What we see from Simcoe North is the same MPP (Garfield Dunlop), the same Legislature, the same (conservative) Liberal Government, and the same unfair electoral system.
It’s as if everything is hunky-dory when in reality a day of reckoning is near. Put in terms Albert Einstein would appreciate: the kind of thinking that produced the problems we face is not the thinking that will likely solve them.
Locally, the voters have affirmed that pork-barrel politics gets one elected. I have observed this at work at all 3 levels of government. The local councillor boasts of the sidewalks he got for his ward; the MPP boasts of a Highway 12 improvement; the MP boasts of money spent on the Trent-Severn Waterway (on which he happens to operate a resort). ‘What have you done for us lately?’ is the question that submerges broader issues.
Locally we see that it will again, or still, be left to the citizens to do battle on important environmental issues like incineration, pesticides, Site 41, and brownfield developments posing unecessary risks to human health and the environment.
Provincially, we see no recognition in the Liberal Government that we are heading for an environmental precipice and that a provincial government can do as much as any federal government to slow down our lemming-like rush or even turn us away. Business as usual is not the way.
We see no recognition that the 39th Legislature is going to come to grips with structural economic weaknesses. A recent auto industry agreement (in the USA) provided for a pay cut for new employees. Ontario cannot insulate itself against the ailing economy in the USA (including suicidal fiscal and monetary policies), which appears headed for a disaster, but it would be comforting to think that our politicians are at least thinking about a plan of action. Another Japanese car assembly plant is not the answer.
On education, the view is just as bleak. The faith-based funding issue has managed to drown any debate about the principle of separation of church and state. The principle is lost and will not be debated. Even more unfortunate is that Liberal labour peace in “education” has diverted attention from fundamental debate about training versus education, the influence of the corporations’ needs for trained and unthinking workers versus society’s need for liberal arts education and thinking about tomorrow’s society, not yesterday’s.
The existence of the Education Quality and Accountability Office EQAO which perpetrates mass testing is a huge issue. Even more important than the cost of diverting teaching and learning resources and dollars, is whether it helps in any way to “educate”. One teacher I know has said that the standardized testing does what it was intended to do, which is to test for literacy and numeracy. It tests for the tools of education, not education itself, and that was never raised in the election campaign. The status quo is not good enough.
Finally, Dalton McGuinty, less than 24 hours after his Party won a large majority of seats with a lower percentage of the popular vote than in 2003, has decreed (I use “decreed” advisedly) that the issue of electoral reform is now dead. His action epitomizes all that is wrong with the present system and the way he set about keeping his promise while making certain that the Citizens’ Assembly would lead to failure. McGuinty has decreed that 8% of the voters (Green Party supporters) can remain without a representative while 42% can have almost 70% of the seats and 100% of the power.
I find it curious that a decision on something as important as fair representation can be left to the vicissitudes of electoral politics. Was it disingenuous to combine the referendum with a general election? When people inured to the old way are asked to vote in the traditional form and handed a ballot to change what they have just done on the other ballot? To say that the question was “yes” or “no” when it wasn’t?
I feel cheated. All my life my vote has been, almost literally, thrown away because I did not happen to vote for the “winner”. Now McGuinty has decreed that my vote will never be counted. Do I join the 50% who don’t see any point in voting? I, and hundreds of thousands like me, will never be represented. That is neither fair nor democratic.
There is a solution. The Government could elevate fairness and representative democracy to the level of fundamental principles. It could do the right thing. It could listen to its conscience. But it won’t, not in the 39th Legislature or any future Legislature in which the first-past-the-post gamble has produced a “majority” government.
Editor’s note: are questions like our energy future (more nuclear it seems) and electoral reform (apparently rejected), dismissed by the election results? What should be read into the growing Greens, the NDP perpetual plateau, the depleted Tories, and Dalton redux?
You commented unfavorably on “pork barrel politics”, which involve voters supporting candidates who have seen that expenditures were made that benefited them personally.
