Clearing Up MMP Issues (e-mail)

Hey all,

It concerns me that our message hasn't been getting out as well as we want it to. People have questions about MMP and how it will affect them, and they aren't receiving any answers.
I spend most of my time recently answering phones in the office and taking take of all the emails that come through the voteformmp website. In that capacity, I've been fielding questions from the public about every aspect of MMP. Overwhelmingly, the two biggest concerns have been about the accountability factor of list members, and the costs of adding more representatives. Reports I'm getting from volunteers talking to people in their communities are echoing these concerns, especially in the more rural areas.

My goal for this email is to address these two concerns and try to have it reach as many people as I possibly can. Below are two things I've written that I use anytime anyone asks me about either of these issues, and the vast majority of people have found them helpful. I'm asking you to forward this as widely as you can as quickly as you can. We only have 24 hours for people to read it. An important thing to do is to send this along to the candidates in your riding that you've identified as being in support of MMP and ask them to spread it as widely as they possibly can. They're sure to have databases that would be unreachable by us otherwise. If they express hesitation about doing this, let them know that the Conservative Party has sent an email to all their members, and asked them to forward it, telling people to vote against MMP and why. We desperately need a similar email going out to everyone across Ontario addressing these major concerns.

This addresses the concerns about costs:

Ontario's annual budget is over $90 billion. The 22 additional MPPs would cost about $44 million. That is %0.048 of the current budget. With the additional oversight on that total spending, all they have to do is save $44 million of our $90 billion and they will have paid for themselves.

How might hey save it? By preventing the massive waste we see each time government shifts from one party to another and they then waste hundreds of millions of dollars filling in the holes the last government dug, literally in the case of the Eglington subway in Toronto a few years ago. The money wasted there ALONE would have paid for 22 MPPs for most of a decade.

Also, when Mike Harris cut the MPP's from 130 to 103, costs actually went up! The reason for this was they now had to serve a greater area and deal with more issues, so they had to have a bigger staff and more offices and advisors to help them do their jobs.

If you don't trust MPPs and politicians can I suggest to you that your cynicism is a product of the present system and that if we do not change it, then nothing will change?

In New Zealand, when MMP was introduced, seats went from 99 to 120 and they had the same worries about the cost of extra MP's. This proved not to be an issue, as since then they've continually had budget surpluses in the $5 billion range in the 11 years since it was implemented.

The lesson? You want to save money? Don't skimp on your democracy. They are the people keeping an eye on the spending and they can only do a good job if there are enough of them. Ontario already has the worst ratio of voters to MPPs in Canada at 113,000 people per MPP. Quebec is second-worst at 60,000 people per MLA there.



This addresses the concerns about at-large members:


The at-large candidates will be voted on by the parties at their nomination meetings just like they are now. The only difference is that under MMP the parties will be required to make public the way in which they choose these candidates, which doesn't happen now. They are then put on a list and ranked with consideration given to seniority, regional balance, gender balance, and ethnic balance. The list and the selection process then has to be made public before the election so everyone can see who`s on the list and how they were chosen. We then get to vote for the party based on these lists.

In countries that use MMP most parties tend to `zipper`` their lists, meaning man - woman - man - woman and so forth, as well as making sure the regions are equally represented all the way down the list. So when we place our party vote, it`s like a ``team vote`` where you get to see the team, and if you like that team the best, that`s who you vote for. So these list candidates are elected by and accountable to every person across Ontario that votes for them, as opposed to the riding candidates that are only elected by and accountable to the often less than 50% of the people in their riding that vote for them. In our current system you don't have anyone in the legislature outside your riding that's accountable to you.

Proportional list seats, the greatest strength of this system, are also what draw the most attacks from those who oppose MMP. They create a misguided, imaginary, and fear based story about how party leaders would appoint backroom party hacks to their lists (All four parties in Ontario have been on the record saying they'll democratically elect their at-large candidates), and that they'd be unaccountable to anyone. In the real world this is not an issue, and as evidenced by how the process actually works in countries that use MMP, does not happen. Any party that did use such backroom tactics would quickly draw criticism from the media and the people of Ontario. Would you or anyone you know vote for such a party? It's a safe bet that this party would lose a very large amount of votes for such a policy.

Therefore, it is in every party's best interest to create their lists in as democratic and representative fashion as they possibly can. It is this feature that creates a responsive government that is more beneficial to the people of Ontario than any government we've seen in our lifetimes. The reason for this, is now every vote in Ontario now counts towards a party's share of the seats, making every vote in every riding a swing vote. People that have been traditionally unrepresented due to living is "safe seats" dominated by a party they don't support will finally have a chance to elect someone they want to see in government that will represent their views. Traditionally in other countries, at-large representatives will have offices in these areas where they didn't elect anyone from a riding, so as to serve those voters who wouldn't generally have a representative from their favoured party in their riding.


If you have any more questions please feel free to ask. Let's make democracy better.

Cheers,

Rob McDonald
Vote for MMP

1-866-283-3667 ext 5

Letter to Citizen

Methinks the letter was too long. Here it is now.

Dear Editor,

The NO campaign's hopes lie in their belief that we the people do not have faith in each other to shape our destiny together.

They want us to have no faith in the 94-8 near consensus of ordinary citizens picked randomly from each riding of Ontario. They want us give no credence to a proposal that was based on 8 months of studying and consulting Ontarians. They give us the message that politicians are just plain bad, so we don't need more of them, even though Ontario is considered underrepresented already. Of course these are the same politicians who are the local representatives so 'accountable' we can picture them painting our fence. Are the bad guys among the other 102 MPP's we can do absolutely nothing about in the current system? List MPP's are labeled unaccountable before they've even had a chance. The NO's underestimate your ability to understand that in MMP you have the power to vote them out. They predict back-room politics as the method of nominating the list, even though the recommendation clearly states that the process must be entirely transparent and published before the writ is dropped. They crave majorities and fear coalitions, but how many Conservatives are happy with the Liberals 70% seat majority earned with 46.5%? How did Liberals feel about the NDP's 37.6% majority government years ago? If we think about it, we might be better off sharing power according to how the population votes. The population works together quite well every day, despite our differences.

The NO campaign believes you cannot understand a ballot where you have the choice to vote for a party and a local candidate and that the folks at Elections Ontario won't be able to count them. The NO campaign doesn't respect your struggle in our system if you have to punish a good local representative because their party messed up. The NO campaign actually distrusts voters so much, that they can picture 3 out of every 100 people at your neighbourhood poll voting for a Muslim party or the White Supremacists.

It all reminds one of when women got the vote. The NO side of that time was full of all kinds of fears we'd find amusing today. They said that women voting would invite foreign aggression and weaken national defence. They said that if women voted they'd stop marrying and having kids, and the human race would die out.

We could take a break from the political hacks and pundits on either side, take a breath, clear our minds and consider the recommendation and its credibility. Then let's judge for ourselves.

Arif Jinha
Carleton Place