Apolitical Staples

Pleased to have you on “our” side.

I absolutely, 100% hate the idiotic MMP system, and the people who invented it should all be ashamed of themselves.

But I’m almost certain to vote for it, highly imperfect though it be…

Doesn’t this ultimately cost us $110,000 extra per politician for this added benefit of proportional representation? Or am I missing something here?

Ontario is very underrepresented as a legislative body. The # of MPP’s would simply go to the level they were in the 1980’s.

There are more benefits to MMP then just having more proportionality.

Greg, One major problem I have with this proposal is that probably more than 90 percent of all Ontarians have still never heard of MMP.

I do not believe that such a dramatic change to our voting systems should take place without a thorough public debate. For that reason alone, until that has happened, I cannot vote yes.

Well Two Cents, talk to Elections Ontario. They’ve done an absolutely horrible job of getting information out there. Some of us are rather suspicious that’s been done on purpose, because people who don’t have information will probably pick the status quo, and polls have shown that when voters in Ontario get information on what MMP entails, the support for it jumps.

I should have added that I fully agree with your disappointment at John Tory’s leadership. (It makes a farce of his campaign theme as leadership). John Tory is running as a Dalton McGuinty clone. For those of us who support the small “c” conservative option, we have no dog in this race. Yet, I do not believe that MMP will solve the problem.

But that’s the whole point - the current system forces you to make a tough choice and vote for the government. You are basically saying that you would rather not have to make that sort of choice.

“make a tough choice and vote for the government” Is that just your way of saying - vote Liberal, you know you want to ;) Any system has making a choice, tough or otherwise. Why is making your choice full valued a bad thing?

The last thing we need is more representation. It sounds great on paper. It really just amounts to more government waste and more pensions and golden handshakes to hand out.

The best government is the smallest amount of government, and one which is elected by the majority of the people. We don’t need more MPP’s and we certainly don’t need more MPP’s based on gender or visible minority status as Olivia Chow wants.

For these reasons I am opposing MMP.

I apologize for posting this much but I think Joseph Lavoie said it best when he explained his reasons for reversing his support of MMP.

I’m an engineer, and I say “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Look at what a mess moving to a “strong mayor” sysem has created in Toronto, and look at how much trouble fixed election dates create when combined with a minority parliament in Ottawa.

Cherniak — you oppose MMP not on principle but because you fear Liberals will lose power. But you clearly haven’t done the math. Between 1937 and 2003 — 66 years — the Liberals had exactly ONE majority government (under Peterson in 1987). The PCs have an inherent seat advantage in Ontario because of how votes are translated into seats — at 37% support each, the PCs get 52 seats to the Liberals 44.

Under MMP, Liberals will lose a few Toronto MPPs, but they will more than gain them back in the Ottawa Valley, Durham Region, and West-Central Ontario (Simcoe to Bruce), where nearly a quarter million Liberal votes elected 0 MPPs even in 2003. MMP ensures that all parties work on behalf of all regions, not cater to only one or two. And only a fool would give up getting their fair share of seats every election for the chance of getting a majority government once every 66 years.

MMP isn’t that different that what we have now — you are just giving people a two-part ballot i.e. the freedom to chose a preferred local representative and a preferred governing party separately (which may or may not be different). This greatly improves the independence and accountability of local MPPs, and makes more seats competitive, unlike today when 60% of seats are “safe” (under MMP, party backbenchers can no longer ride the party vote to victory — they actually have to earn their local votes). List MPPs are accountable because they are nominated just like local candidates today by the membership (on it’s done regionally vs locally). And list MPPs always have constituency offices, just like local MPPs (and they will certainly seek local nominations the next election). Why? Because they have no guarantees that their party will win list seats the next election (in which case, they wouldn’t be elected).

Like Staples, I preferred an open-list variant because it gave people more choice about the list MPPs. But if choice matters to you, it’s downright perverse to claim that FPTP provides more than MMP (after all, under FPTP, you have to accept the candidate of your preferred party even if he hate him/her, or vice versa, you have to accept the party of candidate you like even if you don’t like his/her party’s policies or leader). On choice and accountability, MMP beats FPTP hands down, without sacrificing the local representative that we like about FPTP.

Glad to have you on board, Greg. I too would like the flexibility of being able to split the vote between a local candidate I want and a Premier I want (which would be possible, indirectly, with a party slate). As it is right now, that’s just not possible.

If you want a preview of the kind of nonsense that can happen when two parties with opposite agendas (legitimately) feel they have a mandate to represent the people, take a look at how well the City of Ottawa is running right now.

We voted in a, supposedly, conservative Mayor but the rest of council (mostly tax-and-spend types who won’t confront the bureaucrats) stayed the same. Result : lots of silly infighting on council and threats of a “coupe” by the councillors but not a lot of real management of the city.