I am certain that you are correct. Many members of the public, along with many who attain municipal, provincial, or federal office would never think to apologise for that sort of “quid pro quo”. They consider it business as usual.
Where I may part company from you is where I place the blame for this state of affairs. So far as I have seen, our councilors, M.L.A’s, and M.P’s – with a few notable exceptions – serve us extremely well.
It is very large numbers of voters who let us down.
(1) A voter who gives no thought at all to the needs of his or her community, but who votes purely selfishly; (2) a voter who supports a candidate *only* because that person shares his ethnicity or nationality; (3) a voter who supports a candidate *only* because he or she is running for the party of all four of the voter’s grandparents; (4) a voter who will support any damned candidate at all, so long as “Lower Taxes!” is the promise – all of these weaken democracy.
I would prefer to see all such voters staying home on election day. If the 53% of voters who show up are informed, unselfish, and thoughtful, and the 47% who stay home lack interest and understanding of the electoral process, that’s fine with me.
I’d be happy, if only 25% showed up, so long as they were people who had kept abreast of the issues and who were voting unselfishly.
I don’t think the question of electoral reform was dismissed by the electorate. The very decisive rejection of MMP is just that – a rejection of Mixed Member Proportional representation as proposed. The voters understood that MMP put more power in the hands of the political parties. There is no getting around the fact that it remains the party that is putting the names on the MMP list and deciding the order. If you are number 1 on the list then you are going to be elected. Lists members are going to put the party first even over what is best for Ontario. I believe Ontario voters were very aware of this and just don’t trust political parties. They were not willing to vote for a system that gave these parties more power. I think the vote shows Ontario voters want a system where all members of the legislature are elected from local ridings. Where the voters control which candidates from each party are elected as well as elections that more accurately reflecting voters’ choices. MMP was just the wrong alternative; something like BC’s STV should have been the choice. BC-STV got 58% of the vote and 92& of the ridings in BC. Now what does that tell us here in Ontario? Perhaps that BC’s Citizens’ Assembly got it right! Also the low Ontario voter turnout is telling us that nearly 47% of Ontario is not happy with the current system. McGuinty should not be allowed to decree the question closed! We the people should demand a full Royal Commission on the issue.
Should the province consider paying electors to vote (ie you would avoid being fined, when they show up at the polls)? In Australia voting is manditory, and electors are fined if they don’t show up at the polls.
This won’t address the fact that these coerced voters may not be properly informed in their decision who to vote for, it should move them into taking their role, as overseers of government more seriously. In any case it should raise some $$$, that would subsidize the cost of the election.
As a Poll Clerk on election night, I was quite apparent to me that the Voter’s List contained many errors. Most frequent were voters names who no longer resided in the polling district. So when I hear 47% of electors failed to vote, I feel this figure to be overstated. I hope Queen’s Park will look into the accuracy of voters lists.
When will the province consider electronic voting? If citizens can bank online,political parties can elect their leaders online or the national census was done online, the technology must exist to vote online. What about a trial where an elector could request a PIN number, and use that number at an advance poll with an electronic voting station. Traditional paper ballet could be used at the same time, and the results compared. I would like to see the government endorse a trials at all future bye elections, (possibly Mr. Tory’s???).
2 Points stick out in my mind, for the failure of MMP: 1) Party Lists; 2) Increased size of the legislature. They were always cited by others when I debated MMP with them. Unfortunately Mr. McGuinty, deliberately did not allow for sufficient to properly educate the electorate. Had the referendum decision been finalized by 2005, this added time would have revised the referendum outcome.
Finally it would have been good to know the demographic make-up (age, etc…) of the referendum voter. I am sure that a vast majority of MMP supporters were younger, and our aging population made up the vast majority of the FPTP support.
Response to John:
I think it was Disraeli, British Parliamentarian, who, on passage of the Reform Act in 1867 (extending the vote to male householders), said that it would now ‘be necessary to educate our masters’. It was not entirely coincidental that extending suffrage and opening education to the ‘common people’ worked in historical tandem. Even closer to our own time we see the same coincidence of women winning the vote and gaining gradual access to higher education. My point is that I am not an elitist. There should be no political IQ test for voting.
