I believe that legitimacy should be paramount, and that the best way to achieve legitimacy is through fairness of representation. I submit that a legitimate election is one in which people can look at the results of the election and see that their vote has influenced the outcome in a way that they had intended. Fundamentally, democracy is supposed to be about every citizen having equal power in making decisions: One Person, One Vote. In the earliest Greek democracies, citizens gathered to vote on each issue for themselves. Over time, states became larger and more complex, so this became impractical, and democracy evolved into a representative system, where citizens elected candidates to represent them in a parliament. The fundamental problem with our current system is that it is not truly representative; most of the time MPPs are elected by less than half of the voters in their riding, and governments (including majority governments) by less than half of the voters in the province. Votes cast for candidates who did not win (which is to say the majority of votes cast!) are simply disregarded. Therefore I strongly advocate change; almost any other system would be better than the status quo.

Because our system is representative democracy, I believe that the next most important principle is voter choice. In order to allow voters to choose a candidate that truly represents them, voters should have as much choice as possible. I submit that the most straightforward solution to this would be to enable voters to choose any candidate to represent them, regardless of geographical location. Although it bears some resemblance to STV and open list PR, I haven’t seen quite this type of system described before, so assuming that this is a new type of system that I am proposing, I will refer to it as Open Transferable Representation (OTR).

I believe that ridings are a relic of the past and are outdated in the 21st century. Ridings limit voter choice, are arbitrarily and artificially delineated, and can be manipulated for the political advantage of the ruling party. They were a logistical requirement back in the early days of , when ballots had to be counted by hand and results tabulated locally, but with modern communications and technologies, I argue that they are obsolete and may even do more harm than good.

The arbitrary nature of riding boundaries has been subject to political manipulation, as seen most recently in PEI (http://www.herald.ns.ca/NovaScotian/541901.html) where the governing party bypassed riding boundaries drawn by an independent commission and Elections PEI in favour of a map paid for by a governing party riding association. Another form of political manipulation to which ridings contribute is illustrated in the study “Regional Grants as Pork Barrel Politics” (http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/cepa/Smart-Milligan.pdf). As this study found, government spending is higher in ridings held by government MPs than in ridings held by opposition MPs, and higher in ridings won by a narrow margin than those won by a wide margin. (Although this study looked at federal ridings across Canada, it is logical to assume that this principle of self-serving targeted government spending extends to provincial politics as well.) Governments should be free to act in the best interests of the province as a whole and not be motivated to target spending and initiatives to particular locations solely for political gain or patronage, and if we eliminated ridings, we would grant them this freedom.

Q: But what about local representation?

Voters would still be free to choose a local candidate, and I fully expect that many would. Why should voter choice be limited to local candidates, though? I’ve often heard the complaints that there’s no candidate a voter likes in their riding, or they don’t like the local candidate for the party they support. If we eliminate ridings, these problems would be solved.

Also, ridings promote parties that have regionally concentrated support, which seems unhealthy, particularly given the divisive nature of the regional squabbles in this country’s history. It seems to me that MPPs should be concerned first and foremost with the best interests of the province as a whole, and not just their little fiefdom.

Q: But who could I go to when I need help with the provincial government, such as getting a birth certificate or Health card, or advocating my point of view in the legislature?

It’s still in an MPP’s best interest to help voters, and I believe it would actually improve the service you get if there was more than one MPP that you could go to for help, based on the simple market-based principle that competition improves quality of service. There will also probably always be an MPP you can go to who shares similar views, which will eliminate situations where party faithful are given preferential treatment and opposition supporters are ignored, most extremely illustrated in the case of MP Tom Wappel in 2001 (http://www.cbc.ca/national/rex/rex20010510.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Wappel). Even if I’m wrong about the effect this would have on how MPPs would treat voters, there are other mechanisms for getting help, such as the Provincial Ombudsman, and if there are concerns in addressing local issues, I would certainly support increasing the Ombudsman’s role and opening new offices across the province to address this.

As for having your point of view advocated in the legislature, what better way could there be than to have your vote help elect an MPP who truly represents you and your views. Clearly that would accomplish more than sending a letter to your current MPP who holds opposing views.

Q: But what about direct accountability?

This approach has direct accountability at election time, because an MPP will still need votes to be elected, and in fact will need more votes than they need today. Since you would be voting for a single candidate, and their voting record is available to the public, accountability would be perfectly clear and direct.

