WhatFinger


Democracy, Ontario Election

If you want real democracy…



There's a drive on currently to change the electoral system in Ontario to make it "fairer and more democratic." The current system, called First-Past-The-Post (FPP) is deemed undemocratic and unfair because under it a party can win the majority of parliamentary seats without necessarily having a majority of votes.

Support Canada Free Press


The proposed new system, called Mixed-Member-Proportional (MMP) representation, is supposed to make all that unfairness go away through a Rube Goldberg scheme that somehow allocates 29 additional seats that would be distributed among the various parties, according to the percentage of votes they took during the general election. This means that a party can lose in certain ridings, yet still gain a seat because they gained a sufficient percentage of overall votes to garner one or more of those 29 "party" seats. Talk about a harebrained scheme. If truth were told neither FPP nor MMP is particularly fair or democratic for that matter. But, as my friend Art Weinreb pointed out so eloquently in these pages last week, life isn't particularly fair. Fairness is one of those nebulous concepts that appeals to our abstract sense of Right and Wrong, yet is rarely achieved as it tends to interfere with all those competing agendas out there. If the electorate were really serious about instilling a fair and truly democratic system of government, the logical starting place would be to cut down the number of parties competing for votes. Think about it; if you have more than two parties running in any election the chance of achieving a fair or democratic result are somewhere south of nonexistent. The only way to achieve fair and democratic majority governance is by getting 50% of the votes plus one. If you have three parties, then a "majority' can be achieved with as little as 34%. Four parties cut that majority down to 26% and so on. So rather than tinker with the formula of how to achieve a democratic outcome it would make much more sense to get rid of all those rump parties that tend to divide the election pie into too many pieces to make any one of them be fair. At least under FPP it's the largest piece of the pie that usually ends up forming the government, even though no clear majority was achieved. Under MMP there will undoubtedly be haggling over which party will form the government with the support of some small splinter party whose agenda will bear more weight than it normally would under FPP. Besides, there are only two sides to the political spectrum anyway. It's the Left vs. the Right and all parties are either to the left or the right of centre, regardless of their particular political interests. Take the Green Party. It's safe to say that they generally trend to the left of centre and are closer to the Liberals and the NDP than they are to the Conservatives. While they have managed to take 4.5% of the overall vote during the 2006 election, the party won no seats and rightly so. Their interests being largely environmental in nature, the Greens would be much better off incorporating their members into a mainstream party, such as the Liberals and promoting their agendas from a position that's achievable. Ditto for the NDP, which has largely managed to split the votes with other left of centre parties. The NDP's interests are more consistent with those of the Liberals, the Greens or the Bloc (except for the part about separation). Yet their chances of achieving an advanced agenda are not a whole lot better than the Greens'. The Progressive Conservatives and the Canadian Alliance split the votes on the right of centre for years until the membership realized that chances of forming a right of centre government were really slim, given the generally leftist orientation of Canada's mainstream. So they united. If the people of Canada were really and truly interested in making their system of government "fairer and more democratic", they'd abandon the idea of having three, four, five or more political parties and adopt the two party system. There isn't really any other way to achieve true majority rule than to have two ideas competing for the hearts, minds and votes of the electorate. Any other scheme will just further complicate an already complicated system and will do nothing to advance the cause of democracy.


View Comments

Klaus Rohrich -- Bio and Archives

Klaus Rohrich is senior columnist for Canada Free Press. Klaus also writes topical articles for numerous magazines. He has a regular column on RetirementHomes and is currently working on his first book dealing with the toxicity of liberalism.  His work has been featured on the Drudge Report, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, among others.  He lives and works in a small town outside of Toronto.

Older articles by Klaus Rohrich


Sponsored