Given this BLOG has been predominantly about federal technology law issues like copyrights and patents, it might have seemed unusual that I've been blogging about the Ontario Referendum and election so much. There are a number of reasons for this.
First, there are issues we deal with that are provincial in jurisdiction. There are obvious things such as Open Access in education, which requires that our provincial Ministries of Education adequately understand that there are new-economy options to redirect public money from private educational publishers to publicly licensed Open Access educational material.
There are less obvious things such as "DRM". When you look at what these technologies actually "protect", it is not Copyright related at all but contract and commerce law which are provincial in nature. Whether any federal law that seeks to protect "DRM" is constitutional is questionable, but it is important to alert provinces to this federal encroachment on their jurisdiction.
Anyone who subjects themselves to being active in politics knows that the current system isn't working well. We have a small number of partisan party members nominating candidates into ridings that are often safe for a given party. These alleged "riding representatives" are then elected into parliament that is dominated by party discipline where the first allegiance is to the party that nominated them and not to the constituents that voted for them. This centralizes the control of governments into the hands of a few key caucus members and backroom policy people. (There has been more written for an International audience)
The current system may be liked by the well financed special interest groups who are able to manipulate it easier, it is not liked by citizens groups and politically active citizens who are unfairly shut out.
There are many ways to try to improve this situation, with some more realistic than others. We could try to do away with the party dominated parliamentary democracy, bring in a directly elected presidency and cabinet, or abolish political parties -- none of which are likely to ever happen.
The easiest places to make small incremental changes is with the nomination process and voting system. Previous governments have already made some improvements recently with campaign finance rules, but the larger steps that involve the nomination and voting system don't have the support of current governments who were elected under the current system. The only reason why we are having a referendum at all is because the proposal is not generally supported by politicians who won under the old system, and thus the proposal needs the strong voice of citizens to outweigh current politicians.
The Ontario MMP proposal is a wonderful compromise. There are many systems that are better from an academic perspective, but this system is a compromise that 107 average Ontario citizens who formed the Ontario Citizens Assembly came up with. They know their fellow Ontario citizens better than academics might, and proposed a system that focused on what actual average voters wanted rather than what the parties or the academics might prefer. This really is a system chosen for the people, by the people.
The proposal keeps 70% of the seats elected identical to the way they are now, warts and all, and only makes a change to 30% of the seats. This makes the system much easier to understand and far more likely that voters will choose the option as it is an incremental rather than a radical change. People tend to fear change, even if the change is of great benefit.
The other major improvement of the MMP proposal is the requirement that the process used to nominate the candidates for the 30% province-wide seats must be publicly disclosed by the political parties before an election. This is also an incremental change as I hope the future will bring us a requirement that the process used to nominate 100% of the candidates will be transparent and accountable to citizens.
While this is only the Ontario provincial voting system that would change as a result of this referendum, I believe that once one province moves to a modern voting system that other provinces and the federal government will follow. The Ontario MMP proposal wouldn't be a good option for a Canada-wide vote (any type of proportionality must be counted per-province), but it is the best and most realistic option for Ontario.
I urge everyone reading this to Vote For MMP. A referendum is the only time under our current voting system that every vote in every riding counts, and no ridings or voters are considered "safe". This is the most important and most influential vote I have cast in my lifetime!
Why Vote For MMP? (as presently put forward)
Why indeed! There is little justification for the grossly
increased number of non-voted seats in order to support a more fairly representative government. One does NOT equal the other.
Why wouldn't the present system be capable of handling this with the additional 'seats' being addressed as 'votes' administered by party leaders as a weighted decision-maker.
Less MPPs (than planned), less cost (than planned), and it still meets the goal.
Second try: Why vote for MMP indeed!
The concept is flawed! Had the referendum asked for support for further study, I would have agreed. Having more politicians and their support staff on the public payroll is NOT acceptable nor necessary. The MMP agenda could have been reached simply by allocating the proposed ’seats’ as ‘votes’ to the leader of the respective parties.