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Liberals win, Tory loses, MMP not adopted
Ontario voters have elected a second straight Liberal majority. The province was painted red yet again as Dalton McGuinty lead his party to its first consecutive majority in 70 years. PC leader John Tory not only lost his bid to become Premier, he also lost his seat in parliament. Kathleen Wynne, the current education minister, defeated Tory in the riding of Don Valley West. John Tory is the first party leader to lose his or her seat in 17 years. It appeared, however, that Tory is planning on remaining leader of the party despite the loss.
Toronto voters did not change their allegiances in the last four years. Out of the 24 Toronto ridings, 19 ridings went to the Liberals, four went to the NDP, and the PC only managed one, as Julia Munro was victorious in York-Simcoe. The 905 region elected 15 Liberals and 5 Conservatives.
At the dissolution of parliament 67 MPPs were Liberals, 25 were Conservatives, 10 represented the NDP, and there was one vacant seat. Not much has changed. Parliament will now be made up of 71 Liberals, 26 Conservatives, and 10 New Democrats.
The referendum regarding electoral reform also maintained the status quo. About 63 per cent of voters chose to stick with the current first-past-the-post system. Many blamed confusion, lack of education, and poor explanations for the loss suffered by the mixed member proportional system. P.E.I. and British Columbia have voted on the electoral system earlier, but both votes lead to the same results as Ontario, with the current system remaining.
The Liberals won 42 per cent of the votes, but now hold 66 per cent of the seats in parliament. The Progressive Conservatives garnered 32 per cent of the votes, but will sit in 24 per cent of the seats and the New Democratic Party's 17 per cent gives them about 10 per cent representation in parliament. The Green Party won over eight per cent of Ontario voters, but they remain without a seat in parliament.
Voter turnout was even lower than last time. While many thought that the referendum would boost the numbers heading to the polls, only about 50 per cent of eligible Ontarians bothered to vote. The turnout in 2003 was 56.9 per cent.
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I find it ridiculous that the Green Party won over 8% of voters yet gets zero representation for this. The system is broken.
I think it was the low voter turnout that killed any possibility of an electoral reform (which I do feel is highly necessary).
Bottom line... Canadians don't like change. We go through a bunch of rigamorole, only to end up with the same damn government, who we constantly bitch and moan about. WTF?
We're wayyyyyy behind the times on this one. If the Country had MMP in the last election, the Bloc would have something like 17 seats instead of 51 and the NDP would have something like 40-ish seats instead of under 20. The system is broken and the onus is on the people to figure out the difference.
No complaining about brochures not arriving in your snail mail box. You have the internet, you have google, there's no excuse to not be informed.
The amount of apathy and stupidity rolling around election time is high enough as it is, do you expect people to actually research MMP or to read those insanely detailed brochures (more than once?)? Yeah, ideally everyone would care and be intelligent to understand those complicated pamphlets but... definitely not the case.
I think what killed MMP is probably the same thing that killed Quebec's sovereignty in referendum. "Duh, Quebec separate Canada? Canada separate Quebec? Duh me no get!"
However, does anyone think that some people voted for the first-past-the-post system because they actually understand it and still supported it? It's not only idiots that voted for it, as many people seem to assume.
Not having MMP in this election was actually bothersome to me. The leader of the Green Party was running in my riding, and he actually *lives* in the neighborhood (unlike most of the other candidates here). To me, he would be a no-brainer to vote in as the best representative for my riding, but whether I actually support the ideas of the Green Party is another issue... it would have been nice to vote him and another party. Instead, the other party got my single vote.
I have copied and pasted my thoughts on the issue from a previous thread (posted today) since people seem to be reading this one.
I don't understand the problem with "current" and "alternative". How else would you describe them? I suppose you could have gone with "existing" and "proposed", but I don't really see the difference. While I appreciate that there is always a fair amount of head scratching and soul-searching the day after a (resounding) election defeat, the pro-MMP forces are ignoring the obvious reason why the referendum failed: voters are content with the current system.
On another vein, CBC is reporting that 6 or 107 ridings met the 50% threshold (which was required of 50% of ridings to pass, in addition to the overall 60% threshold). Does anyone know which ridings these are or have a link to a riding-by-riding breakdown?
(posted by another user) The Star has a breakdown, but it's a little annoying to navigate:
http://www3.thestar.com/cgi-bin/star_static.cgi?section=results&;page=/Specials/071010_election_results.html
Thanks for that, and interesting results. All 6 ridings favouring MMP are in Toronto proper and none of them reached the 60% threshold - i.e., even where the idea was most popular (and one infers, where the yes campaign concentrated its resources), it was not popular enough to meet the supermajority threshold. That is - not a single riding was in favour of MMP to the required majority. In other words, park your conspiracy theories at the door.