I disagree that our elected representatives serve us well, and my disgreement is precisely because, in spite of the hours they put in, they are appealing to the lowest common denominators: selfishness, parochialism, partisanship, conventional wisdom. I attended an all-candidates (municipal) meeting at which one man demanded a “yes” or “no” answer to the question: If elected will you make tax reduction your Job 1? Every politician ducked and weaved, afraid to address the important principles for a civilized and caring society raised by the question. I do fault our politicians for a near-universal failure of intellectual leadership.
That said, I can’t place all the blame on them. There is clearly a failure in education, at school, at home, and in the media, with respect to critical thinking. How many students emerge to voting age with some knowledge of other ways of organizing the political economy? Or of co-operation as an alternative to competition?
The conundrum is how to persuade/educate citizens to raise the level of the common denominators. We have to expect better of our politicians, but it won’t happen until their appeals to the basest of instincts stop producing electoral success.
I found interesting the suggestion that the education system should give more time to the teaching of critical thinking skills.
I agree that this could and should be done.
I would caution that results would be uneven. Abstract thinking is a major challenge to a significant number of people. No amount of instruction is going to turn out a majority of highly sophisticated thinkers.
Still, the effort ought to be made.
The first challenge would be to instruct teachers in critical thinking skills, so that they could pass them on to their students. However, that is the sort of thing for which we set aside “Professional Activity Days” in our schools.
With a strong impetus from the Ministry of Education, it could be done.
A second comment for Alan: regarding the individual who got up on his hind legs at an all-candidates’ meeting and called for lower and still lower taxes.
Certainly, one of the candidates ought to have set this selfish clod straight.
He should have been reminded that it costs money to run the good government programs from which we all benefit.
He should have been told that we have seen what happened to the province, when Mike Harris and his tax-cutting neo-con extremists took over and laid waste to so many of our programs.
Government, he should have been told, is like so many other things. You get what you pay for.
Perhaps, after the selfish oaf had had his say, another audience member should have gone to the microphone and spoken up for adequate levels of taxation being used to fund health care, education, and a host of programs that we value.
A non-candidate can sometimes be more direct in this situation.
Response to James:
No, I don’t think it was MMP that was rejected. It was any change to the electoral system that was rejected. McGuinty certainly saw it that way, taking his statement at face value.
The myth about increased Party control under MMP was assiduously cultivated by the supporters of the status quo and picked up by people who did not take the trouble to find out what it was all about. I know because I spoke to many of those ill-informed people. To the charge that party hacks and bagmen would be appointed, giving the leader even more control, I responded with 3 points:
1. All four Parties agreed that if MMP was enacted they would have a democratic method of making up their Party’s list;
2. The word “appointed” was a deliberate misrepresentation because anyone from the list would have to be elected twice – once by a Party (in which citizens could have their say by joining) and finally by votes of people all across the Province (giving them a broader mandate than the FPTP ‘winners’); and
3. Since the Party lists would be published well in advance of voting day, would you vote for a Party that created a leader’s list with hacks and bagmen?
The answer to my question was always “no”. Then, I said, assuming that Parties are not tactically stupid, they won’t do it because they know people like you won’t support them. End of concern.
Wrong. Then the excuse was that we would have too many politicians feeding at the public trough. I reminded people that we had 130 before Mike Harris and MMP would result in 129. Harris and his brains trust were real pros at framing questions to fit their ideology: The PCs brought in a Bill called “The Fewer Politicians Act”, but one wonders what the reaction might have been had it been called ” An Act to Dilute Democratic Representation” or “An Act to Favour Candidates With Money”. I also reminded people that the costs of running a legislature and constituency offices are a tiny fraction of 1% of the Provincial budget. So that can’t be the real concern.