People will vote their favourite locally and then use the list vote as a protest vote for somebody like the Greens. The result will be unelected (really unaccountable) MPPs and lots of silly infighting while our money gets pissed away faster than it is already. Plus, everybody knows that all of the list MPPs will all be from Toronto anyway so the rest of the province will (as usual) get the shaft.

“the positives out weigh the gains”

Well I think we can certainly all agree on that. By “gains”, of course, I assume you mean increases in representation for fringe parties like the NDP and other such unsavoury characters.

I assume you mean increases in representation for fringe parties like the NDP and other such unsavoury characters.

Among others, yes. Maybe we can get some wacko Libertarians in there too. ;)

Collectivist Greg:

I am a libertarian in the same sense that you are a Buddhist, my friend. Which is to say, not really.

When will you renounce your collectivist attachment to the possessions of others and find enlightenment? Only by letting go of my wallet can you attain the freedom you seek.

Alas, you can no more free yourself from the earthly temptations of property redistribution than I can escape the High Tory that lurks within and pulls me from the narrow path of blissful anarchy.

We are slaves to our natures, I suppose.

“The promises are so starkly similar”

McGuinty did not live up to his promises. He campaigned to the center but did not act it. If you want to bring in MMP simply to change of party election platforms, then I don’t see the point. You are putting too much stock in the election platforms.

There are other systems that are better than MMP that would still give you a second choice.

John M Reynolds

It is true that you can cast a separate vote for your party vote if you don’t like the leader, but voting for your local PC (Liberal) candidate still will go towards helping Tory (McGuinty) become the premier. Not only that, for people that do agree with one of the major parties, it forces you to vote for someone other than the major party for the party vote, since that vote would essentially not count. It encourages people to vote for the fringe parties if they want their party list vote to count.

We are slaves to our natures, I suppose.

At last we are in total agreement.

What would happen if no one voted?

Just curious.

“The promises are so starkly similar. You really wonder whether Ontarians have much of a choice here,” said York University professor Robert MacDermid.

That’s because they all favor more government instead of less, and somehow, against all common sense, 99% of Ontarians agree with them. Since there are so few areas of freedom left to Ontarians then there are very few ways of saying that you’re going to continue dismantling those freedoms that don’t duplicate the promises of the other parties.

The most “radical” of party platforms are of the have-you-cake-and-eat-it-too variety, such as the Freedom Party (cough) and the John Tory party, which for example propose to give you the “choice” of sending your kids to non-government schools, but apparently without dismantling any of the bureaucracies which regulate schools, more than likely intending to actually expand the bureaucracy in order to achieve even tighter control over (and therefore de-facto ownership of) non-government schools. Similarly, the most radical “right wing” platforms related to health care propose that they will improve Ontarians’ lives by abolishing the so-called barriers to buying private health care (barriers which don’t even exist in practice), without touching a single hair on the head of the precious, communistic Canada Health Act or firing a single bureaucrat. And again, when they say they are “allowing” something to happen they mean “controlling and taxing” it. Kinda like how they “allow” you to buy (Ontario) wine at the mall.

The people who really want government to expand should go ahead and tinker with the electoral system all they want. The more that the system is changed, the more confused people will be, and the less opportunity they will have to question the fundamental premises of Big Government. You can bamboozle them for quite a long time by inviting them to help you Make Big Government Work. Long enough perhaps to have a bit of a career in politics and government. But at the rate things are going I wouldn’t recommend being in a position 20 years or so from now where you’re dependent on a government pension. Former bureaucrats of failed states who are unable to squirrel away enough hard currency end up like this. And if they squirrel too much away they might end up like this. Anyhoo, best of luck with your MMP.

MMP gives more power and choice to voters.

The power to choose a candidate AND a party. And the ability to split our vote if we choose to.

The power to support any policy or leader from any part of the province. (Unlike now where voting Conservative in Toronto doesn’t support anything or anybody).

And with the 3% threshold the power to punish a party by effectively voting for a caucus rebellion.

I created a website to show just how many voices are suppressed by FPTP. Give it a browse www.wastedvotes.ca

AH - Democracy is merely domination with a populist face. The ultimate goal of each and every voter is to impose his world view on everyone else. In Canada of course, we call that “compromise”. Democracy is a game you can lose. That’s what makes it such an exciting game, don’t you think? The only advantage I can see to universal representation is that the resulting cacophony of new “voices” will, to a certain extent at least, drown out some of the blather from the players currently monopolizing the stage.

Hi Greg,

I’m collecting Conservative and PC support for MMP at a new blog - Conservatives for MMP (http://conservativesformmp.blogspot.com).

I’m wondering if I can link your site and cross-post your posts (with proper credit).

Let me know.