I attended the recent all-candidates meeting in Dundas. While there was a good turnout, and at times a lively debate, I couldn't help walking away disappointed.

While these meetings are an imperfect form of engagement in this most important election, it was disturbing to have no form of audience involvement in the actual process.

We have ceded a lot of control of the political process to the parties. They decide the issues to be discussed, the choices of candidates, the timing of elections and more. Because the questions followed along with what they would expect and were so general, there was little opportunity to probe the differences between the individual candidates and between their parties.

Kudos here to the woman representing the Marxist-Leninist candidate who spoke her mind and rose to the challenge. Her audience support, I think, was as much due to this as to what she said because everyone respected and admired her for her blunt talk and passion.

It is no surprise to me that the public has lost faith and the ability to trust its institutions. We need to rethink the process. There are other less obvious issues that most of the parties, except perhaps the Greens, don't want to talk about.

Here's the one I would ask -- given that we will most certainly end up with no one party receiving a majority support in Parliament, a fact of life in modern Canadian political life, how would you as an individual member, and with your party, work to collaborate to form a government agenda representing at least a majority of popular views, and would this include moving to proportional representation in elections?

Peter Hutton

Dundas