When the ballots were all counted on October 2, Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals had won 72 seats out a total 103 available. While that stands as an impressive majority of seats, they achieved that result with a minority of ballots cast (just 46 per cent). The same could be said for every majority government elected in Ontario since the mid-1930s. Not surprisingly, none of those faux-majority governments has seen fit to change the first-past-the-post electoral system that put them in office. If change is to occur, it will be up to voters to demand it.

One of the many disappointments that I felt at the end of Bob Rae’s five years in office is that the NDP government didn’t even broach the subject of electoral reform, let alone do anything about it. While acutely aware of the fact that he had been elected with a mere 38 per cent of the popular vote — indeed, he regularly cited that fact when excusing his failure to act boldly in a particular policy area — Rae nevertheless kept the system in place that made that feat possible. The system had its revenge on Rae (and the electorate) when it subsequently facilitated the election of two majority Conservative governments, also elected with less than half of the ballots cast.

Besides the way that the current system translates ballots cast into seats awarded, there is considerable evidence that it also affects both whether people vote and how they vote. Particularly when opinion polls suggest that the outcome of the election is a fait-accompli, many voters feel that they needn’t bother to cast a ballot. Combined with the loss of door-to-door enumeration, the perception that one vote won’t make a difference is the single biggest contributor to the plummeting turnouts that have plagued us in recent elections.

In addition, first-past-the-post system puts pressure on voters to give their vote to a party that can win a particular riding. In the recent provincial election, that translated into thousands of voters casting their ballots for the Liberals when they actually would have preferred to vote either Green or NDP. Under a different system, people would be largely free from such pressures, as every vote would count equally.

But, even assuming that everyone voted exactly the same way under a reformed system, the legislature resulting from our latest exercise in balloting would look a lot different. Fair Vote Canada, a multi-partisan citizens’ campaign for voting system reform, estimates that an electoral system based on proportional representation would have given us the following results: “The Liberals would have had about 48 seats and a minority government, rather than a 72-seat majority government& the Tories would have had about 35 seats rather than 24& the NDP would have had about 14 seats rather than 7& and the Green Party would have gained about 3 seats.” This result would have led the Liberals to seek the support of the NDP and/or the Greens, and the resulting government would have been exactly what voters wanted.

So, what are the prospects for change? Better than you might think. The Liberal platform stated: “You will decide how elections work…After consulting with the public, we will hold a referendum on whether we should keep our winner-take-all voting system or replace it with another. Alternatives to our voting system could include some form of proportional representation, preferential ballots or mixed systems.” Curiously, the Liberals’ federal cousins recently used their own parliamentary majority to kill an NDP motion which called for a national referendum on proportional representation — exactly what the Ontario Liberals are proposing for Ontario.

Still, Dalton McGuinty has been fairly adamant that some kind of electoral reform is overdue. In a 2001 interview with Pundit Magazine, McGuinty cited “waning confidence in government” as the impetus behind this position. He went on to say that “the two alternatives that would be on the table would be preferential balloting, which requires only modest changes to the system that we have in place, and proportional representation, which has various forms found throughout the world. What I want to do is have a debate. I want to inform the public about the options, and then I want them to make a decision. They may decide, at the end of the day, to say ‘thank you very much for the opportunity, we’ve had a review and we understand what it is that we have, its upsides and its downsides, and we’re sticking with what we have.’ Or they may decide ‘no, we’re going to make a change.’ And I just think it’s very important that we have a debate.”

Let that debate begin now. But don’t let it be a debate between politicians, academics and newspaper columnists. Get informed, and get involved. This may be the best chance you have to create an electoral system that works for everyone.

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Scott Piatkowski

Scott Piatkowski is a former columnist for rabble.ca. He wrote a weekly column for 13 years that appeared in the Waterloo Chronicle, the Woolwich Observer and ECHO Weekly. He has also written for Straight...