Daily Archives: 4/16/2007
Ontario Electoral Reform?
| 4/16/2007 | Posted by Patti under Canadian News |
Well, as often happens things either change or potential for change happens. In Ontario for the last several months 103 Ontarians have been looking at ways of tinkering with how we elect our provincial parliament. Some call it electoral reform, I tend to look at it more as electoral tinkering and I can’t say I’m leaning towards supporting those changes which thankfully, I will have opportunity to vote on it in October.
In my view, our provincial parliament is about a group of locally chosen representatives forming a governing group for the province. That creates voices from all corners of the province. The majority vote of that riding rightly chooses the party that will represent that riding.
There are only two issues I’ve ever had with the way we elect politicians. They are that there is no mechanism for me to be able to signal my displeasure with the leader of a political party even while I support the local candidate and the second being that a population cap should exist for each riding. Every five years ridings should be reviewed to determine if ridings need to be reformed in order to comply with the cap.
That isn’t broke even though it appears the Citizen’s Assembly (as they are named) has lost sight of that simple concept. They have decided that their recommendation to the people of this province is that we should adopt a system they call Mixed Member Proportional to determine our provincial parliament.
Their proposal would take the total number of MPPs back up to 129 members which is about where it was before Harris became Premier. With our increased population that is a logical move. The drawback is that the people of this province will only be electing 90 (instead of the current 103) of those MPPs. That seems like a backward move to me.
Under this system, we’d have two votes, one for the party aka the leader and one for the local candidate. The vote for the leader would be considered to be the popular vote. Each party will have nominated a slate of list candidates before the election through a process they must disclose prior to the election. If a party elects fewer local members than their popular vote candidates from their list will be selected from their list to compensate for the difference.
While this system resolves my issue about the lack of a vote for the leader and the local representative it creates issues. Under the proposed system, 30% of the legislature would consist of those chosen not by the people but by political parties. There is already enough self serving politicians engaged in patronage without condoning it under the name of electoral reform.
This proposed system would mean that only 70% of those in the legislature would be answerable to the people while 30% would be answerable to their respective parties. I would rather stay with the warts of having only one choice to make and each member of the legislature being required to go before the people than what is being proposed.
Seems to me that ridings being strictly set by population distribution would balance the system quite enough. Who gets the popular vote is rather immaterial. If a candidate/leader combination can’t get the support at riding level then they don’t deserve to have a political hack appointed.
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