I hope, James, you understand that the Single Transferable Vote (STV) was considered by the Citizens’ Assembly, and rejected. Not only is it a hopelessly complicated method to explain but it also suffers from the same basic defect of the winner-take-all approach: Except by a fluke, smaller parties will still not be represented and votes will still be thrown away.
Response to “Status Quo Ante: Not Good Enough”
Something is broken in our system of electoral government and more of the same is not going to fix it.
What will it take to bring some fairness that will include all of the people in the process of an election, the economy and the right to live with dignity in our communities?
It is common knowledge that half of the world’s population goes to bed hungry every night, while a few people amass fortunes that are beyond their ability to comprehend. And the First Past The Post option supports the kind of process that enables such gross unfairness.
Premier Dalton’s first act after the election, was to declare a holiday in February and call it “Family Day”. Sounds a little bit like let them eat cake if there is no bread. And I do wonder whose family he is talking about, perhaps it is the Family Compact, rule by the few at the expense of the many, that is still in place in Ontario.
And kudos to TVO for providing the opportunity for the voices appearing in Campaign Tales.
Alan, I’m Eric Bow (James’s father) NOT James Bow. My son is very much in favour of MMP and gives the same arguments as you. My point is, people my age understood all that you are saying and still didn’t like the MMP’s list idea. The people on the lists are responsible to the Party no matter how they are appointed/elected to those lists. The list candidates do not answer either to any geographic area or directly to the people. I talked to a lot of people here in Kitchener who were undecided but after reading about MMP decided they just couldn’t support it. Admittedly they were my age and committed to the principle of voting for the man rather than the party. They believe that democracy is about individuals being represented by individuals not a Party. The list candidates represent their party – MMP is about giving the Parties representation in the legislature according to the percent of the vote they get. Here is a direct quote from one of my friends (who also votes for the candidate and not the party) “The more I think about it and read about it, I am in favour of first past the post.” I know he gave the issue a lot of thought before voting against MMP. I also gave it a lot of thought before voting against it. I definitely was not voting for FPTP but against MMP. I know STV is very complex but I think its principles fit what I personally want far better than MMP. From BC’s final repot:
1. BC-STV increases choices, allowing voters a much greater say in determining who will be their local representatives. It allows voters to choose between candidates and parties, it lets voters show which candidates they prefer and in what order, and it ensures that their preferences count. This will provide increased opportunities for candidates from underrepresented groups.
2. BC-STV is also the only proportional system that allows independent candidates a real chance to be elected. Although increasingly rare, we believe that independents must have opportunities to participate in our provincial elections equal to candidates who work through political parties.
3. BC-STV responds to British Columbia’s basic values. It provides for fair election results, effective local representation, and greater voter choice, and it best balances these three values of electoral politics. Similar systems have been used successfully—in some cases for decades—to elect members to various positions in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland, countries that share our Westminster parliamentary tradition. The Irish government has twice tried to use referendums to abolish STV, but the voters said “No.” This is a system designed by voters for voters.
Those who try to make a case against the “Party Lists” element of MMP, are quite wrong-headed.
They appear not to have the slightest notion about the total power that is in the hands of a small group of party insiders under our present system.
1. No nominee is allowed to run inan election under the party banner without the express approval of the provincial executive.
2. Except in those very rare circumstances when a “free vote” is held, all party members are under strict orders to cast a yes or no vote on all important bills that are presented in the Legislature. The penalty for failing to obey the party whip is a seat in the back row, followed perhaps by expulsion from the caucus.
3. Anyone who believes that both candidates and elected members of the Legislature are not firmly under the thumb of party leaders is naive and misinformed. “Loose cannon” members are treated like lepers, until they toe the line.
Having “Party Lists” would not change this state of affairs one iota. And that makes any rejection of MMP based upon discomfort with “Party Lists”, if not dim-witted, at the very least ill-informed..
