MMP vs. FPTP Debate on TVO

Last Thursday’s episode of The Agenda With Steve Paikin on TVO covered MMP vs. FPTP with a live debate at the Munk Centre for International Studies at Trinity College, University of Toronto.

On the pro-MMP Side

• Rick Anderson – the chair of the Vote for MMP campaign.
• Marilyn Churley – former Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations and Registrar General in the Ontario NDP government from 1990-1995. She served as a New Democratic Member of Provincial Parliament for 15 years and two years as a Toronto City Councilor.
• Dennis Pilon – professor of Political Science at the University of Victoria.

On the anti-MMP Side

• Sheila Copps – columnist with Sun Media. She is a former Liberal MP, deputy prime minister and minister of the environment.
• David Fleet – director of the No MMP campaign.

There was a post-show video chat with featuring the guests taking viewer questions.

Previously The Agenda With Steve Paikin’s Election Battle Blog had a debate been bloggers.

Update: October 5, 2007

This episode of The Agenda with Steve Paikin covering the debate will be rebroadcasted on Monday 08 October 2007 8:00 PM

The Great Debate: Toronto Edition – Part 1

The Great Referendum Debate: Toronto Edition organized by The Centre for the Study of Democracy at Queen’s University was held yesterday, September 28, 2007 at the MaRS Complex in downtown Toronto.
For MMP were:

• Andrew Coyne – National Post political affairs columnist
• Marilyn Churley – former NDP provincial cabinet minister, nominated NDP for next federal election

Against MMP were:

• Christina Blizzard – Toronto Sun Queen’s Park columnist
• Charles Harnick – former PC provincial cabinet minister

Moderated by Tom Axworthy with introductory remarks by George Thomson, Chair of the Ontario Citizens’ Assembly.

The proceedings were taped by CPAC for later broadcast. Check local listings…

George Thomson initially spoke on the selection of the Ontario Citizens’ Assembly and the depth of study of the various alternative systems they looked at. He agreed with a common theme throughout the evening, too few people knew about the referendum or about MMP. He specifically criticized the rules that Elections Ontario’s education campaign was operating under – informing people that the referendum was occurring but not the pros and cons of MMP.

Following Thomson the moderator gave each speaker ten minutes to speak. This post gives my take on their positions. Part 2 will cover their answers to the moderator’s questions and questions from the floor.

Another Conservative Case For MMP

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.

Conservatives for MMP Disappointed By John Tory, Attack Anti-MMP Copps

Conservatives for MMP carefully explain why Ontario Progressive Conservative leader John Tory comments against MMP “seem to have been expressed without a true understanding of the proposal.” In a post the group explains that Tory’s concerns about MMP increasing the number of politicians are misplaced as the additional MPPs decrease the number of people per MPP which highest in Ontario. List candidates would not be selected by party bosses but in a transparent process and if the voters don’t like the list they can reject the party but still vote for a local MPP in the FPTP portion of the vote.

The group was much less restrained in attacking former federal Liberal cabinet minister, Sheila Copps for her editorial against MMP in which she expresses concerns about the selection of the party lists and also that it will result in many of the same problems as seen in Israel’s Knesset – the government being held hostage by small religious or other single issue parties. Conservatives for MMP say that this is a misplaced comparison as Israel has pure proportional representation, not the mixed member proportional proposed.
However other than a lower 1.5% instead of 3% vote threshold the proportional representation portion of MMP is effectively the same as Israel’s pure proportional representation and I feel comparisons are valid.

MMP Said To Be Good For the Environment

The Toronto Star’s environmental columnist states that MMP will be better for the environment because it will mean more consensus building and coalitions.

There are two reasons why proportional representation will benefit the environment.

The first is that a premier would be more inclined to make the environment a top priority.

Secondly, proportional representation will result in more minority governments and coalitions, which means responsibility for government policies would lie with more than one party.

The current system breeds instability. It’s a blood sport, where opposition parties focus more on gaining power than on good government, largely because they have little hand in creating policies and have no commitment to them.

