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Here it is, just a couple of days from the Nativity, and there’s another surge of populist outrageousness, this time in the sunny uplands of British Columbia.

Offered a choice of choosing their elected representatives by the tried-and-true method of First Past the Post, where the candidate’s name, face, address and party are known to all who vote — or by various more serpentine methods that called for solving a Sudoku puzzle, reading the flight of migratory birds and writing a short essay (with equations) on quantum entanglement, all prior to voting for an anonymized candidate to be chosen later by the leader of a fringe party promising to ban indoor heating and to subsidize all urban hen farms by the imposition of a nationalized cluck tax — B.C. voters chose — and this is astonishing — FPTP, the system that fashioned the democratic government of Canada, has worked for over a century and a half, is straightforward and which they understood.

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Populist ingrates. There’s just no telling what citizens will vote for, if you let them. Now if is this were China …

There’s just no telling what citizens will vote for, if you let them

In Alberta, populism took to the 18-wheelers, in what could have been the largest convoy protest this country has even seen, a thousand and more big rigs stretched over 22 kilometres. It got about as much coverage outside Alberta as some trendy school board opting for confusing bathroom signage — one for males, one for females, and one for if you have time to change your mind on the way in.