Vote Yes for MMP in Ontario

On Wednesday (Oct 10th, 2007) will have a Ontario Provincial Election, and a Ontario electoral reform referendum. The referendum would bring about a mixed member proportional representation system in regards to elections to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.

MMP (mixed member proportional) is a modest reform that will bring representative democracy in Ontario into the 19 20 21 century and end first-past-the-post 4 year dictatorships by pseudo majorities. ( 40% of the vote, 60% of the seats, 100% of the power).

For a very good summary of what MMP means and doesn’t mean, and answers most objections and misunderstandings about the proposed MMP reform see the Tor Met Blog post MMP Criticized.

Updated:The turn out was only 50% (the smallest since the 1920’s);

The Liberal’s won big (70 seats) with 42 % of the popular vote.

The greens will 8% got no seats, up from 3% in 2003.

Sadly only 36.7% voted in Favour of MMP far sort of the 60 % needed. And I heard that the voter turnout for the referendum (the first in 80 years) was 54%, which is higher than the actual vote turn out. (WTF!!) Of course the Liberal government failed to fund a proper campaign to inform voters and the official education effort from Elections Ontario was so anemic as to be all but useless.

But, It’s not over yet! We need to keep MMP alive. In New Zealand, it took two referendums to adopt a similar system in 1993. Unless you like un-representative democracy? “40% of the vote, 60% of the seats, 100% of the power” for another 4 years.

from the CBC Ontario 2007 Election site