Admittedly OTR doesn’t offer direct accountability between elections (in terms of recall or any other such mechanisms) but I believe that it lessens the need for this by allowing voters wider choice. They will be able to choose a representative who comes much closer to representing their own views than they can today, and who they therefore will be better able to live with until the next election. However, if this becomes a serious concern, I would support increasing the frequency of elections, to boost accountability.

Q: But what about simplicity and practicality? Wouldn’t OTR require a ballot that looks like a phone book? How could the votes possibly be translated into MPPs under OTR?

Certainly, the system does need to be simple and practical to be accepted as legitimate, and it is important to avoid overwhelming the voter with choice. Simplicity is why I am still proposing that voters vote for a single candidate, rather than having a preferential ranked ballot. For practical purposes, I am a believer in electronic voting, although I do believe in having a paper backup.

What I propose (at least for the first election under OTR) is a touch-screen electronic voting interface, which would initially look like the standard ballot that we have today, with only the candidates in the voter’s local riding, to make things simplest for the average voter who doesn’t want to change the way they vote. If the voter wants to choose a candidate in their riding, they simply touch that candidate’s name and they’re done. Somewhere on the screen, however, would be a set of alternative options to allow the voter to find any candidate, such as a ballot of party leaders, or search options to bring up a ballot for a different riding or search for a candidate alphabetically. Voters who wish to use these alternative methods of selecting a candidate would be free to do so. If a voter became confused or disoriented in navigating the system, there would be a master button to return to the initial current standard ballot for their riding, and ultimately if they were having a great deal of trouble, they could get assistance from electoral officials. Once the voter selected a candidate, the vote would be electronically registered, and a printer would also print the name and relevant ID information for that candidate on a small paper ballot, which would be certified by electoral officials in the same way that they are currently.That ballot would be placed in a ballot box for manual counting should the electronic system fail or be questioned. The voter would be permitted to manually write in their candidate’s information on the paper ballot in the event of technical failure, although I expect that if only the printer failed, the electronic register would still normally be used. I believe this system takes advantage of the power of today’s technology while maintaining the robustness of paper ballots.

The paper equivalent, if electronic voting was rejected, would be to have copies of the various ballot types available to voters, and they could choose which ballot type they wanted when they check in at the poll. Probably the biggest issues with not going to electronic voting are that tabulating the votes would become a bigger challenge, and the cost (averaged over multiple elections) would be higher. Even if you don’t buy into electronic voting, though, I firmly believe that it’s nigh impossible to put a price tag on fixing our democracy. Ultimately, I feel that if it required offering ballots that look like phone books to give us a truly representative democracy, then so be it.

I envision two possibilities for translating the votes out of OTR into MPPs: 1.Symmetrical – This would be a variation on STV. Like STV, the total number of votes cast across the province would be divided by the number of seats in the legislature to determine the vote threshold required to be elected. Also like STV, votes would be transferred (in a mathematically even way) from candidates who received an excess of votes or so few that they were at the bottom of the list of remaining candidates and needed to be eliminated. The main difference would be that instead of voters ranking candidates and those rankings being used to transfer the votes, the candidates themselves would rank other candidates to decide to whom their votes should be transferred if they have excess upon being elected or have insufficient votes to be elected. This way the simplicity of the current ballot would be maintained, but with the fairness of representation that STV provides. Since the voter has been given enough choice that presumably the candidate they’ve chosen will rank similar candidates highly, I believe the compromise is a fair one, and in fact, this transfer of votes can be thought of as an act of representation which the voter has empowered the candidate to perform by voting for them. I’m sure that it would become a campaign issue who candidates might rank highly on their lists and that this would be scrutinized by voters to help them make their voting decision, and recognize when voting how their votes might affect the results should they need to be transferred. 2.Asymmetrical – This would be a similar variation on STV, in that the candidates themselves would rank the other candidates and those rankings would be used for transferring their votes where necessary. The difference is that votes would only be transferred from the bottom candidates as they were eliminated from contention, and the top vote-getters would not have any of their votes transferred. The bottom candidates would continue to be eliminated until there were a predetermined number of candidates left, and those candidates would be the elected MPPs. Each MPP’s vote in the legislature would then carry the weight of the number of votes that he or she received (either directly or by transference) in the general election; in the same way that voting in a corporation is weighted by the number of shares the voter owns, the MPP’s vote would be weighted by the number of voters he or she represents.

The main difference between the two options is whether it is important that all MPPs’ votes count equally or not. I tend to think it’s more important and more legitimate to directly reflect the will of the electorate, which is why I favour the latter, but I can see it potentially being too much of a change for some people to accept, which is why I also propose the former as an alternative. I think either method would be fair, and because there would be only one province-wide electoral district, there would be no potential for false winners or manufactured majorities.

