The Probus Club of Maple Ridge has new speakers lined up for the next three months after a short summer hiatus.
Probus is a social club for retired and semi-retired people that provides regular gatherings for those who want to meet others who have similar levels of interest.
The word Probus in a contraction of the words professional and business, but membership is not restricted to these two groups of people.
Former executives of industry, government or anyone who has had some measure of responsibility in any field or endeavour is welcome to join.
The club has 55 members.
Peter Tam, a member of the Fair Vote Canada committee, will start off the monthly lectures on Sept. 20 with a talk on the subject of proportional representation.
The committee is charged with educating British Columbians about proportional representation in a non-partisan way.
A move to a single transferable vote system was rejected during a 2005 B.C. referendum because it didn’t receive the required 60 per cent threshold.
A referendum on STV in 2009 also failed.
Tam, a former Maple Ridge candidate for the Green Party, believes the reason why the last referendum failed was because the question wasn’t clear enough.
Tam said that 47 per cent of people who vote are not represented in the current first-past-the-post system, in which the candidate with the simple majority is elected.
He will be explaining how, under a new system, the number of seats in the legislature would be proportional to a party’s share of the overall vote.
Previous Probus speakers include Ross Davies and his work with the Kanaka Education and Environmental Partnership Society (KEEPS), investment banker Patrick O’Brien, Linda Shanks – on what you should know about medical marijuana – Alison MacLean, the director and writer of the documentary Burkas2Bullets, Pitt Meadows Mayor John Becker, and Pitt Meadows-Maple Ridge MP Dan Ruimy.
The last outing for the club was to Hollandia Greenhouses in June.
The first Probus clubs sprung from Rotary in England in 1965 and 1966, and since have spread worldwide. There are 240 Probus clubs in Canada with an approximate membership of 33,400.
There is a club in Langley, in White Rock and three in Vancouver.
Howard and Ingrid Glossop, John Bale and Theo Rathonyi-Reusz are the founding members of the club in Maple Ridge, which held its first information session in Nov. 2017.
Currently, the club gets together the third Thursday of every month and is always looking for new members.
Meetings are from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. and there is no age requirement.
Special interest groups that have been formed in Probus Clubs have included ladies’ and men’s golf, photography, hiking, discussion groups, tea tasting, book clubs, coffee clubs, walking groups, wine tasting and more.
The group meets at Meadow Gardens Golf Club is located at 19675 Meadow Gardens Way in Pitt Meadows.
• For more information, call 604-463-6908 or go to probusclubofmapleridge.org/home.
