Category: Provincial Politics

The entitlement of Quebec university students.

by Peter Lowry

Quebec Premier Jean Charest should stop underestimating the student movement. What started as a protest about rising tuition fees in the province has now become a popular revolt against the Charest government. Charest is out of touch.

Despite desperate efforts to placate the student leaders, it is Charest’s draconian Bill 78 that has become his Waterloo. The hastily thrown together bill has outraged people across the province for its attack on the right to protest. What the premier has done is to throw people of all ages and political persuasion behind the protest.

At the same time, Anglophone Canadians outside of Quebec are somewhat puzzled by the fuss. Ontario university students have been unsure what the Quebec students are protesting. Ontario university students pay outrageously high fees compared to fees in Quebec. In contrast, Quebec university fees are the lowest in Canada. It all comes down to the Quebec students’ sense of entitlement.

Since the early 1970s, successive Quebec governments have catered to the students. Both Separatists and Liberals have seen the university students as the ally needed to win the battle for and against separatism. To this end, both sides of the separatism question have kept the fees for post-secondary education extremely low while also extending university accessibility to students across the province.

The Charest government thought they could start to increase the fees. Bear in mind that the Quebec Liberal Party is closer philosophically to Harper’s federal Conservative Party than to the federal Liberals. With a weakened and split provincial separatist movement, the Liberals saw this as the time to better balance their books.

Charest was wrong. It is also a time of the ‘Occupy’ movement and growing threats from Harper’s Conservatives in Ottawa. The students saw the increases—no matter how reasonable—as a challenge to their sense of entitlement. They fought back. And their determination caught Charest off guard. He tried outlasting the students but they proved far more determined than his side expected. With the rapidly approaching tourist season, Charest panicked. The economic impact of a lost summer of tourism can be catastrophic to the province.

It was the concern over tourism that prompted the draconian dictates of Bill 78. With the proposed control it would give police over the student demonstrations, the government felt that maybe it could hide the dispute from tourists. Just how was not clear.

If we have any political advice for Jean Charest, it is to capitulate and fast. It has already cost the students their year. The government only loses its dignity.

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Ten reasons to support first-past-the-post voting.

by Peter Lowry

THE DEMOCRACY PAPERS #10- Revised  This is now the tenth and final of The Democracy Papers that were originally written in 2007 to make the case for our first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting in North America.

First-past-the-post (FPTP) voting is an awkward name for simple, single-member constituency plurality voting. It is almost too simple: you just go to the polls, vote for one person, the votes are counted and the person with the most votes wins.

And that gives you reason number one in favour of FPTP: There is no confusion. What you vote for is what you get–if enough of your neighbours agree with you. If your candidate loses, you tried and you have nothing of which to be ashamed. Your vote was counted and you made a contribution to democracy.

It is the matter of democracy that gives us reason number two for FPTP: it is the most democratic method of electing members to government. Whether there are two candidates on the ballot or 20, FPTP means that in your constituency you elect the person preferred by the most voters.   If it is fair when there are two candidates, why would it not be fair with 20?   If you would prefer that the person be the choice of more than 50 per cent of the voters, it is a simple matter to have a run-off election or, to save money, even easier to have voters indicate a second, third or fourth choice in a preferential vote.

But ideally, we want to keep the voting simple, which is reason number three for FPTP: it is very easy to keep honest.   There are no complicated formulas, no mathematical manipulations, just a plain simple, easy to understand, count of ballots for candidate ‘A,’ candidate ‘B’ and so forth.   The one with the most votes wins.   No questions.   An occasional recount is needed when the vote is close but that can be as much fun to watch as a close horse race.

We cannot compare our politicians to horses but if we learn one thing at the racetrack, it is that training and past performance are critical factors to consider before we place a bet.   And people need to find out something about the people on the ballot before placing their trust in them as politicians.   There is far more than money at stake.

That is reason number four to support FPTP: You are putting your trust in people. You do not have to vote for a party. You can vote for a person, a person you trust, one who works on behalf of the people in your riding.   Parties do not have to keep their word.   It is difficult to hold a party accountable.   A person, your MPP, comes back for re-election and is accountable to the voters.