The ridings, for those interested are:
Trinity Spadina (NDP held)
Toronto Danforth (NDP held)
Toronto Centre (Liberal held)
Beaches EY (NDP held)
Davenport (Liberal held, strong NDP and green candidates)
Parkdale HP (NDP held).
Draw your own conclusions, but one can at the very least infer that the idea was most popular in jursidictions where it was perfectly rational for voters to prefer MMP, i.e., NDP strongholds, since it is acknowledged that the NDP (and, to a lesser extent, the Greens) would be the big winners in an MMP system. Yet, paradoxically, these are also the jursidictions where NDP voters have been able to get their candidates elected first-past-the post.
(I add: one would have thought that the greatest MMP support would come in ridings which inevitably elect MPPs of a particular party - it would the other voters in those ridings who would be most "unrepresented" in the current system, n'est pas. I invite you to look at the results for, say, Whitby, a long-time PC stronghold (so much so that the departing MPP was replaced by his wife), and try and make sense of the data.
Most people were simply not talking about it, but you know who I actually found to be most enthusiastically discussing it? Young people. Interested in democracy! WhaaaT!
The majority of my friends, myself included, would describe themselves as anarchists long before taking any other political designation. Yet we were all very excited about MMP and were talking to each other and to anyone who would listen in the lead up to this.
I said that the only reason I was bothering to vote in this election was the referendum, and I wasn't alone on that. In the face of what looked again like a cheap imitation of democracy, it seemed to offer an opportunity for real political involvement that really might've meant something.
And what crushed it? The oppressive weight that our system hands to ignorant people via disproportional representation, and an unfair "super-majority" demand that far exceeds what any political candidate would ever be expected to reach to have their win considered valid.
Meaning, the reason we've felt the opportunity to fix our broken system was crushed was the broken system itself, the broken system that makes all of us not merely apathetic and disillusioned, but often very aggressively so.
Disillusionment, as in every election, has won another landslide. I'd better not hear people keep whining about youth apathy in the future, 'cause we're just looking at our options and choosing the ones that actually work some of the time.
This is such twaddle. The Pro-MMP forces want to wrap themselves in the flag of the "unrepresented" voter, who may or may not exist. Yet the whole system is contructed to benefit the "unrepresented" or "underrepresented" party - under MMP, I would be given two votes, neither would ask me about my "values", as you put it. The additional vote would ask me to support a party.
(2)"The anti-MMP 'campaign' barely popped up anywhere to say anything, while pro-MMP stuff was everywhere and was clearly greatly supported by everyone I heard talking about it." with "The majority of my friends, myself included, would describe themselves as anarchists long before taking any other political designation. Yet we were all very excited about MMP and were talking to each other and to anyone who would listen in the lead up to this."
A few thoughts. First, everyone you spoke to, by your own admission, shares your viewpoint, such that your sample is horrendously non-representative. I encountered many pro-voices, but most thought the case against reform had not been made. The left always likes to explain its defeats on the basis that the poor sod voter did not have the right information, or powerful forces prevented them from having it, which demonstates both its elitism and its arrogance. The cognitive dissonance necessary to explain a 38% pro-MMP result on these forces is staggering. As the razor says, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
Second, shame the pro-MMP lobby missed the opportunity to run the campaign slogan "MMP - Anarchists love it!" - might have one them a couple more percentage points.
Third, the defeat is even more impressive given the clear absence of a coherent no to MMP campaign. The yes campaign was far more active yet the results (for them) were poor.
Fourth, the claim that one system of government is more "democratic" than another is highly vexed. Certainly political science does not describe it as you do, and judges the level of "democratic" by the process and not the outcome. I repeat my mayor example above - is the fact that we have only one mayor "undemocratic" (except in the circumstances where the mayor gets 100% of the vote)? In the end, MMP and FPTP are different systems which lead to different outcomes but both are equally democratic.
Fifth, there is no data to support your claim that voter turnout is greater in MMP or PR systems, or that it increases once a country moves from FPTP.
It's too bad MMP didn't make it. It would not have been perfect (does such a system exist?) but to me it's very clear that the current system is broken and the MMP would have been a step forward.
On Voting day proper, I worked the polls as a Polling Day Revision Assistant... there to help people correct their voters info so they could vote... The average age of the voters at the polling station I worked was 50+... Wow what politically active youth! the station maybe saw 350 people all day... 12 Hours Folks! this was in the Woodgreen Leslieville area... obviously a hotbed of complacency.
Another simple solution, follow Australia's lead and make voting mandatory. A $250.00 fine for failure to vote might shift some asses into the polling places, and if not, It would generate some much needed income for the province... Don't want to Vote? Pay $250.00 and you don't have to... Really people, the populace has been put to sleep and the government likes it that way... WAKE UP!
D.M.Howe