Referendum October 10th!
I’m starting to hear rumours that this Ontario referendum hasn’t been well publicized and that a lot of people don’t know what it’s about. Personally I think it’s an important step toward a more representitive government, so I hope people are made aware and vote!
Right now we have the “first past the post” system which means that the representitive with the most votes in a riding gets a seat in government and noone else from that riding does. In theory this makes sense, but imagine the following. Three ridings near one another are each very competitive. One between the Liberals and the Conservatives, and two others between the Liberals and the NDPs. Now imagine that the Liberals win a seat in each riding by a margin of 1%. Hypothetically the first riding votes 51% Liberal and 49% Conservative and the other two ridings are the same proportion except with NDPs. Overall there is a great deal of support for all three parties, and yet only the Liberals would be represented in this system.
The idea with MPP (mixed party proportional?) is that representitives would still be elected from ridings, but there would also be seats designated to parties who did not get enough representitives elected to correspond to their proportion of the popular vote. Result? The percentage of votes a party gets will actually correspond to the percentage of seats they have in government. Cool much?
Anyway, look into it further. Decide what you think, and make sure you vote in the referendum!!
For more information:
The Referendum Website
An article from city news
The Vote for MMP website
Add comment September 30th, 2007