Category Archives: Federal Election 2011

Our Election Issue

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Mandate.

I have been given a mandate by the people.

Those are the words inevitably spoken by a politician just freshly elected (or re-elected) to office. The battle has been won. The prize awarded. Absolute rule.

That’s our first past the post voting system for you. Unless held in check by a minority situation in a parliamentary setup, those winning an election govern relatively unhindered by opposition for their entire term. This, regardless of how many voters actually voted for them. Look at Ottawa currently. The newly installed Conservative majority government has almost 54% of the seats in the House of Commons having only secured 39.6% of the popular vote. Absolute rule with fewer than 4 in 10 voters voting for them.

That’s a mandate.

And it’s not at all unusual. In fact, it’s commonplace. The unexception that proves the rule. The last time more than half of Canadians voted for a federal government was 1984 at exactly 50%. Before that, 1958. In Ontario, 1937! That’s right. For all those who remember the vaunted Big Blue Machine that ruled the roost in this province from 1943 until 1985, never once did it secure an absolute majority of voters. Not once.

The lack of true democratic representation is as equally skewed at the municipal level. Last October, Rob Ford was elected mayor of Toronto with just over 47% of the popular vote. Declaring a mandate, he single-handedly scrapped and established transit plan. Just like that. No vote. Just a so-called mandate from less than half the voters who cast ballots.

Even more disturbing, of our 44 councillors nearly half of them, 20 to be exact, were swept into office with less than 50% of the popular vote. Five of those tallied less than 40%. Four less than 30%. One under 20%.

Think about that for a second. A city councillor makes decisions on behalf of his constituents after 4 out of 5 didn’t vote for him. Again, think about that. Line up every voter in that ward and start throwing rocks at them. For every 5 rocks you throw, less than one will hit a voter who voted for their current councillor.

And that’s not all, folks.

Of those 20 councillors elected with less than 50% of the popular vote, 10 were incumbents. That means that even after having been in office, garnering the kind of publicity that brings –at the municipal level, name recognition counts a lot — they could not convince more than half of voters in their ward to vote for them. They didn’t need to. It doesn’t work that way.

Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, Team Ford’s self-proclaimed QB, he of the famous thumb, was returned to city hall by 43.8% of Ward 7 voters. He’s been a councillor since 1995 and was an MPP for five years before that. Before deciding to seek re-election, Councillor Mammoliti ran a very high profile campaign for mayor of the city. With all this, he still couldn’t convince more than half of the voters in his ward to vote for him. But there he now sits beside the mayor, casting votes along with him 100% of the time.

How about John Parker, councillor for Ward 26, in no way a Rob Ford stronghold in last year’s election. Another former MPP and one term incumbent failed to muster even 1 out of 3 votes last fall. Yet, now he’s deputy speaker at council and bona fide member of Team Ford. How could that be considered fair and equal representation?

Now, this is not a partisan issue. The skewed electoral situation breaks almost evenly on both sides of the electoral spectrum although, I should point out that of the Team Ford members who have voted with the mayor more than 2/3s of the time, eleven of those councillors came to office with less than 50% of the popular vote. It suggests to me that the views, opinions and attitudes of the citizens of Toronto are not truly reflected in the direction of how the city’s headed right now.

So it’s little wonder so many of us are ultimately disengaged with the political process. Of all the numbers being bandied about here, the one that is truly the most dispiriting is this one: 53.2%. Barely half of eligible voters even bothered to vote last year and that was a significant jump from previous elections that had dipped under 40%.

We have tuned out and this very well may be one of the reasons. Our votes simply don’t add up. Too many of us cast ballots that ultimately are meaningless. A majority of voters never end up voting for those who govern us. So, of course there’s a disconnect. Why bother voting when chances are very likely that it won’t end up mattering because the other candidate will end up winning.

Not only that but our first past the post electoral system (Is that from a horse racing term? Odd because in horseracing, those betting on the second and third place finishers are rewarded too. Win, place and show.) warps campaigns into also suppressing voter turnout. Negative, nasty races are the norm as cutting your opponents down to size works to your benefit. Less votes for them can work out for you. Assholish behaviour prevails but democracy is dirtied and diminished.

There is a better way to do this.

And I have been anointed by the powers that be here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke to tell you how. Over the next few months, I will be posting pieces on how we can change this. Don’t let anyone tell you we’ve been throw this before and it’s all too complicated. It isn’t. Do not give in to the ease of our status quo bias. There is a better way.

Lesson # 1: RaBIT, Better Ballots, Fair Vote. Check them out, brush up a little. We’ll talk.

Better, fairer, more representative elections are possible. They are coming. Stay tuned.

— goadingly submitted by Urban Sophisticat

Jack

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If I were the God fearing type, I just might have to conclude that the Man upstairs is displeased with us progressives. Maybe it’s because we’ve turned our backs on the teachings of His one and only Son who He sacrificed to atone for our sins or whatever that was all about. Or maybe He is actually that Old Testament God, Yahweh let’s call him, who makes side bets with Satan to test our faith mettle. “Who are you to question Me?” Yahweh thunders from the whirlwind in response to Job’s seemingly fair question of what was up with all the pain and suffering and pestilence brought down upon him. “Have you ever created an earth, Mr. Too Big For Your Britches?”