Response to John Carrick
Exactly (re the power of the party in the present system)! That’s what’s wrong with the current system. Our individual representatives have more loyalty to the party than to the people they are supposed to represent. The MMP system, with its party lists, reinforces party control over the elected members. That’s not my idea of democracy. I want all individuals to be responsible to the individuals that directly elect them. If there must be party lists I want the voter not the party to select who on the list gets a seat. My preference is not to have lists at all but to have something like the BC proposed STV system. As for your comment “Those who try to make a case against the “Party Lists” element of MMP, are quite wrong-headed.” are you saying that the three respected members of the Faculties of Political Science of Waterloo, Western and Wilfrid Laurier who published a critic of MMP just before the election as well as a historian at Queen’s (a regular Agenda guest) all of who argued against MMP are “quite wrong-headed”? Even the Agenda’s NDP advisor, Dave Cooke, was against MMP! Oh well it’s all moot now as Dalton has decreed it to be a dead issue. We get the status quo and neither MMP nor STV. Change won’t be in our lifetime!
Response both to Eric (with my apologies to you and James) and to John:
Whether to vote the Party or vote the person is an age-old dilemma, but a false one. That there is a question may be another result of Canada’s conflicted place between Britain (parliamentary system) and the USA (congressional). Fixed election dates in Ontario, for example, betrays a serious misunderstanding of both systems. (We know what you get when you cross an English horse woth an American donkey.)
Party or person depends on the form and structure of representative government. Form (unitary, federal, association) may depend on geography, ethnicities, and/or history. The power structure may integrated (executive in the legislature) or divided (the mythical 3 branches south of us). Within the system we have inherited there really ought to be no debate. It is the Party.
It has been the Party for almost 3 centuries of British parliamentary rule (within the constitutional monarchy). It is true that if we did not have political parties they would have to be invented. Political scientists refer to what I have called “integrated” as “responsible government”. The executive is, by convention, responsible to the legislature and must have the confidence of that body in order to govern. (Think budgets.)Confidence depends on Parties and party discipline.
Paries are a necessary evil, and most of them have shown over the years that Lord Acton’s saying (about power corrupting) applies. While we can decry the abuses of power within a Party, and particularly when the Party becomes a governing party with a majority in the legislature – the absolute power that Lord Acton spoke about – those abuses are not inherent to the system. They reflect the kinds of people who are lured by the potential power of the party.
We have to put up with the parties because they serve one indispensable function in the cause of democracy. We can hold legislators accountable through their parties and only through their parties. One of the best illustrations of that was the federal election of 1993. Although Mulroney was gone, the voters wanted to send a message. The PC Party went from majority status to 2 seats (Elsie Wayne and John Charest). They say governments are defeated, not elected. If there had been no national PC Party with a candidate in every riding, how would voters have registered their message of discontent?
The 1993 vote was also a classic illustration of why we need some form of proportional representation. I was and am still not a fan of Brian Mulroney or the PC/Reform/Alliance/C Party, but the popular vote should have allowed Kim Campbell to lead about 50 MPs in Ottawa and demote the Bloc to 3rd.
Just a quick word about independent legislators. Ask yourself how the legislature would work and how a government would govern if the chamber were full of independents. Think municipal councils or the US Congress and ask yourself how a voter in Ontario would hold an independent MPP accountable for the government’s actions (or paralysis).
Parties are here to stay. Election financing reform is the camel’s nose in the tent. Let’s think about statutory ways of opening and democratizing the parties if they won’t do it themselves.
Allan and James, I don’t accept the criticism that STV is complex. At its heart, it simply means that one constituency’s worth of voters (in BC, that means about 20,000 voters) have to agree on who they want as their representative. They do this by indicating their first choice – kind of like choosing captains for sports day. If a particular candidate has the fewest supporters, they’re eliminated and their supporters go to their next choice. If another is particularly popular, they keep 20,000 voters with them and the balance move on to their second choices (actually, this is the trickiest part of STV – if you think of your vote as a dollar, some fraction of it stays with your first choice and you get some change to ‘spend’ on your second choice). That’s basically it.
