The Die is Cast
It looks like Ontario has a new (old) government. Not much is new on that front. But the good news from the election is that the Greens portion of the popular vote skyrocketed to 8%, which is an impressive gain.
The bad news is that MMP didn’t receive the support it needed to pass, which precipitates a few questions: did the MMP initiative fail because people understood it and didn’t like it, or because they misunderstood it and didn’t like it? Was the system properly explained? Should the pro-reform use this as a starting point to pushing for future reform?
Here’s my personal take on MMP and the referendum (though this is only the view from my secluded little piece of the world)…
First up, a lot of people didn’t know about the referendum at all. Now I blame this a lot on the people themselves and only partly on the pro-MMP people and others who should be keeping us informed. Because on the one hand I know we all received little things in the mail saying that there was a referendum happening, I saw commercials, and I heard/read about it on the news so at that point I figured I had to look into it. A lot of others dismissed it and now say “Why wasn’t I told about this?” So a lot of it is their own fault for just being oblivious but also, in this day and age it seems that the above just isn’t enough. Things in the mail tend to just get thrown in with the load of bulk mail we receive. Commercials are fast-forwarded through using TiVo or PVRs or whatever. And the only “news” people are watching is Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. So it takes something more to get people’s attention.
Secondly, even when I did look into it I don’t think the descriptions of MMP were all that great. It took some work to answer some questions I had like “overhang seats” and some sites that talked about it were giving crappy information. Some sites actually just said that some mathematicians claimed overhang seats couldn’t happen in Ontario with no explanation. I thought “Really?” It seemed like some things were being glossed over.
And that leads to the whole “sky will fall” thing. People who did know a bit about it were seemingly getting swamped with messages about how evil it was right from the start. How “fringe” parties would somehow get all the power. How some adult film star would get a seat (I guess something like this happened somewhere else that wasn’t even using MMP, or at least this version of MMP). How it would cost us more money. How elected officials wouldn’t be responsible to the voters because they were put in by their parties and not elected by the people. Etc, etc. And at that point people made up their minds that it was evil and didn’t want to hear any more about it.
Now that’s not to say some issues people have with might not be appropriate. I know some people who do look into it don’t like the idea of people being given seats that aren’t directly voted in by the people. And that’s a valid way to feel and should be discussed. But the majority of people I talk to about it were throwing out quotes and such that they read on the internet and had no substance.
Perhaps what I might have liked to see (and maybe it was done and I missed it), attach a discussion about it to the debate but instead of having the politicians talking about it, have the pro-MMP side pick one person to represent them and the anti-MMP side pick someone. Have a third party present the choices and have each side present their reasons for going MMP or not.
But as I said, this is just my narrow view of things.