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