Allan, 58% support is not ‘rejection’; it’s failure on the part of the government to recognize the clearly expressed will of the electorate.
Finally, given how often MMP was criticized for allowing for the emergence of fringe and single-issue parties, STV’s insistence that a candidate attract at least 12.5% support in a district would likely be seen by most voters as a strength, not a flaw. Even if one’s preferred party has too little support to elect a candidate, your vote need not be wasted – by indicating lower preferences, you can help the most sympathetic candidate from one of the larger parties get elected. This gives you the remarkable ability to influence the direction of a party towards your own values. If FPTP wastes 50% or more of votes on people not elected, the comparable number for STV is on the order of 10% – a clear and dramatic improvement.
Apology accepted; James and I get that a lot.
I know “Parties are a necessary evil” but I still don’t want their power to control elected representatives increased. Cromwell’s parliaments didn’t work not only because half the members were not there but also because the remaining members were independents of a different religious persuasion from most of his troops. In the days of Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform in Britain, the party system was far less structured and worked well because there were only two parties. Even then there was much floor crossing. For a few of those centuries you write about the prime minister had to constantly work at keeping his majority; not unlike minority governments today. I like having some independents in the House and MMP, seems to me, to further minimize their roll if not make it harder for them to be elected. Under our current system, the riding representative has a fiduciary duty to all riding voters. This is missing with the MMP list representatives; they are in the House to represent their parties. I know party whips make it difficulty for a riding member to vote against his/her party but some members stll take their fiduciary duties very seriously – Shelia Copps for one and more recently Nova Scotia MP Bill Casey.
In my opinion STV is the better option. It answers most of my concerns and Antony Hodgson’s post just answered some others. I just wish I had had a chance to vote for it. I am very upset that we are going to be stuck with our current flawed system for the next few decades.
A question. Under the MMP list system what happens to an MP who votes his conscience and is thrown out of the Party? Can he sit as an independent? If so who does he represent since he doesn’t have a riding?
A List MPP is still an MPP, so if he is thrown out of his party, he would sit out the remainder of his or her term as an independent, theoretically responsible to the voters of the entire province.
He or she would have a devil of a time being re-elected, unless he or she chose a riding in which to run. Or possibly formed his or her own party with other disaffected party members.
1. Although the names “Whig” and “Tory” date from the 17th Century, they did not become parties in a recognizeably modern political sense until the Commons began to usurp the executive/administrative powers of the monarch. That led to the “cabinet” and “prime minister”, i.e. responsible government, in the first half of the 18th Century. The power shift created a new game. Then Whigs and Tories transformed themselves into parties to win enough seats and “rotten boroughs” to control the House of Commons and thereby exercise real power.
2. While I appreciate the attempt to sell STV – and I know no method is “perfect” -, its proponents are still missing an essential point. It turns into a form of so-called strategic voting which is based on fear and negativism. The voter abandons her first choice, because she thinks her party can’t win, and votes for the least worst of her remaining choices because she wants to ensure defeat of the worst of the worst. Voting is supposed to be “for” a party, a candidate, an important policy issue, etc. As explained to me, STV will not result in my vote being counted towards the party of my choice if it happens to be a party in a minority position in most ridings. Antony’s analogy of the fraction of a dollar to spend on another choice completely misses the point. I don’t want to spend my vote, or even a fraction of it, on a worthless (in my eyes) product.
3. Some form of proportional representation is the only electoral system which answers to the principle of positive participation. It gives a truer idea of what the people want, not what they don’t want. Could we not all agree that being able to vote for something, and being assured that the vote will count, is the best sell for democracy?
4. Sheila Copps, on the TVO panel on electoral reform, pushed the idea of run-off elections. Sure, it can be done, and it works when you are electing the President of France because there is only one throne available. But it is a really dumb idea for a legislature because, again, the votes for smaller parties are thrown away and many voters will not bring themselves to vote in a run-off for the lesser of the worst. Twist and turn as you wish, there is nothing except p.r. which combines fair representation and practicality. It gives the best claim to being a “representative democracy”.
