Pie Palace

I like democracy. I like having the right to vote for a party I believe in. But my vote doesn’t usually count for much. I’ve been voting Green since the late ’90s ¹. Since then, the only tangible result of my vote has been about $4 awarded to the federal Green Party in federal funding.

Even though roughly 500,000 Canadians voted Green in the last election, we didn’t win any seats. Why? Because our votes were spread evenly across the country, instead of clumped into a few ridings in one of this country’s many regions. If there was a mass migration of Greens into ridings in Ontario, we’d be able to take roughly 12 seats²

So I’m happy that Ontario has put together a Citizens’ Assembly to look into ways of improving our provincial electoral system. The result was presented (with little media attention) in mid-May. The system has the following features:

1. Ontario will have 129 seats in the provincial legislature.
   
2. 90 seats will be “local” (ie, associated with a given riding).
   
3. 39 seats will be “list” (ie, parties submit an ordered list of people to represent them).
   
4. List members will be awarded in a manner that tops up the number of their local seats. If a party gets 40% of the popular vote, but only 30% of the local seats then they will be given an extra 10% more seats from the list seats.
   
5. Voters will be presented with a ballot that has two parts: a local vote, and a party vote.

I’m not entirely happy with the proposal. The whole idea of “topping up” strikes me as overly complex. The percentage of list seats is quite low (it’s only 30% of the total) – I would rather see it at something closer to 50%.

Having said that, the proposal is better than our current system. It lowers the barrier to entry felt by smaller parties, while preserving local representation. As such, I’ll be doing what I can to support it.

It looks like the Yes Campaign is being run by the folks at Fairvote Canada. I’ve sent of my email asking to get involved. I encourage you to do the same.

1. After a brief flirtation with spoiling my ballot, and an even shorter flirtation with the NDP (back)
2. This is an extremely conservative estimate. The assumption behind it is that a riding in Ontario has 75,000 registered voters. If 40,000 people decide to vote Green in each riding, then we could spread the 500,000 Green votes across 12 ridings. Of course, most candidates win with a minority of the votes (40%ish, say), so we could probably squeeze another few Green seats out of those 500,000 votes. But keep in mind that most seats have fewer than 75,000 voters registered in them. In PEI, the average is closer to 27,000. (back)