected Liberal Maria Minna as MP, even though more of us voted against her than for her. Obviously, I didn't vote for her, but she still represents me in the Commons. We don't elect politicians simply to represent those who voted for them. We elect them to represent everybody, which even includes those lazy bums who didn't bother to vote. And it's all out in the open for everybody to see.

That's democracy, folks. And as Churchill said about democracy, it's not perfect, but it's better than the other systems.