When you think about it, politics is about people.   That is reason number five to support FPTP: It serves people.   Elections are not about political parties, or party platforms or any of the parties’ broken promises (or, even worse, promises they kept that they should not have kept).   To put parties ahead of the people we choose in our constituencies is to give political parties control of our lives.   Political parties deal with ideology, broad solutions and power.   It is people who can deal with our concerns as individuals.

In that vein, you have reason number six to support FPTP:   It gets things done.   An election is a call to action.   It is when we sum the activities on our behalf of the previous government and our member and consider our collective needs for the coming term.   It is a time for change or a time to consolidate and it is the voters’ decision to make.

That leads us to reason number seven to support FPTP: It gives the voters control.   It means, the voters can quickly remove a government that becomes so convinced its ideology is right that it ignores the needs of the voters.   Both left and right wing parties have felt the wrath of voters inOntarioover the years.   The ability to change governments is one of the most important capabilities of FPTP.

When our votes are counted, we have reason number eight to support FPTP: We know who to call.   Your politicians are there to represent all the voters in their riding.   They can ignore you, if they dare.   They can even disagree with your ideas.   They might have to tell you why they cannot support your ideas, but, if they are good at their job, they might have an explanation that satisfies you.

That is reason number nine for FPTP: Our politicians are accountable.   They cannot get away with an answer such as ‘my party leader said I had to vote for it, so I did.’   There are no excuses.   The record of our politicians is there for us to examine.   They have to meet our expectations.

And, finally, reason number ten for FPTP:   It is hard to get elected and hard to stay elected. To be the first past the post in an election is no easy task.   The voters are demanding and ruthless with those who think there are shortcuts to earning our trust.   Should we ever ask for less?

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

A Conservative MP speaks honestly: that’s news.

by Peter Lowry

David Wilks, MP for Kootenay, BC made news the other day. He spoke honestly and openly with some of his riding people. It was another win for having cameras in cell phones. He was commenting on the omnibus budget bill now being pushed through parliament by the Harper Conservatives. This Conservative MP admitted that he was unable to examine the bill properly.

It appears that Stephen Harper took his wayward MP to the woodshed when it was learned that Mr. Wilks’ comments were on the Internet. He had broken the rules. Back bench MPs are there to vote and say nothing other than they are told to say. Canada’s parliament is no longer a place for debate.

We are, of course, quite safe from any such shenanigans in Babel. The MP for Babel is not elected to think. He is elected as a Conservative nebbish who does what he is told. He accepts the pay and the perquisites of office without ever having to care, to think, to plan or to worry about anything other than re-election.

The MP for Babel is the king of the ten-percenters, the obnoxious grey, self promotion government mailers that come so often in our mail. He has never met a charity that he could not use to promote himself. You can always count on him to rush to his riding if there is another picture opportunity. He has become a master at inserting his name into government news releases without caring or understanding what they are about.

But this pathetic person should not be allotted all the blame. Who picked him to represent the Conservative Party in Babel? Are these Babel party members proud of what they have done? Does he really represent them?

And what does this say about the voters of Babel? Does this person represent them? Did they bother to ask him of his understanding or position on the issues of the day? Did they care to find out if this person could make any contribution at all to our country? Did the person for whom they voted have any qualifications to be a Member of Parliament?

Two years ago, we engaged in a thorough study of voting patterns and attitudes in Babel. With the electoral maps for Babel, municipally, provincially and federally being almost the same, we were able to use voter turn-out and voting tendencies from all levels to conduct the study. The information gathered was used to considerable advantage in the municipal election that year. It also told us who would win in the subsequent provincial and federal elections.

You have to recognize that Babel is made up of various communities. It is not a cohesive entity. It has no identity as a city. The traditional east end (north of the bay) still thinks it runs Babel. The larger numbers of younger homeowners in the south end do not even know the east end exists. Communications in the city is a fascinating challenge. There are no simple solutions.

But what we do know is that there is a strong and shared devotion to this country. If a city ever needed leadership, it is Babel. It needs people who can speak up for it in Ottawa. It also needs people who can speak up for it at Queen’s Park.

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Police Chief Blair gets a pulpit.

by Peter Lowry

It has been almost two years since Police Chief Bill Blair’s people ran roughshod over human rights at the G20 event in Toronto. Canadians watching the news at that time were horrified at the failure of the Toronto Police, augmented by police from across Canada, to rein in a group of anarchists on a rampage and the following day taking their revenge on helpless bystanders by kettling them in one instance and brutally attacking them in others. We finally had an opportunity to hear Chief Blair’s side this past Sunday on Global Television’s Focus Ontario.

