Less than four months ago, I wrote about ways our election
systems were improving. Back then, progress at both provincial and federal fronts
was good, but I noted some key drawbacks. Amazingly enough, over the course of
an exciting summer, both of those problems were addressed and we are now on an
even stronger track to improvement.
At the provincial level, reforms to election finance have
leapt beyond what was first floated. The current super-high contribution limits
exceed $15,000 per party per donor, double that in an election year. $30,000
can buy a lot of political influence! Reforms floated in the spring would have
cut that down to $7,750, still too much. But a recently-announced amendment has
cut that in half, and further proposes banning MPPs, candidates, and party
leaders from political fundraising events. It also includes per-vote funding for parties and for local riding associations, one of the fairest ways to
replace our current wealth-based fundraising model. This new funding is set to
diminish and be re-evaluated after 5 years, but I expect it will be maintained
and even increased, as people see the benefit of politics funded by votes instead
of by big cheques from deep-pocked donors.
At the federal level, things are also progressing well.
Rather than wait late into their mandate to act on their “last election under
first-past-the-post” promise (an error the McGuinty government made a decade
ago, dooming Ontario’s electoral reform hopes), the Liberal government has set things in motion rapidly. The last time I wrote on this issue, I was critical
of them for addressing our distorted election results by creating a distorted
electoral reform committee, with a Liberal majority that could outvote all the
other participants, even though Canadian voters gave over 60% of their support
to other parties. But a month after I wrote, the government saw the error of
their ways and organized the committee to reflect the preferences expressed by
your votes last fall, still with more Liberals but with no single party holding a majority. This means whatever the committee recommends will have to pass
muster with at least two of the parties in the House, and hopefully have the
support of most or all of them. This radically lessens the chance that the
Liberals will try to force through a ranked ballot or instant runoff system, a
fairly minor tweak that would give them a major advantage in future elections.
After spending the summer consulting with experts on all
aspects of voting systems, the committee has entered a phase of wider public
consultation with Canadian citizens. Several town halls have been or are being
held in our area to discuss electoral reform, with results forwarded to the
committee for consideration. You can also make your views known online at the
ERRE website. By the end of November the House will receive their report and start
drafting a bill to present next year, in time to make changes before the next
election in 2019. As democracies around the world have been moving to more proportional systems, and since the significant failings identified in our own
system lie largely with results not proportionally reflecting voter preference,
it is fairly likely that some kind of proportionality will be added to our
current system of local representation.
All in all, 2016 may well go down in history as the summer
when Canada’s and Ontario’s electoral and political finance systems made great
strides toward fairness and better representation. After more than a decade of
pushing for these kinds of improvements, I couldn’t be happier to see them
finally coming to be.
Published as my Root Issues column in the Barrie Examiner as "Electoral system improving"
Erich Jacoby-Hawkins
serves on the boards of Living Green and the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation.
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