Q: But what about byelections?

Immediately after the election, each MPP would designate a ranked list of other MPPs who could act as proxies for them, in the same way that they ranked the other candidates in the election. That way, if an MPP stepped down or could no longer serve, their top- ranked designate could wield their vote until the next general election. Once a certain threshold of MPPs (perhaps six or eight?) had their votes transferred this way, a general election would be automatically called.

Q: But what about recounts?

This is a potential challenge for this system, as a disputed result could conceivably require a recount of every poll across the province, but I don’t think this issue is insurmountable. I think reasonable options would be to do a recount of a statistically representative number of polls to determine whether a more extensive recount was necessary, or to disallow recounts for polls except where there were technical issues or reasonable suspicion of fraud, or perhaps even to disallow recounts altogether, as the recent US midterm elections seem to have accepted. I also have another alternative idea, which is to make the number of MPPs flexible enough to ensure that the margin between the last candidate elected and the last candidate eliminated from contention is significant enough that it won’t reasonably be disputed. For instance, perhaps the rule could be that there would be at least 100 and no more than 110 MPPs elected, which would give 11 possible scenarios, and the largest margin of victory of those 11 scenarios would be the one used.

Q: But what about effective parties?

There’s nothing about OTR that limits party activity, although I believe and fervently hope that it would make the inner workings of parties more transparent and open to the electorate as a whole. There’s a pretty big difference between Dalton McGuinty and Mike Colle, or John Tory and Frank Klees, or and Peter Kormos, and I think you should be able to make that distinction for yourself rather than have a few members of your local riding associations or a few backroom party brass decide for you which one you can vote for. That’s why I tend to dislike proportional representation, especially closed list (although I do think it would still be a huge improvement over first-past-the- post) because it puts even more power in the hands of the backroom party operators.

I will admit that I am distrustful of political parties in general. Scandals at all levels of government have jaded many of us, with the payola of the federal Liberal Adscam scandal being the best illustration of why I tend to distrust parties. I believe that MP Garth Turner is on the right track in his contention that backbenchers and independent candidates should have a greater role in parliament. I think diversity of opinion is healthy, and I think OTR (and most systems that improve fairness of representation) would contribute to diversity, by encouraging representation of geographically disparate but ideologically proximate communities. I think this would result in an improvement in representation of women and minorities, since such groups could rally together across the province around candidates who could represent them.

Ultimately, however, it’s a fact that “politics is a joiner’s game” (I’m not sure to whom that quote should be attributed) and it takes a majority of votes to pass a motion, so it’s in an MPP’s best interest to be aligned with a party in order to improve their chances of finding their way to the government side and having a say in controlling policy (to say nothing of the brand-name recognition a party affiliation gives them which I’m sure helps immensely in attracting votes). I believe that remains true regardless of what electoral system we have.

Q: But what about stable and effective governments and effective parliament?

I believe that if this voting system was implemented, minority governments would likely become the norm, but minority governments are in place around the world and flourish in most cases. Even the current minority federal government and the one that preceded it seem to have functioned quite well. It comes down to the culture of the politicians that represent us, and whether they work cooperatively toward consensus and reasonable compromise or let partisan politics bog down the system. I believe that the electorate has shown that it will punish those who trigger elections without sufficient reason, either because they are too rigid and intransigent or because they are too arrogant and overconfident. (One example is the 1990 election, which the David Peterson Liberals lost to ’s NDP largely because they called it earlier than necessary.) An MPP who doesn’t act collaboratively will be marginalized and therefore fail to get results, which will cost him or her votes. In this way, I believe OTR is a self-correcting system.

Furthermore, a system with better fairness of representation would actually contribute to stability by removing a lot of the temptation to trigger an election prematurely due to favourable electoral conditions, because to truly get better electoral conditions they would have to realize a significant gain in popular support across the province rather than just a gain of a few extra votes in a few specific swing ridings.

Q: But what about stronger voter participation?

I believe that any change that improves legitimacy, fairness of representation, and voter choice (three principles which I believe OTR squarely addresses) will consequently improve voter participation, as people will see that their vote actually can make a difference.

My opinion, however, is that while stronger voter participation is a laudable goal, it needn’t be a priority in itself. As long as everyone has equal opportunity to vote and the system is legitimate, it’s up to the individual whether they want to use that opportunity.