This program is considered a pulpit because it is speaker-friendly. Hosted by John Tory, a former leader of the Ontario Conservative Party and news reader Leslie Roberts, the public affairs program is not known for sand-bagging guests or being particularly tough in its questioning. Chief Blair was allowed to use this friendly venue to go on at some length about how his police are so good at facilitating peaceful protests for our citizens.

It is more than a week since Gerry McNeilly of the Office of the Independent Police Review Director issued his 300-page report condemning police actions at the Toronto G20. The report states that ‘It is fortunate that, in all the confusion, there were no deaths.’

For all the anguish caused and the 1100 people whose rights were ignored when illegally detained by police, the report only recommends that 35 police officers be disciplined. What the report lacks is a condemnation of Blair. He should have been fired immediately after the event. He asked the Attorney General of Ontario under what law he could keep citizens away from the G20 meeting site. He was given the wrong law, he had to know it was wrong and he did not question it.

And then he allowed inaccurate information to be spread about the law supposedly protecting the summit.

The event itself was a failure in intelligence in more ways than one. With combined resources from national, provincial and municipal police forces across Canada, Blair was unable to place sufficient police among the crowds to keep track of what was happening. He was blind-sided by some anarchists who could have been stopped. He left them to their rampage. They did it when he was responsible.

The anarchists were used as an excuse to come down hard on the gawkers and bystanders. The mass arrests were a disgrace for Canada. They were also a disgrace for the politicians who made no protests.

Prime Minister Harper was to blame for wasting our money on a summit in a stupid location. Tony Clement had spent enough on Huntsville for a dozen G20 events.

Premier McGuinty and his Attorney General were to blame. We never saw them when the police were trampling on citizens’ rights.

And since Chief Blair did not have the grace to resign for his part in this, he should be fired. He disgraced Toronto, our province and our country.

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Be careful what you wish for.

by Peter Lowry

THE DEMOCRACY PAPERS #9- Revised  It was in 2007 that The Democracy Papers were written to make the case for our first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting in North America. Despite changes being rejected firmly in Ontario and twice in British Columbia, people still complain. The complaints are understandable. No system is perfect. Neither is democracy but it is better than the alternatives.

There are many assumptions made about proportional voting. It is a panacea to some people to solve the ills of our society. It is a harmless change according to others. For people who know Canadian politics though it is neither a panacea nor harmless. It can send Canadian politics into a spiral from which it might never recover.

In Canada, we use first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting that we imported from England more than 200 years ago. Proportional voting has been used in many other societies that allow voting for almost as long. The basic difference between the two voting approaches is that FPTP is considered idealistic. It attempts to create a government of our best and brightest. It is designed to select the people whom we believe best represent us. It means we select the people to govern who are preferred by the largest number of voters.

The option proposed to Ontario voters in 2007 was mixed-member proportional (MMP) voting. It is a form of proportional voting that allows some members of the legislature to be elected in enlarged FPTP constituencies and others to be selected from party lists based on the votes for each party. An even simpler explanation is that FPTP voting is based on individual candidates and proportional voting is based on political parties.

The proportional part of the voting process seeks to represent society as it exists. In that sense, it is more realistic. It seeks to try to create an image of society in government by reflecting the make-up of the society. The proportional system allocates seats to the various parties according to the votes for each party.

But the problem with this attempt at mirroring of society is that it is being done with political parties. Political parties in Canadado not all try to mirror segments of their society. Parties such as the Conservatives and Liberals had some of their roots in demographics in the past but today are based more on ideology.

Federally, the two best known parties with demographic bases are the Bloc Québécois and the New Democratic Party. The Bloc is regional and tribal, based on the threat of separation from Canada. The NDP is socialist and union based and originated from an earlier class struggle in what has become a mainly class-free society.

Factions such as the Green Party see proportional representation as their only entrée into Government and make it their cause. Proportional representation is also supported by some unionists who see it as an opportunity for short-term gains for the NDP. The requirement for a minimum of three per cent of the popular vote before seats are allocated would probably keep out parties such as the Communists and Libertarians.

