I have a high regard for people who have strong opinions and the courage to express them.
Republican member of the United States Congress, Liz Cheney, is one of those. Bold, brave, and unconcerned about personal consequences, she put it all out there at a prime-time televised committee hearing last week. Regardless of her political future, she will go down in history for that.
I have much less time for whiners.
There has been a lot of that since the provincial election in Ontario a little over a week ago. All of a sudden, many of those who were unsuccessful with their preference were crying foul, attacking our electoral system, moaning over low voter turnout and in some cases, questioning the legitimacy of the election itself. Shades of the United States!
Chief among these was the Toronto Star. In a recent editorial commenting on the provincial election, entitled “Time to ditch our outmoded voting system” (online you’ll find it as “Ontario’s election produced a result that is unfair and unrepresentative. The voting system needs to be changed”), they said this:
“And this time it [first past the post] produced a result that is patently unfair, completely unrepresentative, and is bound to increase even further the widespread cynicism about electoral politics that leads to such a dismal turnout. Why bother to vote, many will conclude, when the system is so rigged?”
All political journalist Andrew Coyne could say about this was “Whoa!”
Rigged? Again, shades of the United States. When was it rigged? Was it rigged in 1867 when first past the post was introduced as the electoral system for Canada? Has it been “rigged” ever since or just when those with influence don’t like the results?
In that same editorial, the Toronto Star opined, “It’s time to put electoral reform — specifically proportional representation — back on the agenda.”
Really? As Paul Rhodes, a political strategist and pundit, noted after reading that statement, “I’m still looking for the Star editorial where they bemoan FPTP when it elects Liberals.”
It certainly begs the question as to where the Toronto Star was during the last two federal elections when the Conservatives each time received more votes than the Liberals. Under proportional representation the Conservatives would have had more seats than the Liberals, and possibly the right to form government.
Where was the Toronto Star on proportional representation then? It does leave one wondering if their current position on electoral reform is anything more than hypocrisy, whining, and sour grapes.
John Mykytyshyn is a political consultant and public opinion researcher. I find him a little off the wall at times but agree when he says, “The reality is Good Losers look for what was missing from their campaigns and what they can learn. Bad Losers blame voters and democracy and endeavour to change the rules to win.”
First past the post as an electoral system may not be perfect but it does have its advantages. For example, if that method was in force for presidential elections in the United States, Donald Trump would never have been president. It’s hard for me to argue with that one!
While, as many will know, it is not my normal inclination to agree with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, I certainly did when he said this past week that proportional representation is not right for Canada. First and foremost, it would effectively do away with our system of local representation by ridings, which I believe to be an important part of our democratic process, and which also brings governance accountability closer to the people.
Under an electoral process of proportional representation, most if not all members of Parliament would be appointed and not elected. Electors would vote not for an individual, but only for the political party of their choice. Seats would be assigned based on the percentage of votes each individual party receives across the country and the party hierarchy, and not individual voters, would decide who actually sits in them. While this can be tweaked and twiddled with to make it appear more democratic, it is the basic model of proportional
representation.
Personally, I have no problem with a first past the post electoral system. It has worked in this country since confederation. This time around it worked well for the Tories in Ontario. At both levels of government, it has worked on other occasions, in favour of Liberals and Conservatives, and at least at the riding level for New Democrats. It seems indelicate to bitch about process only at the time when it doesn’t work for you. If we must look at electoral reform, however, I would far prefer a ranked ballot system over proportional representation.
A ranked ballot system would require every elected candidate to receive a 50 per cent plus one plurality. To accomplish this, voters would be allowed to indicate their first, second, and third choices on a ballot. Candidates with the lowest number of votes would be eliminated until the second or third choices of those that voted for the eliminated candidates amounts to a plurality for the candidate who receives the greatest combined votes.
This system would maintain representation and accountability at the local riding level. It would also require all elected representatives to have a majority of votes in order to be elected.
Some Conservatives would feel that this process would give an advantage to left-of-centre political parties, but I am not so sure. One part of the Toronto Star’s recent editorial that I do agree with, is that the Liberals and the NDP have “real, substantive differences”.
And from a personal point of view, such a system could well force Conservative policies more toward the centre than the far right of the political spectrum, in order to attract second-choice votes from Liberal supporters.
Whether one is a proponent of electoral reform or not, that is simply no reason to challenge the legitimacy of the recent provincial election in Ontario. It followed the rules and a process that has been in place for more than 150 years.
Like them or not, Doug Ford and his Progressive Conservatives won that election, fair and square.
Hugh Mackenzie
Hugh Mackenzie has held elected office as a trustee on the Muskoka Board of Education, a Huntsville councillor, a District councillor, and mayor of Huntsville. He has also served as chairman of the District Muskoka and as chief of staff to former premier of Ontario, Frank Miller.
