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Tom Monto

2022 Ontario showed us how not to conduct an election (Millwoods Mosaic article)

The recent Ontario election gave us a solid example of how our present election system produces poor results. Past elections have been just as weird under the First Past The Post system. But this time the clash between how votes are cast and how seats in the Legislature are filled is so glaringly obvious that even authorities as staid as the Toronto Star have decided enough is enough, it is time for a change. In a recent editorial, the Star's editors broadcast their view that the present election system "produced a result that is patently unfair, completely unrepresentative, and is bound to increase even further widespread cynicism about electoral politics" leading to low voter turn-out. (June 9, 2022) It is nothing less than a miscarriage of voter justice for a party that took less than 41 percent of the votes to take two-thirds of the seats. Doug Ford's Conservatives, with the support of 18 percent of eligible voters, took 100 percent of the power in the Ontario Legislature. The unrepresentative nature of the affair is particularly obvious to us in far-away Alberta. Here, many questioned the right of Jason Kenny, who was supported by just more than half the members of his party, to continue as premier. The questions were so loud that Kenny in fact stepped down - or anyway has scheduled his resignation. While in Ontario, we see Ford, supported by less than 18 percent of eligible voters, remaining in power, seemingly untouched by scandal, confident in the power that sheer chance and the foibles of First Past The Post have granted him. The Liberals, NDP and Greens altogether received 54 percent of the votes cast, and although divided on which party should lead Ontario, each of those voters clearly were opposed to Ford leading the province. But now under the prevailing system he is lined up to govern for another four years. How could Ontario have done things differently? Under Proportional Representation, the Liberals, NDP-ers and Greens would have taken about 54 percent of the seats, and Ford's Conservatives would have taken about 41 percent of the seats. With no one party holding a majority of the seats, any combination of parties that held a majority of seats would wield power. Likely it would have been a Liberal-NDP-Green united effort. Under a two-round system such as used in France, the two most-popular parties would have battled for a majority position in a second round of voting. If it had been used in Ontario, the Conservative party and the Liberal party would have been in a two-sided contest on the second vote, and it seems clear that the Liberals would have received many votes from previous NDP and Green voters and the Liberal party would have been declared a winner and been awarded a majority of the seats. There is a third replacement for the present accident-ridden FPTP. That is Single Transferable Voting, used successfully now for a hundred years in Ireland, Malta and Australia. It was used at one time even in Alberta provincial elections. When STV was used in Alberta, members were elected in city-wide districts. with each city electing members of different parties, reflecting the true diversity of city voters. Under STV, votes are seldom ignored. Most of the votes cast are used to elect a member. If STV had been used in the recent Ontario election, Toronto would have likely elected 9 Conservatives, 8 Liberals, 7 NDP-ers and 2 Greens. Under First Past the Post, Toronto elected 13 Conservatives, 9 NDP-ers, 4 Liberals, and no Greens. The STV result just in that one city would have been better balanced than what did happen across the whole province under FPTP - Liberals only elected 8 MLAs across the whole province and the Greens elected just one MLA. The under-representation of those two parties opened the door to the Conservatives' over-representation, now the cause of much regret as Ontario looks ahead to four years of rule by a government backed by less than a quarter of eligible voters. In Alberta we have never had a minority government. Always one party has taken more than half of the seats in the Legislature. But we have had governments that had the support of less than half the voters. We saw this type of minority rule in 1993 when the Conservative party, led by Ralph Klein, backed by just 45 percent of the vote, took all but 8 seats in the Alberta Legislature. Federally, we have had many minority governments, where no party had a majority of seats in the House of Commons. Unlike First Past The Post, any fair voting system would produce more minority governments - in Ottawa, in the Ontario Legislature and "under the dome" in Edmonton. Minority governments in fact are common under Proportional Representation and STV in Europe today. But those countries make it work. Similar-minded parties work together, and a majority of voters are content to live under a government chosen by a majority of the voters. We should be so lucky. ============================

(originally published in Millwoods Mosaic June 2022)

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