Most political observers see one result in the long-term of proportional representation as a potential splintering of the right-of-centre parties.   They expect with proportional voting, the hard-line religious right will give up on the Conservatives and Liberals and form their own parties. With the dominance of Roman Catholics in the Right-to-Life movement, this could mean a separate party being formed by the Protestant religious right.   A growth in this factionalism could also lead to religious parties for the more extreme Muslim, Jewish and Eastern Orthodox sects that would put an entirely new complexion on Canadian politics.

While demographically based parties on religious or tribal lines are common in the rest of the world, this is not a road that most Canadians want to travel. Despite the bad example of ethnic infighting over riding nominations in the Toronto area in the last 20 years, Canada’s political parties have tried to stay away from ethnic or religious manipulation.   A recent lapse in this regard was Conservative Leader John Tory’s ill-conceived offer to support non-Catholic parochial schools in 2007.

Much is made of the desire of some people to have gender equalization in the Ontario Legislature. The NDP have promoted this by trying to have equal numbers of male and female NDP candidates. Nobody expects the results in the election will be gender equal. Hopefully, we will be represented by people of both genders, chosen for their abilities.

In a speech by a one-time political pundit many years ago, he made the point that political parties needed to make room in their ranks for all segments of Canadian society. To illustrate this, he made a somewhat tongue-in-cheek plea to have more stupid people in politics. His case was that there are likely to be some stupid people in Canada and they deserved to be represented just as much as anyone else. His entire argument fell apart when it was pointed out that the stupid faction was already well represented. For proof, one just had to sit through a late-night session of the Ontario legislature after some of the members had enjoyed their dinner hour in the press gallery bar.

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

And the Star thinks OLG is hypocritical!

by Peter Lowry

If Ontario Lottery and Gaming (OLG) Corporation is hypocritical about a casino in Toronto, what do you call the Toronto Star’s position? Will the Toronto Star state categorically that it will never accept advertising from OLG or any of its casinos or lotteries? Provincial affairs writer Martin Regg Cohn drew the line in the sand the other day for the Star editors by stating that OLG wants to create a moral stain on Toronto.

What claptrap! For a corporation in the business of disseminating news, opinion and advertising, the Toronto Star needs a good shrink. If the Star thinks it will decide the moral issues for Torontonians while maintaining credibility as an impartial disseminator of the day’s news, it needs counselling.

What the Star editors do not seem to realize is that it is legal to buy lottery tickets or go to a gambling casino in Ontario.  For Cohn to insinuate that there is something insidious about OLG encouraging Ontario citizens to gamble at its facilities is quite ridiculous. He says that the request to locate a casino on the Toronto Lakeshore is using location to legitimatize gambling. Would Mr. Cohn be surprised to learn that gambling has already been legitimatized? No matter where the Toronto area casino venture is located, it will be legitimate. And, if the casino venture is planned properly, it can be very successful.

Mr. Cohn is also appalled that OLG would use loyalty programs to endear itself to its gambling customers. Was he not aware that the Liquor Control Board of Ontario uses a loyalty program called ‘Air Miles’ to encourage drinkers to purchase more alcoholic products? Why, even Highway 407 uses a loyalty program to encourage the electronic toll road users to drive on it more often. What is Mr. Cohn’s problem?

Mr. Cohn says that these loyalty programs are insidious. He believes that alcohol drinkers drink more, Highway 407 drivers drive more and gamblers gamble more because of the temptations of free rewards and give-backs.

Maybe Mr. Cohn has been on the political beat too long. He should broaden his horizons.

But, in the interests of full disclosure, we did admit in a recent blog entry that we had an excellent dinner at Casino Rama, early in May, courtesy of that casino’s loyalty program. The evening continued with a spectacular sound and light show by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, courtesy of the casino’s loyalty program. We capped the evening by winning a few dollars at the craps table. This additional largess was not courtesy of the loyalty program. It was more the result of understanding the odds of the game and knowing when to take your chips to the cashier.

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Ontario could have done better.

by Peter Lowry

THE DEMOCRACY PAPERS #8- Revised  It was in 2007 that The Democracy Papers were written to make the case for our first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting in North America. Despite changes being rejected firmly in Ontario and twice in British Columbia, people still complain. The complaints are understandable. No system is perfect. Neither is democracy but it is better than the alternatives.