Whatever the reasons, supernatural or not, it’s been a rough ride recently for those of us perched left of centre. The latest blow came with the death of Jack Layton on Monday. Just months after the NDP’s historic (if qualified) breakthrough on the national scene, and freshly installed as Leader of the Oppostion, Mr. Layton was gone. A party full of new faces is now leaderless, as is the 3rd place Liberals, leaving the field wide open for the Conservative majority government to conduct its business with even less parliamentary oversight.

It is the latest in a string of blows to the progressive cause, municipally, federally and internationally that leaves one wondering what other misfortunes are lurking. How bad can this get? Radical right wing ideology has seized the agenda, its adherents control city halls, state and provincial houses and national parliaments world wide, their thoughts and words propel shocking outbursts of hatred and division. The narrative has been recalibrated to one of backward rather than forward looking. Reason is suspect. Compromise is derided as little more than a sign of weakness.

And now we have lost someone who had dedicated his life to contesting that pre-Enlightenment push of anti-modernity. The ascendancy of the Old Testament mindset over its more humane companion book, jettisoning forgiveness for retribution, inclusiveness for tribalism, compassion for anger. What’s so funny about peace, love and understanding? Well, for starters, it all sounds so 1960s (where everything went so horribly wrong to the conservative mind). Hopelessly naïve. You want to teach the world to sing too while you’re at it? In perfect harmony?

It’s enough to make you throw up your hands, declare no mas, and walk away to a more quiet life of personal introspection and disregard for the world around you. We failed to beat back the tide. Sorry about that, folks. Having benefitted greatly from post-war advances, we can sit back and tell our kids and grandkids that it’s just not in the cards for them. You’re on your own now. We got ours… Jack.

Hmmm.

My thoughts immediately turn to The Clash, the only band that matters.  For many of us fortunate to come of age in the late-70s, we found ourselves surprisingly politicized with our healthy does of The Clash. Somehow it seems fitting that the last time I reacted so viscerally to the death of a public figure as I have with the news of Jack Layton was back in 2002 when I heard Joe Strummer died, similarly gone far too early.

The words that come to mind:

We gonna march, a long way/Fight, a long time/We got to travel, over mountains/Got to travel, over seas/We gonna fight, your brother/We gonna fight, ’til you loose/We gonna raise, trouble/We gonna raise, hell.

My sincerest condolences to the Layton family.

Let’s honour them by not retreating on the political fights that Jack Layton dedicated his entire public service in fighting and allow his death to have been in vain. He kept the progressive torch burning even in the darkest of times. It’s up to us now to not let it go out.

— submitted by Cityslikr

Our Profligate Mayor (No, Not That One. The New Guy)

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Hey. All you hard-ass, union haters out there. Where’s the outrage? Where’s the indignation? Yoo-hoo! Why so silent?

The city just rolled over and gave the Toronto Police Services an 11.5% wage increase over the next 4 years. My math is a little fuzzy but that doesn’t exactly work out to the 5% cut the mayor has demanded from all city departments, does it? “The police will give us concessions elsewhere,” Councillor Doug Ford said. Specifics to come, of course, but the TPS isn’t really known for its concessionary tactics.

“Of the thousands and thousands of doors I’ve knocked on,” the brother-councillor went on to tell the Globe, “there was not one complaint of how the police were paid.”

So instead of demanding across the board budget cuts we’re now selectively determining who deserves increases and who doesn’t, based on Councillor Ford’s informal door-to-door polling? The mayor and his team have been rigid in their insistence that any budgetary increase must be balanced with a corresponding cut. If the police services don’t provide such an offset to compensate for these new wage hikes, it’s got to come from somewhere else according to the mayor’s math. Does Doug then go out canvassing neighbourhoods asking folks who they think are overpaid by the city?

Ford scoffed at suggestions by Councillor Adam Vaughan (Councillor Ford regularly scoffs at anything Councillor Vaughan says) that the mayor had caved on the deal. “I find it ironic that the only people [on council] complaining about this deal are the ones responsible for a previous police contract that included a far larger increase than this one,” Mr. Ford said.

If memory serves, the expiring contract was a 3 year deal with a 10% wage increase. ‘A far larger increase’, Councillor Ford? That’s about a .4% difference. You guys are supposed to be the belt tighteners, aren’t you? An increase is an increase.

More to the point, anybody remember the outside workers’ strike in the summer of 2009? The one where Mayor Miller handed the keys to the city vault to the greedy unions and greased the rails for his exit? Yeah, I though you might. The wage settlement went like this: 1.75% in 2009, 2% in 2010 and 2.25% in 2011. That would be 6% over 3 years, nearly half of what Mayor Ford just conceded to the TPS.

So I ask again. Where’s all the chatter and clucking (aside from Councillor Vaughan) about the mayor caving into greedy union demands and breaking the bank? Where’s Budget Chief Mike “There. Is. No. More. Money.” Del Grande yelling and harrumphing about a lack of fiscal discipline? It seems in a Mayor Rob Ford’s Toronto, widows and orphans can get stuffed but the police? How much would you like, guys?

Do these imposters really deserve the dignified name of ‘fiscal conservatives’? Really, it’s more like fiscal ideologues. They are perfectly willing to spend money hand over fist with no regard for the bottom line when it suits their fancy. Just like their federal brethren that the mayor worked so hard to get elected to a majority government on Monday. Last year’s G20. Prisons. Engineless F-35s. Money is no object if it means conservative values are being upheld. Anything else is deemed special interest gravy.

— curiously submitted by Cityslikr