Hugh has served on a number of provincial, federal and local boards, including chair of the Ontario Health Disciplines Board, vice-chair of the Ontario Family Health Network, vice-chair of the Ontario Election Finance Commission, and board member of Roy Thomson Hall, the National Theatre School of Canada, and the Anglican Church of Canada. Locally, he has served as president of the Huntsville Rotary Club, chair of Huntsville District Memorial Hospital, chair of the Huntsville Hospital Foundation, president of Huntsville Festival of the Arts, and board member of Community Living Huntsville.
In business, Hugh Mackenzie has a background in radio and newspaper publishing. He was also a founding partner and CEO of Enterprise Canada, a national public affairs and strategic communications firm established in 1986.
Currently, Hugh is president of C3 Digital Media Inc., the parent company of Doppler Online, and he enjoys writing commentary for Huntsville Doppler.
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57% didn’t vote so “None Of The Above” actually won a landslide.
Only 17.6% of voters gave Ford a big “majority.”
Hardly a strong mandate but he can act like it is.
It’s common for seats and popular vote to not match but Ford’s “majority” is an extreme example.
Trudeau got 20% and ended up with a minority as he should.
Ford got less than that and ended up with a big “majority.”
You state, “I have a high regard for people who have strong opinions and the courage to express them.”
Really? Then why does Huntsville Doppler refuse to publish my opinions in response to your Listen Up commentary? I do not base my opinions on the highly politicized Soros, Trudeau, and Biden-owned media but inform myself from a variety of respected political, independent media, and medical sources. I find it alarming that commentators in Huntsville Doppler are so uninformed on the threats that exist in the free world to our democracies, rights, freedoms, and ability to self-govern, and fail to recognize the threat to our own nation from three times elected by the people, Justin Trudeau, who speaks with admiration of the brutal Communist China regime, who has transformed Canada from a highly regarded nation to a nation on the brink of destruction. I wonder how many thoughts of others are simply removed from your comment section without even the courtesy of a reply. How dare anyone recognize President Trump for the positive future he had given America! Nowhere to be found is a commentary on the corruption and outright treason of the Trudeau government, the threat to the American Republic of the Biden administration, an endorsement of capitalism, a commentary on the danger to sovereign nations of Klaus Schwab Founder of the WEF and his Trudeau and Freeland connection, the indoctrination happening in our schools, or the failure of socialized medicine. Huntsville Doppler is even further left than the likes of The Toronto Star, the CBC, the lot of them and it is worrisome that given the majority of Canadians form their opinions from the media and irresponsibly fail to seek political information from other independent sources that understand the dangers of socialism, extreme climate radicals who damn fossil fuels, the WEF, the Globalists that seek to rule the masses with a One World Government of Elites.
There certainly are personal reasons to bemoan the result, “rigging” is not one of them. No, Doug won fair and square, largely because of apathetic voter turnout, and complete disarray in the Liberal and NDP campaigns.
I forget who it was that once called the Star “a Liberal rag”. Not much has changed, unfortunately.
Hugh Mackenzie: Because someone may hold and express a viewpoint different from your own, that doesn’t make them “whiners”. They may also disagree, a lot or a little, with the pundits you cite to support your viewpoint and I’m sure there are other noted commentators to support their viewpoint and refute yours.
If you feel there are people ‘whining’ about the Ford/Conservative election win, I’m not one of them. That doesn’t mean that I feel our system is working great.
If this is a democracy of the people, then the people better get involved and NO, I don’t like our ‘first past the post’ way of doing things. Might have been great in 1867, but it needs tweaking today.
I don’t like the idea of people having their hand out, accepting government largess, when they can’t be bothered to help elect the government.
I don’t like elected dictatorships, where programs can’t extend past 4 years.
I don’t find it reasonable that plus or minus 25% of the population is all it takes to produce a winner.
Should it follow, that if those who disagree with the way the system works, and you, are to be labelled ‘whiners’, might they label you a ‘gloater’?
Back in the day, a parent or teacher might deliver an ear ‘tweak’ for either display.
I was nonplussed by Hugh Hugh Mackenzie’s statement that “First past the post as an electoral system may not be perfect but it does have its advantages. For example, if that method was in force for presidential elections in the United States, Donald Trump would never have been president. It’s hard for me to argue with that one!”
Actually, it’s very easy, because the electoral college system IS first past the post and that method DID enable Trump to win the election. Indeed, electoral reform supporters have been counting that among our strongest arguments since 2016.
Mackenzie is also incorrect in his belief that proportional representation would mean that voters can only vote for a party and not a person. Some PR systems are like that, yes, but others aren’t. There are many ways of achieving a proportional result.
I do think that Mackenzie makes a fair point when he asks, where was the Star during the last two federal elections when the Conservatives each time received more votes than the Liberals?
I don’t know if The Star’s editorial was politically biased, but it might have been, because yes, they could have printed such an editorial after either of the last two federal elections in which the CPC won more votes but fewer seats. But better later than never, in my opinion.
I indict the media.
