Pie Palace

Those of you who visit the PiePalace website may have noticed the Vote For MMP bling in the right hand column. I’m voting for Mixed Member Proportional representation because:

1. I want to see smaller parties in Ontario’s legislature. In the last provincial election, the Greens got 2.8% of the vote (that’s 126,651 votes) but no seats¹. Meanwhile, the Liberals got 46% of the vote with 2,090,001 votes. On average each Liberal seat cost 29,028 votes. Even though the Greens got more than four times that, we didn’t get a single seat.
   
2. I want to be able to vote separately for local representative and the party of my choice. So far I’ve been happy with my Green Party candidates, but it’s possible that another party would field a candidate that I prefer. In that situation, I don’t want to have to hold my nose and vote for a candidate I don’t like.
   
3. I’m tired of seeing false majorities. During the last election, the Liberals received only 46% of the vote, yet took 70% of the seats. I would much rather see a coalition government that included a number of parties.

There’s an interesting swirl of activity going on around the MMP campaign. The Yes side seems to be relatively well organized: their website looks pretty snazzy, and it has a pretty well written explanation of why MMP is good. Meanwhile, the No side seems to be relying on fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

1. All numbers from Wikipedia. The Elections Ontario website wasn’t serving historic data when I wrote this post. (back)