Suppose a decision needs to be made about something important to you. And that decision is being made for you. Who do you want to make that decision? Do you want people whom you know and trust to make it? Do you want people who are experts in that field to help? Do you want extensive public discussion on the issues? Do you want to consider all the options? Or would you, in some wild state of insanity, decide to get a bunch of lottery winners to make the decision for you? That is what happened in Ontario running up to the 2007 election.

And what is worse, most Ontario citizens were not aware of it. Surveys, in August that year, showed that less than 30 per cent of the population knew of Ontario’s citizens’ assembly on electoral reform and the referendum to be put before the voters during the October election. Ontario citizens were mugged.

In one of the most capricious acts of government in Ontario since the Harris Conservatives decided we did not need to be so rigid about checking the safety of our drinking water, the McGuinty Liberals set a group of lottery winners to play with our electoral system.

Not that there is anything wrong with examining our electoral system.   First-past-the-post (FPTP) voting is no sacred cow. Examine it all you like. It took centuries to develop. Nobody thinks it is perfect.

But would it not be better to have such things studied by people who know what they are doing? What is wrong with learned discussion? Why could we not consider the pros and cons with people who understood voting systems and the political scene? Why were we instead being force-fed a single option? It was wrong.

The McGuinty government picked one voter from each of 103 ridings in the province and said ‘you decide.’ They turned this befuddled group of citizens loose without even a leader who knew about the question. Judge George Thomson had presided over family court before going to work for Ontario’s civil service at Queen’s Park.   He was on the same learning curve as his flock. The results show how little they knew.

The lottery winners voted for a system called mixed-member proportional (MMP) voting. This is a somewhat confusing system of voting where political party appointees can be appointed to the legislature to ‘top up’ party representation. Their job done, the lottery winners went home to their ridings.   It was the voters who were left to sort it out in the referendum that came with the October provincial election.

And they did not get much help.   Elections Ontario had been told by the government to spend what was necessary to educate Ontario voters. Luckily, Elections Ontario decided to spend less than $7 million on the task. They left the educational job to the various groups organizing pro-MMP/pro-FPTP campaigns and the news media.

The battleground turned out to be the Internet. The news media were slow getting into the fray, relying mainly on their own political columnists and talking heads. The one thing for sure is that nobody showed off their expertise. One newspaper column solicited from an assistant professor inVictoria, B.C. gave a glowing report on MMP, mentioning how it has been used in Germany with excellent results. The academic needed to extend his research a bit and he would have also found that MMP was a reluctant compromise in 1949 because of how Hitler’s Brown Shirts took advantage of proportional voting in the Wiemar Republic.

But then everyone needs to improve their research on this question. Platitudes such as ‘MMP will help more women and minorities get in the legislature’ are all very nice but nobody has offered any proof of that statement.

Proportional representation is the most common voting system in the world. The reason is because it is easier for illiterate voters to vote for a party symbol than a name. Mixed-member proportional is not as common. Mixed member means that some people are elected directly and some are appointed by their political parties. The pro-MMP people are usually selective in their examples.   Using New Zealand is a guarantee that not many Ontario voters would know much about that country’s politics. Far more Ontario residents would be familiar with the results of MMP voting in Mexico. Now why does nobody mention the Mexico experience?

The most vigorous pro-MMP campaigns was by the Green Party and NDP. These parties are under the impression that they will benefit the most from MMP. The pro-FPTP campaigns were slower to emerge because of the ease with which the pro-MMP groups label you as reactionary. Hopefully, more and more informed people will join in on the discussion.  We need to protect our democracy.

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

An end to the democracy we know in Canada.

by Peter Lowry

THE DEMOCRACY PAPERS #7- Revised  It was in 2007 that The Democracy Papers were written to make the case for our first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting in North America. Despite changes being rejected firmly in Ontario and twice in British Columbia, people will still complain. The complaints are understandable. No system is perfect. Neither is democracy but it is better than the alternatives.

Do you want to trade our democracy for a parliament of minorities?   That is one of the possible results of promoting proportional representation. The people promoting proportional voting see it as the perfect opportunity for more minorities to have a say in our government. They say it is fairer. It is certainly more than fair to minority parties. It is just not the same type of democracy.

