In case you aren’t aware, Ontario is currently undergoing a Citizen-lead process to consider changes to the electoral system. The Ontario Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform, a group of randomly selected citizens from Ontario’s 103 ridings, is learning about various systems (including our own), and will make recommendations in the coming months, which will be voted upon by Ontarians in the October 4, 2007 election. You can get updates from Jonathan Rose’s blog, associate professor of political science at Queen’s, who is the Citizens’ Assembly academic director. TV Ontario is also covering the Citizen’s Assembly and has blogs and video of the consultation meetings. I haven’t seen enough coverage of this important process, either on the blogs or the mainstream media, so I’d like to encourage people to start talking about it. I posted this comment on Jonathan’s blog earlier; I will repeat it here.

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Thanks for the update, Jonathan. Your posts are helpful to keep tabs on how things are progressing, especially for those of us who cannot attend all of the consultation meetings.

Having designed a new electoral system myself (OCA submission #1122; interpretation bulletins #1138 and #1218), I know it is easy to get bogged down in details and technicalities (size of legislature, local/regional mix, thresholds, open/closed lists, size/number of regions, dual candidacy, how to deal with overhangs, etc). So one of the challenges is to always remind yourselves of the big picture — does changing the way we translate votes into seats can improve upon the quality of debate at Queen’s Park?

I support a mixed-member proportional (MMP) system because, by introducing regional members who are accountable to Ontario’s distinct regions, it will expand debate within the legislature to take into account not only local needs, but concerns that span across many communities. These regional concerns are becoming increasingly important to Ontario’s future — growing regional disparities (projections show the GTA with double the population by 2050, with Thunder Bay, Sudbury and others losing half their population), the province’s role in growth management (Greenbelt/Places to Grow Acts), the introduction of regional health networks, the need for regional economic development (particularly in the North and rural Ontario), pressures to plan transportation networks regionally (expand GO Train, deal with traffic congestion), the recognition that environmental problems (air and water quality, etc.) span municipal boundaries, among many others.

In our current first-past-the-post (FPTP) system, “the public interest” is meant to be the result of the deliberations of 103 (soon to be 107) members who represent local communities (within a party-system which cuts across geography to create “communities of interest”). This system has, on balance, performed well in responding to local concerns, since each locality has an advocate. But this system of local-only advocates has often not performed as well on broader issues (economic and social inequalities, degrading environment, uneven economic development), which is evidenced by Canada (and Ontario) falling behind other places on these issues.

Alternate voting (AV), where candidates are ranked to ensure, with second choices, a candidate receives 50% of the vote, is an attractive option to some. But it remains a system based solely on local concerns and will not improve our performance on broader issues. On the contrary, AV experiences elsewhere suggest that even fewer people will be represented by their first choice than under FPTP (people are already often represented by their second choices today, so requiring a 50% vote threshold only makes it more difficult for small parties to win local seats — which tends to lead to a two-party state).

By contrast, we might expect that a system comprised only of regional members (such as a single-transferable-vote or STV) will likely produce better debate amongst broader issues, but does so by eliminating our local advocates. A parliament resulting from STV, then, is likely to be less locally responsive.

To me, an electoral system should provide representation that achieves a balance between local and regional concerns — an outcome for which mixed-member proportional systems have demonstrated success.

So, in addition to the many principles (legitimacy, accountability, simplicity, voter choice, proportionality, etc) that must be weighed, I would encourage the OCA to think about how the resultant system can expand the quality and range of concerns that are addressed at Queen’s Park.

Gregory D. Morrow
DemocraticSPACE.com
BScArch, BArch (McGill); MArchAS, MCP (MIT); PhD Candidate (UCLA)
School of Public Affairs
University of California, Los Angeles

P.S. no, I’m not American, I’m from a small hamlet called Cloyne, north of Kingston.