Is it that opposition to MMP in Ontario is beginning to get some traction? Today, provincial politics columnist Murray Campbell comes out swinging against the proposed “electoral system (is) that (it) would expand the legislature and stack it with people who didn't have to win an election.” Pretty damming criticism of the solution to the problem few were fretting about.
I have been left wondering who supports MMP and why. Campbell, in describing the flaw some perceive with the existing first past the post electoral system, which is more likely to produce clear winners, comes to the same conclusion I have. Of the propensity of FPTP to produce a majority government from a party that receives less than 50% of the total votes, Campbell states, “It's lamentable only in a world where every student is the class scholar and every player on a sports team is an MVP.”
Bingo! That is just what I have been thinking as I read some of the pro MMP commentary and thought a bout the education system that may have prodded them. Right - they are from the generation in which everyone was a winner. Schools introduced athletics without competition - everyone got a prize at the end of the race. Marking systems were revised so more and more students could get into university. At my high school in the 1960s, one or two graduates a year might achieve the esteemed Ontario Scholar award. Now its about a dozen every year. Does anyone really believe today’s students are so much smarter? Certainly not the university faculty I talk to.
It’s perhaps only natural then, that this “everyone wins” philosophy would carry over to the political realm. Why should you actually have to be elected to sit in the legislature? Why not set aside 1/3 of the seats for people who just want to be themselves.
Of the inevitable fragmentation of the provincial legislature that would result from MMP, Campbell writes:
“New parties would spring up because the threshold is so low - just 3 per cent of the vote. (Rick Mercer passed that mark in four days with his 2000 spoof of Stockwell (Doris) Day and YouTube gamers would love the challenge of persuading 135,000 voters to support a spoof party.) MMP advocates say it's speculation that parties based on religion or ethnicity would be formed but, equally, it's speculation that they wouldn't. Could Mr. McGuinty have resisted the pressure to adopt sharia law if he had needed an Islamist party to govern? The inevitable creation of single-issue splinter parties would threaten the parliamentary tradition in which people with strong views had to find compromise within big-tent political parties. Balkanization would surely follow.”
That, among other things, explains why I oppose MMP.