For any journalist who cared to look, there are an abundance of independent electoral reform studies, in different province across decades which all conclude with the same solution for what ails our democracy, proportional representation.
Justin Trudea’s multi-party electoral reform committee came to the same conclusion, proportional representation. The committee deliberated on evidence for ranked ballots and rejected them.
Yet that didn’t stop Trudeau from shutting down the committee and asserting, even though ranked ballots were ruled out, that he wanted ranked ballots and proportional representation was wrong for Canada.
Where were the media in this dramatic event?
Now Trudeau insists he was chrystal clear on his preference for ranked ballots during the election campaign which sang out at every doorknock, townhall and in the speech from the throne. ” We will make every vote count and end FPTP. ” whereas Trudeau should have said., “We will use ranked ballots.”
The media failed us then and still in 2022 in letting Trudeau rewrite his history and promo ranked ballots when ranked ballots never emerged as the recommendation to an independent, electoral reform study including the study conducted by parliament in 2016.
Why does Trudeau promote this obscure electoral reform, ranked ballots, used only on one house in Australia, when proportional representation is used throughout Scandinavia, in Taiwan, Germany. New Zealand and so on? Simple.
Simulations show ranked ballots benefit the Liberals.
Sorry. The Star Editorial is late to the party and should have come out in favor of proportional representation long ago. Let’s get this party started. May we each cast an equal and effective vote soon.
Normally I expect informed commentary from Hugh Mackenzie. Yet he describes Israel’s PR model, not the model used in Scotland and New Zealand, or the model recommended for Canada by the Law Commission of Canada. They still have local representation by ridings. No MPs are appointed. Electors have two votes, one for a local MP and one for a party. Under the Law Commission’s model, your second vote is for a regional candidate within your local region. It counts as a vote for that candidate’s party. It helps elect a few region-wide MPs for top-up seats, so that every vote counts. Which, it turned out, Trudeau didn’t really mean to promise. The Toronto Star got it right.
Great question, Hugh McKenzie. Our electoral system has been “rigged” (your word, not mine) since 1921. That was the year we had an effective third party enter the mix. Canada is a diverse nation and no two parties can reflect the diversity of viewpoint for any great length of time, and they haven’t done so since.
This Ontario election was the perfect storm as elections go. Covered all of the whacked results.
1. A majority government with less than 50% of the vote.
Federally, we haven’t had a true majority government (where over 50% of the votes went to that party) since Brian Mulroney in 1984.
2. Got more of the popular vote and less seats.
This Ontario election has a textbook case, where the Liberals got 23.8% of the vote, the NDP got 23.7%, the NDP got 31 seats and Official Opposition, the Liberals got 8 and were shut out of Party Status. But this happens a lot to some extent or another. Like in the 2021 Federal election, where the Conservatives had more of the vote, and the Liberals still got more of the seats.
3. Low voter turnout
I hear this election was the worst voter turnout in Canadian history. I haven’t looked myself, but it has to be at least up there with the worst.
There is no question that Doug Ford won the election fair and square. The electoral system needs to change, but not because he did anything wrong.
I have been fighting for electoral reform Federally and Provincially since 2008. EVERY election. Everyone’s vote should count, and everyone’s voice should be heard in our legislatures.
In Australia we have the “ranked ballot” system you described. It is called “preferential” voting here. You get to vote for your first, second, third etc choices. As a Canadian and now also an Australian citizen I found the system very awkward at first. If there is a close race in your riding it can take a week or more to sort out the preferences and get the final result. But I’ve grown used to it and now see its advantages. It gives minor parties, like The Greens, or Independent candidates with no party affiliation, a better chance of actually getting a seat in government and that brings different voices into the mix which, overall, is a good thing. Of course we are also required to vote in Australia so voter turnout is not a problem. I think getting more people to vote is the real concern for Ontario, not the voting system itself. I was shocked to see how few people actually voted in your last election. But how do you fix that without mandatory voting? I am not sure how Canadians would feel about that.
Lower turnout doesn’t always favour the incumbent but it favours them more often than not. There are simply financial, organizational and psychological advantages of incumbency, The data bears it out. According to a G&M article, “In two-thirds of provincial elections since 1937 in which the incumbent was returned to power, turnout decreased. In each of the last two elections won by the Liberals, turnout dropped by more than 3.5 per cent.”
And yes, the Conservatives won fair and square. It wasn’t what I personally wanted but it’s what happened. Get over it and help the governing party to do its job.
I think that some of those using words like ‘rigged’ are confusing – either deliberately or unintentionally – the fact that they believe it’s past time to do away with FPTP with unfairness in the system we currently use. When you lose an election is not the time to conflate the two. Maybe the time to discuss a move to Proportional Representation – or some other alternative – is when a party wins. But that’s precisely when they don’t want to do so here we are.
There are pros and cons to any electoral system; democracy is messy but it’s the best choice we have. So let’s stop whining and move along…there’s nuthin’ to see here til next time. It’s all been decided fair and square.