As a result, government policies often have a short life span. In the face of global warming, short-term, ever-changing policies are a recipe for disaster.

A Conservative Case For MMP

The newly formed Conservatives For MMP blog has a posting of a transcript of a speech by Conservative Senator Hon. Hugh D. Segal, today at the Economic Club of Toronto in which he expressed his support for MMP as a means of ensuring fairness in the voting process. From the transcript:

This election, the referendum ballot we will get on election day also offers voters the opportunity to significantly modify the way future governments will be selected – the opportunity to deliver real fairness to a system that currently and effectively discards a great percentage of votes cast under the present system.

And he discounts concern about selecting “list members”.

Those proposed lists of 39 proportional members would be public record long before election day, and their quality and composition will tell us all more about the competence and representativeness of our political parties. This system in New Zealand, Germany, Wales and Scotland has proven the point through its historical records.

National Post on the Referendum and Opposing Sides

The September 8th National Post has a lengthy article on the referendum, including background to MMP, the lack of public awareness, and the main points of the pro-MMP and anti-MMP campaigns.

Liberals For MMP Suggest Plan For Party Under MMP

The grassroots pro-MMP group, Liberals For MMP have released a manifesto detailing a suggested mechanism by Ontario Liberal Party choose its province-wide list candidates under MMP and rules for which the Ontario Liberal Party could enter into power-sharing agreements with other parties. The manifesto states:

Should MMP pass this October, Liberals For MMP is proposing the Ontario Liberal Party choose its province-wide candidates using the following principles:

1. That the party undertake the most democratic and transparent process possible to select its province-wide list, convening regional party conventions and/or primaries to choose nominees.
2. At least 20 out of 39 province-wide candidates should be women.
3. The list must have regional balance, alternating between Ontario’s regions accordingly, starting with a nominee from Northern Ontario. The party must ensure that there is balance between rural and urban nominees on the list.
4. The party will ensure that Ontario’s diversity be well-reflected, with members of minorities historically excluded from the Ontario legislature well-represented.
5. All Liberal list members will open local constituency offices in the regions they were elected to represent.

If Ontario adopts MMP, majority coalition governments could become frequent. This provides us with another opportunity to ensure the party’s leadership is accountable to the party’s membership and by extension to the greater public.

Liberals For MMP is also calling on the Ontario Liberal Party to adopt a rule that any formal majority coalition agreements entered into by the party leadership under MMP must be approved by a majority of party members. If the party members disapprove of the formal coalition, it will be considered a vote of non-confidence in the party’s leadership.

Currently comments in response to the posting of the full manifesto and a follow-up news release focus mostly on the requirement that any formal majority coalition agreements entered into by the party leadership under MMP must be approved by a majority of party members being impractical.

Will MMP Increase Number of Female MPPs

Two Osprey Media papers, The Orillia Packet and The Sarnia Observer have published letters to the editor that express different view on whether MMP would mean more women and minorities in government. The Sarnia-Lambton Green Party MPP candidate and MMP supporter says that since the proportional list must be published in advance if the list is an all or predominantly male list, don’t vote for it. The person opposing MMP cities figures to show that this does not happen as men still get predominantly elected. They write:

In Scotland, which introduced a type of proportional representation earlier this year, the proportion of women in the parliament decreased in the election which followed. In Italy and Greece, which have used proportional representation for decades, the proportion of women in parliament is only 11 and nine per cent respectively.
Germany used a system similar to the one proposed for Ontario for decades, and yet the number of women in parliament remained low until after the unification of Germany.

Canadian Federation of Students Backs MMP

Canadian Federation of Students has announced that it is endorsing MMP following a vote by 80 representatives from over 30 students’ unions across the province at the recent Annual General Meeting of Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario. From the news release:

“It’s time to change the system,” said Jen Hassum, Chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario. “For far too long, our votes on Election Day have not been properly reflected in the number of seats assigned to each party by the current, outdated system.”
The growing support among students for changing the voting system to MMP is based on results that similar systems have yielded in other jurisdictions, including greater voter choice, fairer election results, and stronger representation for traditionally under-represented groups.