It looks as though the Ontario liberals have almost doubled their membership. And they are busy arguing about it. I would be more impressed and might even care if people had paid something for those memberships. The possibly 80,000 members in Ontario is a bit higher than the 74,000 members the party had in the 1960s, when the party had a membership fee. The recent boost in membership is credited to the Ontario liberal leadership contest with five contestants duking it out to be leader of the party.
The liberals have two federal MPs, two provincial MPPs and one big city mayor wrestling for the prize. And based on the problems the Ford conservatives have brought on themselves, the liberal leadership might be an ideal stepping stone to the job of premier of Ontario.
But that is not as simple as winning the majority of votes from liberals. The people running the liberal party have shown that they are just as bad at mathematics as the people running the conservative party. The conservatives give all of their electoral districts the same weight of 100 points. If the riding has less than 100 party members, it gets those votes as one person-one vote. In electoral districts with more than 100 members, the votes for the candidates are counted as a percentage of 100.
If you think that is one member-one vote, you were not paying attention to your grade school arithmetic lessons.
After more than 60 years in politics, I can safely assure you that no two electoral districts are the same. And why in hell would you penalize the party members in electoral districts who take their responsibility seriously to increase their party memberships between elections?
It is very hard to justify the Northern Ontario electoral district deviations from the provincial average number of voters and then also have their vote count for five times the vote of liberals in a Toronto riding.
If people were worried about the ease of manipulating the vote previously, how can they believe this silly system is any better?
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