Great article in The Star that sums pros/cons and other, and impact on minority governments.
http://www.thestar.com/OntarioElection/article/264120
My two cents: it never occurred to me that by bringing more people into the political process, there will be more people who are pissed off and disappointed. And I thought I was the cynicalestest person I knew. The only other thing i would add imho is that MMP is not designed to give us good, or even better, government, just make it more representative.
Oct 07, 2007 04:30 AM
Andrew Chung
Staff Reporter
Get ready for the third federal election in as many years.
With opposition parties in Ottawa threatening to bring down the minority Conservatives after the government's Oct. 16 throne speech, it appears Canada could be heading into another federal ballot before Christmas.
Stephen Harper was installed as prime minister, with his minority, in January 2006. Former prime minister Paul Martin won a minority in 2004.
And when the dust settles, there may be another minority this time around.
Ignoring the frustration that some Canadians might feel at the prospect of having to go to the polls yet again, there's also a hefty price tag.
A general election these days costs more than a quarter of a billion dollars, according to Elections Canada.
For instance, the total bill for the last election was $270 million, including $55 million to reimburse the candidates' expenses.
If another election were held, that would bring the total up to about $800 million in three years, simply to keep a government in power.
On Wednesday, Ontarians will be voting in a provincial referendum on that asks whether we want to change our current electoral system – commonly referred to as first past the post – to one based on proportional representation, or PR.
It just so happens that PR almost always leads to minority governments.
So should we worry that the system would usher in an endless – and expensive – series of short-term governments?
In fact, the answer is no. Experts agree that this kind of political instability is endemic to minorities in our current first-past-the-post electoral system but not in proportional representation.
"A minority government under a PR system is more stable than a government under our system, because there's no benefit to going back to the polls early," says Dennis Pilon, professor of political science at the University of Victoria, who has just published a book on electoral systems called The Politics of Voting: Reforming Canada's Electoral System.
This means that our system – inherited from Great Britain, in which one winner takes all – often gives a large party a majority in the legislature with a minority of the vote.
When a majority isn't reached, as is the case in Ottawa, politicians know that a small change in their popularity could lead to a majority – their ultimate goal. Therefore they're more willing to dissolve the legislature and call yet another election.
"Our voting system has this propensity to reward the largest party with a majority, and that's tempting for the politicians because they want to go back to the polls whenever they think it looks good, maybe to get a majority," Pilon says. "In (PR), parties know that if they call an election before they should, they're not going to get anything extra, or that majority."
In a system like this, which is used in most Western democracies, majorities are formed in the legislature through coalitions of different parties. And coalition majority governments are as stable as single-party majorities, says Jonathan Rose, a professor of political studies at Queen's University in Kingston.
"The reason parties don't have coalitions in first past the post," Rose says, "is because (they) know they can go to the electorate again. So it's worth it to govern precariously with ad hoc support of different parties at different times."
Rose acted as academic director for the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform, which made the recommendation that Ontario adopt a mixed-member proportional system, leading to the referendum.
Rose says the citizens, who had to learn about electoral systems around the world, were "very concerned" that the system they recommend be stable.
The number of elections a country has over time is one indicator of stability. In his book, Pilon compiles data on major Western democracies using PR. It shows that, between 1945-1998, those countries did not have more elections than Canada. In fact, most had fewer.
Germany, for example, a country with a system similar to the one being proposed for Ontario – mixed-member proportional representation, or MMP – had 14 elections in that period. Canada had 17.
The idea of proportional representation is that the total number of seats a party has in Parliament reflects the number of people who voted for it across the country, not just how many ridings its candidates won.
MMP takes the system we have now – of voting for one member per riding – and combines it with a second vote for the party of your choice. It is this second part that adds proportionality.
If there are too few riding MPs elected from a party compared to the percentage of the popular vote it received, MPs are taken from a party list to fill the gap.
In the last federal election, the NDP received 17 per cent of the vote but just 9 per cent of the seats. The Green Party took 4.5 per cent of the vote but no seats at all. That wouldn't happen under PR.
Such a system would rarely give rise to a party with more than 50 per cent of the vote.
But even skeptics of PR agree that minorities in this situation are more stable than in our system. "Yes, I guess it could be," Edelgard Mahant, a professor of political science at York University, says grudgingly.
Mahant is the outreach coordinator for the "No MMP" campaign (nommp.ca).
Mahant says stability is only one factor to consider. Coalitions, she adds, pose their own tricky problems.
For one, coalitions are often shackled to the wishes of the small parties of which they are typically comprised, she says.
These parties could have extremist agendas, she notes, such as in Denmark where anti-immigrant and anti-tax parties hold sway.
"The problem with coalitions is that the smallest parties tend to get the most influence, they can negotiate what they want," Mahant says. "I don't find it democratic to give the smaller parties so much control."
Others wonder how MMP would break up the concentration of political power in the hands of prime ministers or premiers and their cabinets, instead of the parliament.
"Power is still concentrated in the hands of the executive," says Greg Inwood, a specialist in Ontario politics at Ryerson University, "and we might end up alienating and pissing off more people as a consequence because they're being promised all this electoral reform, but it may not help (politicians) keep their promises and make the executive branch more accountable."
In fact, Inwood says, with MMP, "the creation of party lists will be heavily influenced by the premier and his immediate advisors, and that could help further concentrate power among the leaders."
MMP proponents argue that by being forced to make coalitions, leaders must choose cabinet members outside their own party, thereby decentralizing power.
Mahant also mentions the possibility that parties may be unable to form a coalition. It looked that way for a few agonizing weeks after the last election in Germany.
And Belgium, divided along language and cultural lines, is in the midst of a political crisis that threatens to break up the country: Nearly four months after the election, it is still trying to form a government.
Such a situation is rare. But at least the Belgians haven't had to go back to the polls.
So far.
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