A copy of one of Sheila Copps attacks on electoral modernization is circulating around in email in Northern Ontario.
The first thing people need to realize is that Ms. Copps was herself nominated to safe Liberal seats, and she came up the party ranks as constituency assistant to a past provincial Liberal party leader. She is herself the very type of partisan party hack that she falsely claims the new MMP system favors, and she realizes that people like her will have a harder time getting elected under the new system than the old.
The current MMP proposal is modest in that it keeps 70% of the seats elected the same way they are now, and adds in 30% of the seats decided by province-wide party proportionality. Unlike the current system where the process to nominate party candidates to safe seats is undisclosed, the new system requires that the parties at least publicly disclose the process used to nominate the candidates for the province-wide seats. It is expected that parties will also disclose the process they use to nominate riding-specific candidates.
Lets look at her major complaint, which is that somehow extremist minority positions will control Ontario's parliament. Lets for the moment assume that all the types of people that Ms. Copps defines as extremist could get together under one party banner in order to get the 3% of the votes required to get any province-wide seats at all. This itself is impossible, given the groups she identified would never come together under a single banner.
Ontario has a population over 12 million people, with 7,962,607 of them being on the voters list for the 2003 election. Of that number, only 4,497,244 (56.5) voted. 3% of that number is 134, 917 voters. This is nearly the population of the merged Greater Sudbury which according to the 2006 census now has 157,857.
What if we had an election where we told the people of Greater Sudbury that they were not allowed to vote at all, and that someone from Toronto would be chosen to "represent" them? Would anyone in Ontario consider that fair? Would the people who were excluded from the election be justified in being upset?
In fact, we currently over-represent the people in Northern and Eastern Ontario, and this would remain under the new system. There are fewer people per politician in Northern Ontario than in Toronto. This is done specifically to ensure that the views of people in Northern Ontario are not drown out by the larger number of people in the Toronto area.
The reality is that what party hack Ms. Copps wrote about is not possible with the alternative voting system that 107 average Ontario citizens came up with. There are countries that do not have have a threshold and that are far more politically diverse than Ontario, but her claims have nothing to do with Ontario or the Ontario MMP proposal.
Unlike Ms. Copps who has a long history of not doing her homework before she very publicly spews her uninformed (and near racist) opinions, these 107 average Ontario citizens that made up the Citizens Assembly spent many weekends being taught about various voting systems -- warts and all -- and they came up with a proposal that would work well in Ontario.