[BRIEF NOTE] Three election wishes
Oct. 10th, 2007 07:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonald1. Taking the cack-handed tactics of John Tory out of consideration, I'm not sure that I can say that the prospect of a Progressive Conservative government in Ontario is one I can look only kindly, especially not given the 1990s PC government of Mike Harris, a man whose policies are linked in the popular (read non-PC) imagination with massive cutbacks to public services that endangered the public well-being and a militarization of policing that left dead at least one person, a First Nations protester. Happily, it doesn't look like a repetition of the "Common Sense Revolution" is in the workings; Tory himself might lose his seat.
2. In my riding of Davenport (see the CBC and the Toronto Star for overviews), Liberal incumbent Tony Ruprecht may be facing a strong challenge from the NDP's Peter Ferreira in the light of Ruprecht's comparatively uimpressive record, the longest-serving Liberal MPP without a cabinet position most recently famed for taking five vacations in Cuba in the space of eight months and passing it off as as a way for him to learn Spanish and Portuguese. Uh-huh. In the light of a likely Liberal majority government, I can think of worse things than Davenport's changing hands.
3. Taking place at the same time as the provincial election is an electoral reform referendum that seeks to replace the current legislature, elected via first-past-the-post with 109 members of provincial parliament each representing a different riding, with one comprising 129 members. Of these 129, 90 would be elected from ridings, while 39 would be elected from party list members according to the principles of mixed member proportional representation, so allowing smaller parties like the Greens and the Family Coalition a voice in the provincial legislature that would be proportional to their public support. At first, I favoured MMP, but then I decided against it: Never mind the fact that the political parties themselves have complete control over who they'll appoint to the legislature (yes, those which have been asked have promised to respect the popular will, but really), shrinking the number of ridings by one-fifth doesn't strike me as a good idea. If the referendum had asked whether Ontario should adopt a single transferrable vote system, I would have voted yes, but like many of the commenters at Walrus Magazine I'm unwilling to countenance a change that could harm Ontario's democracy.
2. In my riding of Davenport (see the CBC and the Toronto Star for overviews), Liberal incumbent Tony Ruprecht may be facing a strong challenge from the NDP's Peter Ferreira in the light of Ruprecht's comparatively uimpressive record, the longest-serving Liberal MPP without a cabinet position most recently famed for taking five vacations in Cuba in the space of eight months and passing it off as as a way for him to learn Spanish and Portuguese. Uh-huh. In the light of a likely Liberal majority government, I can think of worse things than Davenport's changing hands.
3. Taking place at the same time as the provincial election is an electoral reform referendum that seeks to replace the current legislature, elected via first-past-the-post with 109 members of provincial parliament each representing a different riding, with one comprising 129 members. Of these 129, 90 would be elected from ridings, while 39 would be elected from party list members according to the principles of mixed member proportional representation, so allowing smaller parties like the Greens and the Family Coalition a voice in the provincial legislature that would be proportional to their public support. At first, I favoured MMP, but then I decided against it: Never mind the fact that the political parties themselves have complete control over who they'll appoint to the legislature (yes, those which have been asked have promised to respect the popular will, but really), shrinking the number of ridings by one-fifth doesn't strike me as a good idea. If the referendum had asked whether Ontario should adopt a single transferrable vote system, I would have voted yes, but like many of the commenters at Walrus Magazine I'm unwilling to countenance a change that could harm Ontario's democracy.
