So, how do we fix our system?

Oct 19, 2007

Well, mixed member proportional government (MMP) isn’t going to happen in Ontario anytime soon.

Is anybody surprised?

If there were enough support to get MMP passed, the parties most likely to benefit would probably win seats without it. Not many outside the fringe parties and their supporters want MMP, and for good reason.

Aside from being a really convoluted patchwork of a proposal, you just have to look at the Nipissing riding to see what was wrong with it. Once you got beyond the three mainstream parties, nobody seemed to be trying to get a member elected. The Green Party obviously just found a warm body to put on the ballot at the last minute. If they couldn’t find a good candidate locally, could they at least have found one who would give the appearance of campaigning? Notice also that they had generic campaign signs.

They’re already thinking proportionally.

If such a system were implemented, would the smaller parties even bother to run decent candidates in a riding, or just put their top people on the list and run one broad campaign? Would the best and brightest of all the parties opt to join the ranks of the safely unaccountable, rather than taking their chances in a direct race?

The question is now, happily, moot, at least for the time being.

But even with the MMP proposal voted down by a solid majority, the complaints continue. The results were barely in and we were being told by some proponents that the voters didn’t sufficiently understand the question, and that informational brochures were too neutral in presenting the choices.

Too neutral?

Was this ever about democracy, or was it about weighting things in favour of the ‘enlightened’ minority? Indeed, MMP had great potential to work against democracy. Consider that John Tory would probably have been safe under MMP, rather than getting his butt kicked.

The best thing we can do now with proportional representation is declare it dead, bury it, and move forward in a new direction. So, if MMP isn’t the answer, what is? Let’s first try to understand the problem with our present system.

The biggest gripe against first past the post is that a candidate can win with a minority of votes, as long as it’s a bigger piece than any other candidate receives. A party with a minority of votes can likewise form a government by the number of seats it holds.

This is only a problem if you subscribe to the notion of individuals aligning themselves with parties. If you think in terms of elected members representing constituencies, there’s nothing terribly wrong with it. Proponents of MMP might say that list members are representing a constituency, but by their arguments, a constituency is a thinly-spread collection of strangers who subscribe to the same political view, rather than a diverse group of people living together in the same community. Instead of one province-wide election, think of it as many regional elections and first past the post won’t seem nearly so unfair.

There are flaws in our present system, make no mistake. But there is no need to replace it with something more complicated and open to abuse. The problems can be corrected, or at least mitigated, without significantly changing the way we elect MPPs.

The major flaw in first past the post is perhaps best illustrated by American Idol, in which people vote for their favourite performer, but the process selects the least popular competitor. How often does it seem that someone really good leaves the show, while someone less talented hangs on for weeks? That’s because people are voting for their favourite. If you happen to be everyone’s second choice, that might, in theory, make you more popular than the week’s top vote-getter. In practice, it gets you sent home, because nobody is asking about second choices. The process is flawed in the same way our system is flawed.

What is the solution?

You could add a second round of voting with only the top two candidates. This would clear out the vote-splitters, but it would be like having two elections. Yikes.

You could ask voters to rank the candidates in order of preference, as is done in some places. It would complicate the counting, but it would certainly yield the most accurate view of what voters want.

But maybe we don’t need to do anything as drastic as that to fix what’s wrong with the system while keeping what’s right.

Here’s a thought. Get voters to select two names on the ballot, assuming more than two parties are running in the riding. Pick your favourite and your second choice. The votes could be simply added up, with the seat still going to the candidate with the most votes. It would be no more complicated than a municipal election — less, in fact. The end result, however, could potentially shift the balance of power at Queen’s Park, strengthen the mandate of those we elect, and hopefully leave fewer voters with an MPP they can’t at least tolerate.

There would be no reduction of ridings, no unaccountable members, no discrimination against independents, no additional power given to parties, no list members trying to horn in on elected members in ridings held by other parties, and little chance any one-issue parties are going to get a seat by mustering a tiny piece of the vote province-wide.

It might also address the problem of strategic voting. If you allow people to indicate both their real preference and an acceptable alternative, they might feel less pressured to choose the lesser of two evils. Those with stronger preferences could still cast a dedicated ballot, choosing only one name.

Maybe it wouldn’t work. Only about five minutes of thought went into that proposal after all. The point is that MMP isn’t our only hope. Far from it.

Fixing the voting is the easy part, however. What really requires further study is not how we elect our MPPs, but how they do their jobs once elected. Our system must change in a way that gives more autonomy to the individual members, so they can be our representatives and not mere party puppets. We must find a solution that makes them less accountable to their parties and more accountable to their constituencies.

It’s crazy to put more emphasis on parties when party politics are the real problem. Political parties need to become less important, not more.

If that happens, then we might see some meaningful change.

A.C.