5. The idea of the winning MPP having a “fiduciary duty” to represent all the voters in the riding is, well, nonsense. Political claptrap. That idea is often floated by winners, and premiers-elect and prime ministers-elect. It is hypocritical in the extreme because they then go on to say that they have a mandate to implement their policies (and only theirs). In an era when we have majority government with only a plurality of the popular vote, almost every major enactment of the legislature is made over the votes of legislators representing the majority of those who voted in the previous election.
“Fiduciary” means in the nature of a trust. I know “my” MPP, Garfield Dunlop, does not think that he owes me any duty of representation. (Throughout the election campaign he failed to return my calls or keep a promise to call later when I spoke to him briefly in my capacity as a “citizen correspondent” for Your Agenda.) More importantly, though, I agree that he does not have a fiduciary duty towards me. And if “fiduciary” is the wrong word and the idea was to suggest some moral or political obligation, he does not have that either.
Under the ‘winner-take-all’ gamble we call elections, any talk of fiduciary or moral duty towards all the voters only gives a patina of legitimacy to a system that regularly bastardizes “representative democracy”.
I don’t think “fiduciary duty” is nonsense; I believe it to be true as must those proponents of voter recall of candidates. I wonder if the idea can be tested in court? I get very upset when MPs and MPPs turn away citizens because they didn’t vote for them or when the Conservatives set up a riding office for the defeated Conservative candidate. I expect my riding representative to represent me even if I didn’t vote for him. I just can’t bring myself to accept the MMP lists partly because of this. I believe that an office holder is responsible to those who directly appoint or elect him/her. I guess, because it is a “belief”, no amount of argument is going to change my mind on that issue. My Irish friends tell me that STV works well for them and that they don’t vote strategically. But then what’s wrong with voting strategically? We are already doing it. Isn’t it true that elections are not won but lost? Sure it would be nice if we all voted for rather than against but it’s better than voting for the party that your grandfather and great grandfather voted for just because they did. You need to have something to vote against – the Greeks realized this and had ostracism. Just imagine being able to vote to exile Harper for a humber of years!
Allan, to me the difference between the proportionality of STV and MMP is one of degree rather than being a binary difference. MMP’s 3% threshold may be smaller than STV’s 12% one (which in turn is smaller than the effective threshold of about 35-40% for FPTP), but to me, that’s a choice on a continuum, not an absolute distinction. One message that came through loud and clear in the Ontario referendum was that most citizens don’t want too many parties in their legislature. STV to my mind strikes a reasonable balance – it’s hard to get 12% support if you’re a single issue party, but it’s quite easily possible to build to that level if you put together a reasonable platform of policies.
Also, only 1% of Ontarians voted for parties that wouldn’t be represented under STV. Under MMP, their votes would be trashed if their party missed the threshold, but under STV, they would be able to say “Okay, I understand that my first choice doesn’t have enough support to be elected, so I’d rather make sure my second choice gets in rather than having you disregard my vote entirely.” I don’t see that as fear and negativism – your first choice can be entirely honest and can encourage your first choice, but your subsequent choices reflect the reality that we have to reach compromises with others. I would see that as adding an element of maturity to our political system that is currently lacking in the partisan bickering that dominates political discourse. With STV, there’s an incentive for parties to reach out to significant constituencies which share some interests with their own.
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I am amazed that my article from 2007 is still on line and being read. The comments in the dialogue which followed the on-line publication were of a high order of thoughtfulness. However, for me it is past history. The article was written as a “Citizen Correspondent” for TVO’s Your Agenda as organized by producer David Hawkins. My ‘assignment’ was over when the 2007 provincial election was over. I won’t be adding anything more to the blog or to any of my other 2007 articles as a Citizen Correspondent, but I do appreciate your interest.
Allan Millard
I recall when logo design was a highly designed mixture of talent and study. What took place?
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