Realistically, with dual candidacy allowed you can bet that the riding candidates will push hard to have that extra shot at winning a seat that comes with a list candidacy, and there’s no good reason to deny a supposedly qualified candidate at least some position on a list, even it it’s not a particularly good position. A party doesn’t pay extra to have a longer list, so why not include all 90 of your riding candidates, plus anyone that the party feels should be in a seat despite not winning a riding nomination?

(Granted, smaller parties that expect few or no riding seats probably won’t bother with any more than 39 list spots, but I’m assuming we’re talking about the big 3 here that can be expected to run full slates in the ridings.)

One real-world place to look to is Germany. Their lists are pretty long, and it’s hard to see why Ontario’s would be much different. I would speculate that an Ontario ‘full-slate’ list would run from 90 to the full 129.

On the regional balance question, if all (or nearly all) candidates are dual candidates, parties [i]could[/i] opt to promote an equitable distribution by using a fairly straightforward recipe for filling the list:

Step 1. Within each region, rank your riding candidates by likelihood of winning, i.e. best chance of winning goes first. (I know it won’t be perfect, but the honest best guess is probably good enough.)

Step 2. Fill your list alternating through the regions, picking the candidates in the order that you just established.

So if you had, say 9 regions, then spots 1-9 would be the best bets of each region, followed by each region’s 2nd best bet in spots 10-18, then each region’s 3rd best in spots 19-27, etc.

The party’s resulting seat distribution after the election should be as closely balanced as can be accomplished with whatever number of list seats the party wins. If the party is fairly realistic about who is most likely to win, then winning riding candidates should generally be those near the top of the list. Regions that are underrepresented in the ridings would therefore be the first to benefit from any list seats.

For smaller (list-only) parties it’s even easier to balance the regions – just alternate throughout the list.

So it can be done – it just takes internal willingness on the part of the parties. (Although personally I’m too cynical to believe that the bigger parties won’t just use the list for some thinly-disguised cronyism. Sorry, had to be said.)

“In New Zealand, the Labour Party and the National Party determine their lists at regional conventions. The lists are then assembled by a special national committee of each party.

“The more common practice in MMP systems is for list candidates to run locally as well. In the 2002 New Zealand election, 84% of list members also ran locally. This gives these candidates more visibility and strong connections to particular areas or regions.

“Permitting dual candidacy recognizes that there can be only one winner in local ridings under a Single Member Plurality system. Candidates who have strong public support can lose local races. For example, in the 2003 Ontario election, the winning candidate in one district received 35.87% of the vote. In another district, a losing candidate received 45.16% of the vote. As this example shows, candidates who lose can actually have more support than other candidates who win.”

The Citizens’ Assembly considered requiring parties to nominate candidates in some particular way, but not many democratic countries have laws governing how parties nominate candidates: some parties are different from others, in a democracy. So there is no legal guarantee stopping a party putting rich white males from Toronto in the top 50 list positions. Just political reality.

As to your sample regions, the Ontario PC Party has nine regional vice-presidents from nine regions, but I can’t find their definition. I like your Option C, except I would ask Perth, Huron, Bruce, Grey whether they want to go with Upper Grand rather than the Southwest.

Proporational systems are better for representation of any sort of smaller group of people, whether it be geographic, or idealogical. Thus as the environmental vote can go to the Greens if the large parties give that sentiment short shrift so too can the Rural Vote. Plus PR creates legislatures that encourage cooperation so even smaller parties can be productive and valuable members of government. This is unlike FPTP where the winner take all mentality is ingrained.

The political history of Ontario and Canada is one of FPTP where vote rich swing ridings and false majorities are what matter. This would not be so in MMP.

Could you tell me what the difference would be between a possible Northern Ontario Party and a Rural Ontario Party?

I say if it does (and I believe it is) then we should stop trying to be perfect and go with the improvement.

I have to take issue with this because this is something that already happens in Ontario. Ontario has a population that is far from being spread out evenly, so it’s not like most of the regions have the same kind of voting power. Basically, most of the provinces voting power lies in and around the GTA, while the North and rural areas have very little power. So there is not really a risk of alienating those voters in smaller areas because they simply do not need them to win as it stands right now. That will only get worse with this version of MMP, because all of a sudden those 39 seats are determined province wide. So the voters in those areas that have the most power already get another vote, and there are many more of their votes than there are in those lower populated regions. That means that there is a whole new pool of seats to go after that have no consideration given to regions, therefore the larger number of votes in those highly populated areas will swamp those from the lower populated areas.

So, if you’re really good to that highly populated area, you stand to get 2 votes, and there are so many more people to give you those votes in those areas. This will only make this that much worse.

As for the smaller party argument, this one just does not wash for me. I’ve been told that areas, like Northern Ontario, could form their own parties, and go for that 3% number. Well, problem there is that the Northern Ontario ridings only makes up 5% of the total votes. So that party would have win 60% of the votes in those Northern ridings to reach 3%. If they could do that, they’d be winning riding seats and would get any MMP seats. In fact, it could be argued that because there are fewer ridings seats thanks to MMP, that this small party would be hurt by MMP.

I would love to think that the parties would “dare risk blatantly faviouring one region over others”, but look at the political history of this province and country, and you see tonnes of examples of parties doing just that.

Even still, parties aren’t stupid. If they don’t have balanced regions, then they risk being pegged as either pro-one region or anti-other regions (because their regional bias is made explicit with their lists). That is going to impact their ability to not only win party votes, but local seats too.

Parties could weigh the advantages and disadvantages for playing one region against another and decide it’s in their interest to do so. But its unlikely that any of the 3 major parties would do so, because they risk alienating whole regions, and relegate themselves to the status of a regional party. Only a small party looking to establish a base of support would dare risk blatantly favouring one region over others.

If these MMP seats were formally attatched to these regions, regardless of the set-up, I would more than likely be able to get behind it. But sadly, this proposal is not set up that way.

The first person on the list would be the leader, who would be elected by OMOV.

The rest of the list would be fill in during a campaign conducted one year before the election is expected, where each member would vote one person. The list would be ordered by the number of votes recived.

Members could vote for multiple list candidates, but that would encourage slates (where people would be given lists of candidates by factions in the party, and the most popular faction would control the whole list. (However major party factions will likely form thier own parties once MMP is implemented)).

For those who want gender parody members could vote one female and one male list candidate and the list would alternate between genders.