People promoting proportional representation argue that it is not fair for a party that might have won 45 per cent of the popular vote to win maybe 55 per cent of the seats. At the same time, they argue that a party that won 10 per cent of the vote but only 3 per cent of the seats should be given another 7 per cent of the seats to make up the difference. That is how they see proportional representation working.

But all they prove by this argument is that they do not understand or want our democracy. Evolving from the Parliament of Westminster, our democracy is not based on political parties. It is a representative-based system of responsible government built on the principle that the people rule. Added to the rule by the people is the protection of minority rights that makes democracy work. This protection of minority rights has evolved to a strong judiciary.

But now people want to throw out the very basis of our electoral system. They want it based on parties and not the representatives we choose. They argue against the first-past-the-post election system that can see someone win with less that a plurality of votes. These same people argue against run-off elections that could ensure that our representatives were all elected with majorities. They argue that because what they really want is a parliament of minorities.

This can occur when many smaller political parties are created to take advantage of a political system such as proportional representation. A recent example of proliferation of smaller parties occurred in the early 1990s when a number of new parties were formed to take advantage of changes in election funding. With the taxpayers picking up more than 80 per cent of the cost of campaigning, Canadians found they had new parties such as the Natural Law Party that had people as candidates who claimed they could levitate.

Other federal parties that formed or revived in this time of opportunity, and are still with us, are the Canadian Action Party made up of people who claim they do not approve of large banks or supra-national corporations, the Christian Heritage Party that claims principles based on biblical ethics, the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) and the Green Party.   These are all parties that would hope to have some of their people appointed if we had proportional government.

In the proposed mixed-member proportional system in 2007, a party needed at least three per cent of the party vote to be eligible for a portion of the appointments. With as few as 200,000 votes across Ontario, a party could have no elected seats but be appointed to as many as five seats in the legislature. From being a loser, this fringe party is being given a great deal of power. They could demand concessions from a minority government for their support. They could even demand seats in the cabinet.

What if the Green Party won enough party support acrossOntarioto be entitled to be appointed seats in a proportional legislature? What are they going to when they are there? There are few people who would complain about the Green Party’s objectives of preserving our environment. In fact, the Green Party platform is actually well represented in the platforms of most of the major parties.   Maybe not as prominent or as forceful but it is there.

The Green’s first choice might be to form a coalition with a party that needs a few extra bodies to form a majority government. That is a common solution for legislative bodies with proportional voting systems. The major party will promise to carry out some of the Green party’s ‘green’ promises, which are in its platform anyway, in exchange for the voting support to keep the party in power.

At the same time, consider how a larger party, needing a partner to form the government, accommodates a minority party with absolutely no similar policies? For the Conservative Party, for example, to find any common ground with the Marxist-Leninists or the Canadian Action Party would be difficult.

The problem is the narrow focus of most of these splinter parties. They can rarely win a riding because of that narrow focus. They bring nothing to the legislature but their narrow view. And they only represent the people who share their view. Given enough of these parties, the legislative body can descend into a parliament of minorities. Who then represents you?

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Putting prosperity in the hands of a banker.

by Peter Lowry

Will Premier Dalton McGuinty ever learn? He has put another banker in charge of the province’s Jobs and Prosperity Council. Has the lesson of Don Drummond been so soon forgotten? Drummond was TD Bank’s contribution to budgets. Now Royal Bank’s President and Chief Executive Officer Gordon Nixon is going to tell us how to create prosperity and jobs in Ontario.

While there is no doubt that Mr. Nixon runs a very profitable and far-flung banking enterprise, it is basically a bank. You just do not consider it a hotbed of job creation and innovation. Bankers and entrepreneurs are not necessarily compatible species.

It smacks of the Don Drummond experience. Drummond reported to the province that they should cut all government expenses and balance the books for the province. At one point, we thought the exercise was designed to make Ontario Treasurer Dwight Duncan seem more human. All it proved was that Duncan had no worthwhile ideas of his own other than to sell the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) headquarters in Toronto. (If he had offered to sell the LCBO, we would have paid more attention.)

But to have any banker chair a council delegated to the task of advising the government on ideas and methods to create jobs and improve financial growth in the province is, to say the least, questionable. That is like creating a firewall against innovation. It is a built in discouragement to putting forward ideas. You have to be able to take the allowances for failure far beyond the levels bankers will accept. We have to encourage entrepreneurs, not bankers.

