The Pessimist

On Wednesday, Ontario goes to the polls and in addition to voting for our MPP, we'll also be voting in a referendum on election reform.

This is fairly novel -- unlike Quebec, we haven't seen a referendum question in 84 years. The question, however, hasn't received the attention it deserves, what with all the confusion caused by John Tory shooting his party's chances in the foot over the funding of religious schools. After his recent flip-flop on what he called "a matter of principle", it is no longer clear who the biggest promise-breaker is. But I digress.

The question before the voters is "should we replace the current 'first past the post' (FPP) system with a 'mixed member proportional' (MMP) system. The details on exactly what that new system will be is not, obviously, on the ballot but is something we need to read about before hand. There have been a number of flyers slipped under my door giving some sketchy out-line of how the new system works, and how it is an improvement on the existing system.

I was inclined to vote in favour of the new system, until I recently found out more.

Per the flyers:

1. FPP tends to exaggerate the power of the winning party. The winner of the seat is the one with the most votes, but because of multiple parties running the winner seldom achieves an actual majority.
2. small parties almost never win a seat, though if they run in most ridings they often receive a not insignificant share of the popular vote.

In the last election, the results were like this:

Note the obvious problems. The Liberals get way more seats than their share of the popular vote; the PCs and NDP less; and the Green none.

The suggested fix is to decrease the number of ridings to 91 (by making them geographically bigger). And to add 39 'List' seats. These list seats would be proportional to the popular vote. Each voter would get two votes: one for their riding candidate, and one for a provincial party.

This sounded like fun. It would allow for strategic voting:
- you could vote for your candidate if you liked him, but for a different party to send your party a message.
- you could vote against your candidate because you don't like him, but still vote for your party provincially.
I was for it. I thought it would work like this (assuming the same popular vote):

This would soften the worst attributes of FFP. The minor parties would have more representation. But this, unfortunately is not how the new system would work.

The new system as proposed would actually use the list candidates to balance the total seats to the popular vote. Sounds ok? Well using the same popular vote as above this is how the results would work:

This is not something I want to vote for. The reasoning behind the allocation of the list seats is the following: The winner has 47% of the popular vote and 64 riding seats. 64 seats is already 50% of the total seats available, so they get no list seats. The result has the following unappetizing outcome:

1. The winner gets only riding seats. The opposition gets all of the list seats.
2. Minority government is virtually guaranteed.
3. The opposition gets a huge portion of their representation in list seats rather than riding seats. This makes most of them unaccountable directly to the people.
4. And the new system increases the size of government by 25%. More members; more cost; more chaos.

Back to the drawing board Citizen's Committee. I won't vote for this.