In October 1992, our political, academic, and media elite united behind a fundamental change to the foundations of our democracy. But after a mostly one-sided campaign, Canadians, displaying greater foresight and a better sense of reality than their leaders, voted “No” to the Charlottetown Accord.
Fifteen years later, the elite are again united behind a fundamental change. And I suspect that after this mostly one-sided campaign, Ontarians will exercise similar good judgment and vote “No” to proportional representation.
The basic argument in favour of a Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system is well known: the percentage of votes a party receives will roughly equal its percentage of seats. In this way, MMP is said to give voters more “control.” But that control is mostly illusory.
Who we send to the legislature is, of course, important. But what really matters is what those people do when they get there. This is something that supporters of MMP neglect to discuss. Instead they have list after list showing the difference between vote share and seat share in Ontario elections in the 1950s or between women in Parliament in New Zealand (32 per cent) and in Ontario (25 per cent). To supporters of MMP, electoral systems are merely about who the politicians are.
Here in the real world, electoral systems are concerned with how our province is governed. In Ontario, as in any democracy, government is about compromises. Under our current system, the voters decide these compromises; to get elected, parties must appeal to a wide range of citizens by creating platforms that are at once coherent and unifying. In an MMP system, by contrast, parties get themselves elected by carving out core bases of support and then defending that group’s unique interests. Compromise gives way to politicians horse-trading in back rooms. This is a dangerous shift of control from voters to politicians— one that could do irreparable harm to Ontario’s democracy.
The shift will have important ideological implications as well. Currently, parties cannot run on ideas that are vastly unpopular amongst the majority of the population. If they did, they would force too many people out of their “big-tent.” Under MMP, more “ideologically pure” parties will form and elect members. Because the support of those parties will be required to maintain coalition governments, they will be in a position to demand legislation that the majority of the population opposes. Instead of being governed by big parties with moderate positions on all issues, our province will be governed by patchwork coalitions with extreme positions on at least some issues. Which extremes on which issues? That will be decided by the politicians.
Voters will lose authority under MMP in numerous other ways. One of the great virtues of our current system is that no matter how powerful politicians are, every four years they must answer to about 110,000 individual Ontarians. To maintain the confidence of their constituents, these politicians must knock on doors, go to barbeques, speak in schools, attend community festivals, and generally remain in touch.
MMP’s party list members would face no such constraints. While opponents of MMP are probably wrong to suggest that the list candidates would be a bunch of party hacks, it is true that they would be free to coast for four years at Queen’s Park before riding the coat-tails of their party to re-election. MMP shifts power from voters to politicians and from individual representatives to party leadership.
MMP is not guaranteed to deliver all the practical benefits its supporters promise. It will not make more people vote: in New Zealand, voter turnout improved by three per cent in the first MMP election, but fell nearly 10 per cent below pre-MMP levels in the second and has still not recovered. It will not eliminate the problem of liking the party but not the local candidate: what if you like the party but not the list candidate? It will not eliminate strategic voting: supporters of parties that rarely get topped off with list seats will cast their second ballot strategically. It will remain true that in politics we can’t always get what we want.
MMP assumes that if we send political parties to Queen’s Park in the right proportions, everything else will take care of itself. Fortunately, voters recognize that it’s not the politicians that matter in a democracy, but the compromises we make with each other. On October 10, we must refuse to cede control of our democracy.
