FPTP vs MMP

[Andrew Heagle]

On October 6, 2007 18:57:57 Colin McGregor wrote:

[snip]

>
> > Also, I might point out a certain
> > http://www.parlament.ch/e/homepage,
> > where proportional representation has served well
> > for a few hundred
> > years...
>
> For some values of well, with 14 parties currently
> represented in the Swiss government, and since 1959
> ruling being done by a four party coalition. In other
> words effectively PERMANENT government gridlock. Put
> another way, while not the total mess found in Italy
> or Israel, the Swiss situation does not inspire
> confidence in the MMP system.
>
> > Jamon
>
> Colin McGregor
>

The Swiss do not use MMP, they use party list voting only. Their "regional" 
(Cantonal) elections are done by voting for individuals with no parties 
involved. Also, you mention Israel and Italy a few times. Israel also uses a 
Party List electoral method, not MMP. 

Italy used to have a Party list (like Israel) system only but then changed to 
an MMP system, but I think their situation is different than ours because 
their system revolves around 2 Coalition groups with multiple parties, which 
I think is left over from their List party days, but I doubt the same thing 
would happen here. They also allow people in their government that don't even 
live in their country.  

Anyway, here is why I AM going to vote for MMP. Like Chris Browne mentioned, 
my riding defaults to the Liberal party. On the federal level (I know the 
referendum is provincial only), the Liberal MP for my riding is a social 
conservative, Tom Wappel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Wappel), even 
though there are a lot of immigrants in in my riding. I'm sure they would NOT 
vote for him if they actually knew who this guy was. In fact, I don't even 
remember seeing that many lawn signs in my area for him either. Anyway, 
because on my riding Liberals tend to win >=50% of the votes in my area, 
what's the point in even voting? (I do still vote, but I always feel my vote 
is wasted). With MMP, at least I won't feel like my vote is being wasted 
anymore, as I want to vote for the Green party.

Also, I personally don't like majority governments. People complain with MMP 
that there's no "accountability", but when a party has a majority government, 
they can virtually do anything they want. Who's to stop them? Once they are 
in, there is nothing we can do as electors to stop them. When was the last 
time we in Canada held a by-election because we didn't like our elected 
representatives? At least with minority governments, which MMP systems tends 
to favour, (FPTP tends to favour majority governments), the other parties 
have more influence as to what bills/laws are passed. The PC and Liberal 
parties do not want to have MMP because they will lose some power. There was 
a discussion about this on "The Agenda" on TVO tonight (which was a repeat 
from 2 weeks ago).

In the past few years, the Federal Liberals have had majority governments, 
such as in 1997 they only had 38.46% of the popular vote but won over 50% of 
the seats. Did they deserve to have a majority? Meanwhile the Bloc got a 
meagre 10% of the votes but had over 44 seats. In 1993 the Bloc had 13% of 
the votes and were the official opposition (with 54 seats) while in that same 
year the PCs got 16% (more than the Bloc) and only had 2 seats! 


Regards,
Andrew
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists