“Plan on starting with the basics if you are doing a presentation”
That was the comment made by a Fair Vote Canada member after a presentation at the Rotary club. A recent experience of mine confirms it. Last night, I was working at The Code Factory. While talking about the referendum, a business person there thought that the proposal from the Ontario Citizens Assembly only had party lists and no local riding members. In electoral system geek speak, he confused mixed member proportional with party list.
From his expression, I think had he known there were still local riding members in the proposal, he might have voted for MMP.
So the question lingers: if a business person could get confused about how MMP worked, how many people out there thought it was a list-only system?
I think in the next few days I’m going to test the knowledge of people who I know were opposed to it.
What 3 questions should I ask? Here’s what I’m thinking:
MMP was proposed by
Politicians
Citizens
The MMP proposal included list candidates. In the
proposal, how was the list made up?
Party leaders would appoint people to the list
They were elected by party members
It was unspecified and left to each party to determine. The list only had to be published before the election
In a column in Monday’s Ottawa Citizen called “Calling the bluff“, Mr. Potter talks about the change in the number of seats per province to more accurately reflect the population of each province and pays special attention to Quebec’s over-representation. Perhaps we should remind OC readers there are other kinds of reform. Here is my response:
Mr. Potter column “Calling the bluff” in Monday’s 12th of October paper makes the assumption that if the number of MPs for each province can be proportional to the population of said province, then democracy is restored.
But such assumption rests on another notion, that all votes are equal under our current winner-take-all electoral system. Yet in the last federal election, 50,7% of votes were discarded because they did not go to a wining candidate. For the votes that did count, they did not have an equal weight. For example, while there were more votes for the NDP than the Bloc, it is the separatist party that received more seats.
First-past-the-post would have given Merkel 73% of the seats with only 39% voter support
Our colleagues at Fair Vote US made an interesting analysis on the results of the German elections.
Bronwen Bruch, President of Fair Vote Canada said “But Canadians have good reason to worry. With five parties competing at the federal level, bizarre elections results are going to be the norm. We have already had three provincial elections where a party formed a ‘majority’ government despite finishing second in the popular vote.”
So, are you going to join Fair Vote Canada so we can have a truly representative government?
The recent German election results provide a classic illustration of how badly first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting can distort election results in a multi-party political system.
If Germans had used FPTP in last weekend’s election, Angela Merkel’s victory would have dwarfed the Canadian record for distorted election results (set by Brian Mulroney in 1984, when 50% of the votes translated into 75% of the seats for the Tories).
This is a great TED talk on the 5 different stages tribes will go through.
An important caveat is underlined at the end of the presentation:
great leaders are capable of reaching out to people at the 5 different
stages, not only the most “positive” stage.
So what do these stages would look like in the messaging and mentality of the proportional representation movement?
Stage 1: “Life sucks” = “Winner-Take-All sucks”
Stage 2: “My life sucks” = “I’m / we’re underrepresented”
Stage 3: “I’m great” = “My electoral system is better”
Stage 4: “We’re great” = “These are our institutions and we are capable of changing them”
Stage 5: “Life is great” = “Wow! This movement managed to get 4 referendums in the last 4 years!”
If you had to represent each stage as a sentence pertinent to our
movement, how would you phrase it?