Maybe you’ve gotten a flyer in the mail or been invited to join a Facebook group. Your student union is pressing pretty hard for it. You can see ads, in 25 languages, explaining how on Oct. 10 Ontario will hold a referendum on switching from our current, “First- Past-the-Post” electoral system to a new “Mixed Member Proportional” one. Are you still confused?
The ads, websites, YouTube videos and the rest, are all part of a $6.8 million public information campaign launched by Elections Ontario to help Ontarians make an informed choice on the referendum slated for the October 10 general provincial election.
As of late June, a poll commissioned by Elections Ontario showed that only 28 per cent of voters even knew of the referendum, never mind its potential consequences.
According to University of Toronto Students Union VP external Dave Scrivener, this ignorance persists. “A lot of people have no idea it’s even happening, which is a pretty massive problem.”
Scrivener points to a recent, wellpublicized referendum on electoral reform that narrowly failed in British Columbia. The Ontario referendum, by comparison, is obscure.
UTSU, and more recently, the Canadian Federation of Students, have both decided to back the “yes” side of the referendum.
Scrivener expressed hope that MMP will put greater emphasis on the popular vote, with less depending on swing ridings and more on issues, including student ones.
Elections Ontario’s website on the referendum (www.yourbigdecision. ca), deals with basic questions like how an MMP ballot would look and work, but leaves the big question, how the new system could change Ontario’s politics, unanswered. Partisan websites are stepping in to fill the gap.
According to Dr. Lawrence LeDuc, professor of political science at U of T, “we’re only guessing what’s going to happen because no one knows with any certainty until the system is in place what it will be like.”
LeDuc is, however, a respected authority on electoral systems, and argues that the best way to guess what MMP might mean for Ontario is through comparative politics: “you can establish some parameters because there are models like this working in other places.”
New Zealand moved recently to MMP from a system like Ontario’s present one. Scotland uses MMP and, like Ontario, is part of a federation. Germany has used MMP longer of any country, and so is a useful indicator of what MMP could bring in the long run. All three countries are dominated by coalition politics, yet all three, LeDuc points out, have stable governments.
LeDuc quick to note that a lot of what could come out of MMP will be determined by circumstance and the political culture that emerges over time—factors that are difficult to predict. Some of that culture could come as responses to actions voters may not like: the formation of surprise coalitions, for example, or short periods of instability when there is a closely divided legislature. Critics of MMP have drawn comparisons between it and the somewhat similar systems used in Italy, which is overrun by small parties, and Israel, with its divisive and fractious politics, for example.
“The system that is being proposed by the citizen’s assembly is not at all like that,” said LeDuc. “So why people even bring it up, I don’t know, but I guess they think they can frighten people with those kinds of references.”
