Ontario Election Referendum

Great Debates
1

So, here’s the scoop.

On October 10th, Ontarians will be going to the polls to elect a provincial government. On the ballot will be a referendum question proposed by the Ontario Citizens’ Assembly. Basically the question will be which of the following do you wish to support:

Status Quo:

Mixed member Proportional:

So, my thoughts. In a nutshell, do we really need 22 more unelected members on the freakin’ payroll here? No. No we don’t.

The list members would be appointed by the party, not elected by the public. Will we see some patronage appointments here? Would Gagliano or Chuck Guité or some other sponsorship MP be handed an MPP position for all their “hard work” in the past?

Vote First Past the Post sheeple!

2

There is an alternative to party-list systems: that’s having multi-member electorates, with the voters electing them using some kind of proportional representation system.

3

I hadn’t thought of that. I looked on MMP as a way to get around the old conundrum of “I like the candidate, but hate the party (or vice versa)”. (Solution: in MMP, you vote for the candidate you like and the party you like.)

Definitely, if political parties become a formalised and public part of the government in this way, party selection procedures will have to beocme more public and more accountable as well. Right now, I believe, parties are still a matter of custom, and they don’t formally exist at all in parliamentary procedure. Party-member and party-candidate selection procedures are merely internal matters of the parties, and can vary all over the map.

Fron the linked website:

Link to the referendum website: http://www.yourbigdecision.ca/.

4

I like the fact that the List Members are published prior to the election so the public can consider who may be elected. If the Liberals were to choose Guite or Gagliano, I believe that the backlash would drive enough votes away so that the Liberals would receive no PR seats. In my mind, these lists would be acceptable targets in an election.

I don’t like the fact that there isn’t a limit to how long List Members can sit in the Legislature. I’d be happier if there was a limit of 15 years after which you’d be free to go and run in a riding or retire. But you couldn’t be return to the Legislature via being a List Member.

I’m going to vote yes, mainly because I’ve never voted in an election where the Liberals haven’t won my riding by a landslide and I’m tired of it. At least federally, my vote is worth $1.75 so that drives me to vote.

5

I didn’t know, until now, that the list members would be published ahead of time. I like that. I still don’t like more government. I prefer less government.

Therefore: No.

6

I wonder whether there’ll be an order to the party lists, so that we’ll know who gets picked first.

Edit: the Citizens’ Assembly website has a detailed description of how it works. The parties order their lists, and the people near the top have a greater chance of being chosen.

7

Why I am voting Yes to MMP:

First Past the Post leads to a few significant problems. First, everyone who doesn’t vote for the winner in their riding is disenfranchised. Which means that for me (due to where I live), either I vote Liberal or my vote is wasted. I’m quite sick of this. Although I tend to lean more towards the “liberal”* side, I am quite sympathetic to “conservative” folks who don’t like the Libs any more than I do and are thus in the very same position.

Second, they lead to vast and bizarre false majorities. The most extreme example is a Maritime premier whose party won 100% of the seats in the province. We regularly have leaders in Canada who win majority governments with less than 50% of the popular vote (which is, in turn, far less than the percentage of eligible voters) who govern as if they have the support of all Canadians.

Lists are certainly not the most ideal way to appoint candidates to parliament. But the way we currently do it doesn’t work either. The main reason people get elected is because they got elected last time (the incumbency effect). This is not democratic, especially when the incumbent has been so for a long time and has become useless. (Please don’t tell me this doesn’t happen. I can name a dozen MPs or MPPs off the top of my head for whom this is true.)

The other main way people get elected (when there isn’t an incumbent) is when they have the support of one of the three main parties behind them (the “machine”). This can be demonstrated by investigating the success of municipal candidates (in Toronto, the jurisdiction with which I am most familiar), who aren’t officially affiliated with any parties but who are, in actual fact, almost always supported by campaign teams from one of the major parties. If you don’t have party support, you don’t win, it’s as simple as that. And you can’t tell me that parties don’t already have some degree of control over who wins local nomination contests. In effect, then, there’s already something of a “party list” system in place, it’s just completely hidden. Under MMP they would be obliged to bring it out in the open.

MMP is not perfect, but there is nothing to sell FPTP other than “we’ve always done it this way” and “it’s easy to understand.” If there are reasons why first past the post is superior to any other method that involves some sort of proportional representation, I have yet to hear them. (Please consider that an invitation to convince me of the merits of FPTP.)

The methods parties use to select members for their lists can be criteria when you make your voting choice. If I know that party X fills their list based on who their richest members are (or whatever), I can choose not to vote for them. If I know that they choose their list based on democratic and transparent methods which enhance representativeness, I can likewise choose accordingly.

Whatever their method, I am quite sure that it will not be worse than the method we currently use to pick members. Nobody who has ever “represented” me has in any meaningful way actually represented me. In fact, a few days ago, I encountered my elected representative while he was canvassing, and the conversation ended when he told me he didn’t care that I wasn’t going to vote for him because he wasn’t interested in defending my interests. (It doesn’t matter, because he is an incumbent and will win by a mile, even though he has not done anything of note for his constituents or anyone else for many years.) MMP will allow a greater diversity of parties, candidates, and ideas, so that even if I am not happy with my current elected rep, I can still accomplish something with my vote.

