The Inhumanity of MMP

[Marcus Brubaker]

Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> Marcus Brubaker wrote:  
>   
>> Those could all be good things but I see it as an orthogonal discussion
>> to this one.
>>     
>
> Not really. The "citizen's assembly" was charged with electoral reform
> and MMP was the best they could come up with. This indicates, to me,
> that those that claim that the CA serves political party interests over
> those of the electorate have a point.
>   

The Citizen's Assembly was tasked with *electoral* reform, not 
parliamentary or democratic reform.  They're job was to look at the way 
people's votes get translated into MPPs.  Recalls or an elected Senate 
were outside the scope of their mandate.  Further, they were an Ontario 
group, which means that unless you're talking about adding a Senate in 
Ontario, that was *completely* out of the range of possibilities.  I'm 
hoping that you've just failed to read the any of the actual source 
material instead of really believing that an Ontario assembly could 
would even try to change the federal government.

Feel free to present some real evidence of political bias, but until 
then I think the assembly stands as fairly neutral in my book.  Plus, I 
don't know if you've noticed but people from all sides of the political 
spectrum have backed this proposal.  For instance, from the right wing 
of the spectrum there is Andrew Coyne.

This isn't a vote about what could be, it's a vote about what the 
proposal does and doesn't do.  Are there other reforms which might help 
the political processes in Ontario and Canada as a whole?  Absolutely, 
but most of those were frankly not within the mandate of the assembly 
and have nothing to do with this debate.

> The vote tomorrow will be worth it if it fails bad enough to kill the
> idea, and make people think about reform driven to suit the electorate
> rather than minority parties.
>
> What I find most interesting is a recent Globe survey which indicates
> that the more informed the electorate, the greater the opposition to
> MMP. Maybe the system works after all.
>   

I'm not expecting this to pass tomorrow, but to believe that this vote, 
whichever way it ends up, will be an educated one is preposterous.  
Frankly, Elections Ontario and the entire government of Ontario have 
dropped the ball on even making people aware that anything was 
happening, much less explaining what's being voted on.  It's been 
expected from the beginning that inertia will lead people to oppose it 
if they know little about it.  That over half the population only 
learned that there was a referendum within the last two weeks does not 
give me much faith that most of them have given it any due consideration.

Marcus
--
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