Entrepreneurs are far below any bankers’ horizon. The start-ups draw first on what is known as ‘love money.’ This is the hidden reserves of society that are kept away from the bankers in pantry cupboards and under the mattress. This is spent and gone before the entrepreneurs reach for the venture money. Banks are still a distant target because, for them, you need regular cash flow and assets.

Ontario’s manufacturing muscle will have to be replaced without much help from Harper’s Conservatives in Ottawa. We have an educated population. We have a tradition of entrepreneurialism. We can innovate. We can build. And, with respect for RBC’s Mr. Nixon, Premier McGuinty does not know what he is doing..

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Asking the ‘Why’s’ of proportional voting.

by Peter Lowry

THE DEMOCRACY PAPERS #6- Revised  It was in 2007 that The Democracy Papers were written to make the case for our first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting in North America. Despite changes being rejected firmly in Ontario and twice in British Columbia, people still complain. The complaints are understandable. No system is perfect. Neither is democracy but it is better than the alternatives.

In the 2007 provincial election, Ontario voters were presented with a referendum that was not just a choice between one electoral system and another. It was a challenge to the democratic principle of one person; one vote.

The referendum question was whether you favoured the present first-past-the-post electoral system or would you like to have something called mixed-member proportional (MMP) voting that was proposed by Ontario’s Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform?

Superficially, the citizens’ assembly proposal could be seen as fairer.   It is not.

The first and most basic difference about the proposed system is that voters will get two votes, one for an individual candidate and one for a political party. If you vote for the individual, are you not, in fact, voting for that candidate’s party? Under what circumstances would you, as a voter, want to vote for a candidate and then vote for another party?

‘Maybe,’ you think, ‘I can vote for the individual and then for a party that I would like to see represented in the legislature.’

This ‘why’ is confusing. ‘Why can’t this party get anybody elected to the legislature? Will their members not be as good legislators as the candidate I already voted for? Are they going to be a second class member of the legislature, members with seats but who do not report to any constituents other then the party bosses? Do these appointed people represent their party or the voters?’

And the questions continue. They become even more complex. And there is really nowhere to turn with questions where you might expect an unbiased answer.

To be fair, and our voters are fair, they might ask questions of some of the cheerleaders for the proportional voting idea. ‘Why,’ you might ask, ‘should the seats in the house be topped up to match the popular vote for party?’

‘That is generous but why does the proposal, in turn, take the win away from a party with 53 per cent of the elected seats but only 40 per cent of the party vote?’

The mathematical implications of MMP voting are complex. There are many permeations and scenarios that can be as intriguing as they are frightening. The conclusion is that the most likely split of candidate and party vote is where there is a strong candidate who has earned a personal following but whose voters usually support other parties. This scenario can only work against the smaller parties.

The MMP cheerleaders will also tell you that more women and minorities can be appointed to the legislature from the party lists. That evokes a very big ‘why?’ If you look around the Ontario legislature or Parliament as they are at the present, you will see women and various minorities already there. Many of these people will be insulted if you suggest to them that they could be appointed instead of elected.

The MMP cheerleaders also tell you that the at-large, supernumerary appointees to the legislature under MMP will be eager to represent voters in ridings that are not represented by their party. That is a very nice fairytale but reality is that there is no incentive for persons who are representing a party to waste time looking after voters’ needs. (In Germanywhere a mix of proportional representation is used, they had to create a petitions committee of the Bundestag to make sure voters’ concerns were heard.)

The appointed members under MMP are chosen by their political parties. They would probably be chosen in very much the same way as Canadians choose the Senate of Canada. They are just not as likely to be as useful. These are the losers in the ridings and party hacks who do not want to have to run for election. Under MMP, they would be mixed in with the general population of members. We would never know if they do anything. If we simply gave the party leader the number of votes to cast as these people would have exercised, it would be a far cheaper solution.

But the cheerleaders tell us that in a new MMP legislature, the parties will have to work together in coalitions and that the system will reward cooperation, compromise and accountability. This seems based on the supposition that there would no longer be majority governments. They think that minorities spell an end to partisan rigidity, trivial bickering and narrow thinking. They obviously were not in Ottawa between 2006 and 2011 to see how that minority government was getting along!

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

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