This MMP thing & The Ontario Election

Oh yeah, blogging. Like posting without pictures. I keep meaning to do that.

This year’s Ontario election sure was crazy. And by crazy I mean ‘crazy boring’, mostly. The vote itself ended up being almost a complete waste of time. John Tory’s legendary screw-up to end all screw-ups will go down in provincial history, I think. He had the election won until the religious school issue came out.

Seriously, he’s a guy whose incredibly moderate to the point where you could make a legitimate argument for him being more ‘left-wing’ than the current liberal government. (He certainly wanted to spend more than they’re willing to, anyway.) A guy who had the potential to redefine the provincial PC party and remove any bad taste from the Harris years. A guy whose last name was “Tory” and was leader of the party commonly known as the “Tories.” It was almost too perfect.

And then he screws it up. One day. One comment. And a whole election gone. I wish Wikipedia had a “List of Political Races that were lost due to a singular gaffe” page, because this is something I would love to know more about.

In any case, with the actual election being pretty much over two days after it had started, the only real issue of any substantial debate this time out was the mixed member proportional thing. After seeing the results, a lot of people have been crying about it getting so soundly defeated by the public which, you know, seems somewhat fair, given that the Liberal Party actually gained seats while losing popular vote support. And the Green Party took almost ten per cent of the popular vote but remained seatless.

Still, though, my general reaction to the result of the MMP vote was a positive one. After going back and forth on the issue about six times, I ultimately decided that, while I am not opposed at all to the idea of electoral reform, MMP was likely not the way to go. MMP, for all its virtues — and it has a few — ultimately would have put us in a place where the party behind the name almost always carried with it greater weight than the name itself. And that’s not a good thing, nor is it something we should be adjusting our electoral system to outright encourage.

I think it’s fair to say that a lot of the impetus behind these electoral reform referendums that have been sweeping the country province-by-province can be firmly rooted in the 2000 U.S. presidential election. Voters got screwed there, and it caused a lot of people to want to examine their own political and electoral institutions, to ensure that nothing like that result could ever happen to them.

However, if anything MMP is a step closer to America’s electoral college. It further delineates candidates to little more than members of ‘teams’. And your challenge, as a voter, is to pick your team. Not a person so much, but your party of support. And that is, in my eyes, a bullshit way to determine who’s going to govern.

And that’s why I didn’t go for MMP. I think any system that, by its very rules, disassociates actually PEOPLE from the party label is a bad thing for Ontario. And, really, for democracy as a whole.

For those who whine about the Green Party and the like that can’t win a seat despite significant popular vote standings, I submit this idea: run candidates. Stop standing for little more than a political ideal and get people to actually run under your banner that are able to connect with voters in their riding. People act like the old First-Past-the-Post system is entirely inhospitable to new parties getting into the political system, but that’s rather ridiculous considering the past success of the NDP. But they did run candidates, building a solid base of real, experienced and talented politicians under the NDP flag.

That’s the challenge I have for MMP supporters who bemoan the Green Party in particular: which Green Party candidates would you have like to have seen get seats? What were their names? Where were they running? What would they have done for Ontario?