The National Post political affairs columnist Andrew Coyne will be one of the speakers for the MMP side at the MaRS complex debate on Thursday, September 27th. In a column he describes why conservatives should support proportional representation in order to get away from the “winner take all” nature of Canadian politics that pushes all major parties to the centre. With MMP, parties will take more chances including that of promoting genuine conservative principles.
Update: September 27
Coyne expands his case against FPTP, focusing on false majorities and wasted votes:
Consider some of the results of recent elections. In Ontario, an NDP government was elected in 2000 with 37% of the vote. In British Columbia, the NDP won a majority of the seats in the 1996 election though it received less than 40% of the vote — not merely fewer than a majority, but fewer than its nearest rivals, the Liberals.
These are hardly unusual. In 26 federal elections since 1921, there have been 16 majority governments elected, but only two that actually commanded a majority of the vote. The rest were minorities posing as majorities, wielding undivided power though as many as five voters in eight voted against them. Supporters of the status quo cite its tendency to produce stable majority governments. But these aren’t majority governments. They’re legalized coup d’etats.
False majorities are but one of the distortions to which the present system gives rise. It is not unknown in this country for one party to take all or nearly all of the seats in the house, with 60% or less of the popular vote — as happened in B.C. in 2001, and New Brunswick in 1987. The 40% of the public or more who voted for other parties, with other philosophies, were effectively disenfranchised: entitled to vote, but not to representation, which alone gives votes meaning.
Update September 29, 2007
Coyne has another column defending MMP against the claim that it would lead of fringe parties holding the major parties hostage for their support. He notes:
Germany and New Zealand both use MMP. Their parliaments typically produce between four and eight parties, none of them extremist, with two large centrist parties as anchors. The same pattern is observed in other PR countries: Ireland, Australia, Norway, Sweden and Denmark all currently have seven parties in their legislatures.
It’s true that these systems do not typically produce one-party majority governments. Rather, they tend to be led by multi-party majorities: stable coalitions, that is, which together command the support of a majority of the legislature — and, unlike the current system, a majority of the voters. We associate this sort of government with instability only because of the incentives under FPTP, which encourage parties to trigger an election at the first spike in the polls, betting that a 2% rise in support can translate into a bushel of extra seats. Under PR, there’s no such payoff.
As for the prospect of extremist hijackings, that is supported neither by experience nor common sense, depending as it does on a number of increasingly unlikely conditions: that the extremist party has just enough seats to hold the balance of power; that none of the larger parties’ members break ranks, but rigidly vote the party line; that, likewise, the mainstream parties are incapable of voting with one another to defeat the extremists; and, most importantly, that none of the parties, large or small, pays any price for their behaviour with the electorate.
Update: October 3, 2007
In Part 3 of his defense of MMP Coyne discusses why proportional representation works, making every vote count:
Proportional representation, on the other hand, makes every vote count, and every vote equal. As such it ensures majority governments really do represent a majority, whether under one party’s banner or in coalitions. It opens up the political market to new competitors, and encourages parties to compete in healthier ways: by the earned increments of persuasion, rather than winner-take-all bets on split votes and other vagaries of the current system.
The party lists for list MPPs could be full of hacks, but as not if the party hoped to win the election:
Second response: Why would the parties do this? Why would they commit electoral suicide? Why would their members let them? It’s one thing to impose your hand-picked lackey on some poor riding association somewhere, amid the hurly-burly of a general election. It’s quite another to post an entire slate of ward-heelers and log-rollers to represent the party –in the shop window, as it were, where everyone could have a good look at them.
Posted by Mark Fox 
Posted by Mark Fox 
Posted by Mark Fox 