The Inhumanity of MMP

Marcus Brubaker marcus.brubaker-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org
Wed Oct 10 23:15:22 UTC 2007


Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 01:03:55AM -0400, Marcus Brubaker wrote:
>   
>> 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.
>>     
>
> Well certainly some members of the Citizen's Assembly were not happy
> with the MMP idea, but it was what the majority ended up picking as the
> best proposal.  Some of them certainly had other ideas.
>   

There were a series of three votes at the end of the Assembly process.  
The first was on April 1, 2007 and asked the members to decide between 
two alternative elector systems.  The vote went 75 MMP and 25 STV 
(Single Transferable Vote).  On April 14, they were then asked whether 
Ontario should keep its current system or switch to MMP.  The vote went 
16 for current system and 86 for MMP.  Finally, there was a vote on 
April 15 about whether to recommend MMP to the people of Ontario, it 
went 94 to 8.  So you're right, some of them had other ideas but a vast 
majority of them thought this was a good idea.

> Certainly the web site on MMP is seriously lacking in details.  It gives
> the impression that the proposal is seriously lacking in details, which
> of course if true should be a good reason not to vote for it.  Some
> things certainly has to be cleared up first.
>   

Which website are you referring to?  
http://www.citizensassembly.gov.on.ca/ actually has quite a lot of 
information and documentation on both the proposal and the process by 
which it was arrived at.  A lot of it was designed to be printed and if 
you were very lucky you might have gotten some of the printed copies 
which were nicely put together.  At any rate, I think one of the great 
injustices of this whole process was that all the work that the Citizens 
Assembly did was hardly distributed at all and as a result basically no 
one has a clue about it and think this proposal just fell from the sky 
or someplace even more insidious.

Cheers,
Marcus
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