There will never be another opportunity for electoral reform in Ontario in my lifetime. I do not have the luxury of waiting for another referendum where STV is the option (my preferred method). ANYTHING is better than FPTP.

Also, “MMP = more MPPs; more MPPs = more government; more government = bad; therefore MMP = bad” seems an awfully simplistic way to determine your ideal electoral system. Does that mean you would prefer a system with 100 MMPs? 50? 10? If we decrease the number, then how do we divide up the voting regions? I guess we could have one each for Toronto, Oshawa, Hamilton, Ottawa, London, Kingston, then one each for the rural North, Northeast, Southeast and Southwest region. I guess that would be as close to ideal as you could get … well, the closest we can get to fewer MPPs is NO MPPs, so let’s just abolish them altogether and let Dalton run the show.

Other nations that use FPTP: United States, United Kingdom.

Other nations that use MMP: New Zealand, Ireland and Germany (to name a few).

Other nations that use some sort of proportional representation in their electoral system: Almost all other democracies.

    • scare quotes to indicate the divergence between conventional understandings of “liberal” and “conservative” on this board, and the Liberal and Conservative parties in Canada.
8

Damned good post! And food for thought. I appreciate it. And that’s why I’m soliciting opinions.

9

Leaffan, on Page 2 of the black-covered report linked from the Citizens’ Assembly FAQ, they mention that Ontario has had as many as 130 MPs in the past:

10

Yes, however Mike Harris vowed to, and did reduce the number of seats from 130 to 103 in 1999. I supported this. In fact I support smaller government and focus on core services in general. I’m not sure I support adding seats back to the Legislative Assembly. Businesses have seemed to be able to trim head counts and find alternate ways of doing things for decades, whereas in most cases governments of all levels tend to increase everything. Did I mention I’m also for more privatization? I don’t know. I’m still mulling this one (MMP) about.

11

Christ. I applied to be on this committee, was ignored, and this is the garbage it comes out with? Amazing.

12

Moved from IMHO to GD.

13

Why don’t you like the recommendations? I’m trying to figure out whether to support them, and would like to hear criticisms.

14

Adding more members to the legislature neither augments nor diminishes the power and functions of the government.

15

I’m inclined to vote against MMP, though I’m not completely decided.

Canadian elections seem to be much more party based than in the U.S. While looking on the web at two of the candidates in my riding, there was very little about them as individuals, and very much about the stands of their parties. I can see how MMP would fit in with that. I dunno. . .

16

I’d vote “yes” if I lived there. Every little bit helps.

Some Canucks apparently feel the same way.

Some Yanks, too.

17

Thanks for those links, BrainGlutton! I’d forgotten about that PR thread.

There’s a lot of good stuff behind the Fair Vote Canada link, too: Vote for MMP for one.

Anyone got some Anti-MMP links? I know there’s been debate on the editorial pages of the Toronto Star.

18

I’ve never voted for a person who has won an election. Due to vote-splitting between parties closer to one end of the political spectrum, somebody on the other end has occasionally won a plurality of votes and been sent into office.

How many NDP or Green voters would prefer a Conservative candidate over a Liberal? I can’t think of many, but while a majority of voters may prefer a left-wing candidate, those votes get split and the right-wing candidate wins.

For that matter, how many people wanted a huge Liberal majority in 1993? Certainly not everyone whose votes were split between PC and Reform.

I also firmly believe in our current system of ridings, where a local representative goes to Parliament to advocate the needs of a small area. (I understand this makes me somewhat of an idealist.) Adding province-wide seats as this proposal intends to do more firmly enshrines political parties in the system, further centralizing power at the province level and removing it from localities.

As a result I am a supporter of ‘instant runoff voting’, where candidates are ranked in order of preference. Each time the ballots are counted, eliminating the candidate with the least number of votes until a majority is reached.

Of course, I also wish MPs could vote the wishes of their electorate (instead of the party line), but I hate the fact that independents really have no place in the system at all.

(And of course, my beloved Green party still wouldn’t have a seat if this system was used last election.)

19

The loser of the last election always claims they’re the ones whose votes got “split.” Reality shows differently. It’s NOT necessarily the case that NDP voters would switch to Liberal, or that PC voters would have switched to Reform.

In any event, a poll taken a month or so ago showed that fewer than 10% of Ontarians even knew the referendum was happening. The vast majority of Ontarians haven’t a clue about this; it’s been atrociously advertised. I just saw the first TV commercial about it maybe two weeks ago.

20

This is the first I’ve heard that it had been completed, of course I live in Calgary now so I expect a dearth of news regarding the great satans in Ontario.

I want to see what would come of an election where the people weren’t worried about vote splitting, where a person could vote without worrying about taking their vote from another party and letting an undesirable candidate into office. Whether or not vote splitting is accurately portrayed by losing politicians, it remains a factor in the psychology of the voters in the booths.