All Fried Up In The Big Smoke

Less political. More fictional.

Electoral Reform Gets All Tied Up at Government Management Committee

Posted on May 14, 2013 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

In the end, Government Management Committee item 22.15, Proposed Electoral Reforms, limped forward without recommendation for wider city council consideration deadlocked in a 3-3 tie. Those voting against reforming the way we go about casting our ballots municipally? Team Ford. Councillors Vincent Cristanti, Doug Ford and Giorgio Mammoliti, stood firmly in opposition to any change in the status quo, even going as far as putting up a motion to defer the item indefinitely. That salvo was fended off by the rest of the committee, consisting of Chair Paul Ainslie and councillors Mary Fragedakis and Pam McConnell.

At issue was a staff report that proposed four reforms of how we can and who can vote municipally. Any possible changes that might be enacted wouldn’t occur until the 2018 campaign at the mayoral level, 2022 council wide. Nothing too radical or too quickly. Plenty of time to ruminate and consider, and all for a good cause. The promotion of wider civic participation and engagement.

Much of the conversation and most of the deputations revolved around only one of the measures, to rank ballots or not. An alternate way to vote by ranking candidates in order of preference to ensure that the winning candidate gets at least 50%+1 of all votes cast. It’s a pitched battle that has been going on for some time now, not only pitting those in favour of keeping our current First Past the Post system against those proposing the basic 1-2-3 alternate ballot but reformers at odds with each other, arguing the merits of the ranked ballot versus pure proportional representation. That fight is for another post altogether.

But I will say that those speaking under the banner (if not official endorsement) of Fair Vote Canada – the side of proportional representation and against ranked ballots – did themselves no favours. It’s one thing to speak out against a proposal and another thing entirely to positively offer up something in its place. They told the committee members a ranked ballot was not truly proportional and wouldn’t affect the election results all that much. What they didn’t tell us was how their Single Transferable Vote would work at the municipal level.

None seemed really all that familiar with the structure and workings of the local government in fact, intent to graft on an approach to voting much more conducive to a situation with a party system in place and multi-member representation. Not to say that PR and STV couldn’t work in Toronto. We just needed to be shown how.

We weren’t and in reality, the PR deputations seemed to scare off potential committee support from the likes of Councillor Ford to the idea of any sort of electoral reform whatsoever. Which, unfortunately, also threatened other equally important ideas in the item for ways to increase not only voter turnout but civic engagement overall. How our ballots were counted was only part of the solution put forward.

City staff proposed holding elections on one of the weekend days in order to free voters from having to sneak away from work to vote. Staff also suggested extending the right to vote over the internet for those with disabilities. Thirdly (and most importantly to my way of thinking) the report put forward the idea of allowing permanent residents living in Toronto the right to vote in municipal elections.

The chair of the Government Management Committee, Councillor Paul Ainslie, who has been indefatigable in his support of electoral reform, talked about how when he campaigns a solid majority of the residents in single-family dwellings are eligible to vote. The opposite is true when he knocks on doors in apartment buildings. You want better election day turnout and more civic engagement? There’s no better place to start than extending the municipal franchise to those living in Toronto, paying taxes and using the city’s services.

As someone native born to this country, and with my Canadianness dating back a whole two generations now, I don’t feel particularly possessive of my right to vote here. It’s one aspect of citizenship, the cornerstone of it even. But I believe the exclusivity to it decreases as we move down the levels of government, from federal to provincial to municipal.

What I find especially egregious in the anti-permanent resident vote at the local level is that it’s perfectly fine for citizens to vote municipally in Toronto even if they don’t live here as long as they own or rent a property in the city. I get the reasoning. If you have some pecuniary interest in city business, you should have a say in how the city is run.

Why give that right to just citizens? All permanent residents have financial as well as social interests in Toronto. Giving them the right to vote acknowledges their contributions to this city, the sacrifices they make to live here and the benefits they receive for doing so. It’s like a democracy starter kit. A welcome mat to anyone wanting to put down stakes in Toronto.

Fortunately, all this will be debated again at council despite Team Ford’s best efforts to smother it at committee. Like the representatives of the proportional representation camp, councillors Cristanti, Ford and Mammoliti were content to emphasize the negative without making any sort of positive contribution. Councillor Mammoliti bemoaned how much harder voting is in the suburbs than it is downtown without offering up any motions to address that claim. He chose instead to try and stop any talk of reforms in its tracks. Councillor Ford was all for strengthening the office of the mayor – putting forth a motion to ask the City Manager what kind of legislative amendments were necessary to do so — while merely providing lip-service to giving more power to community councils.

Trying to bolster our democratic process and extend its reach to promote wider and deeper engagement shouldn’t be a partisan issue. On a lot of fronts, it isn’t. The proportional representation-ranked ballot dust up is largely being fought between the left. City council’s champion of electoral reform is Councillor Paul Ainslie who usually sits centre-right. At Government Management Committee he was backed by two of the more left of centre councillors.

But we heard loud and clear yesterday from those wanting nothing to do with electoral reform. The self-described Looking-Out-For-The-Little-Guys guys. The hardest of the hardcore supporters of Mayor Ford. They came down firmly against change without really saying why. The mark of true reactionaries.

— frustratingly submitted by Cityslikr

Our Election Issue

Posted on November 17, 2011 by urbansophisticat

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

The Strategic Voting Dilemma

Posted on April 17, 2011 by urbansophisticat

I despise strategic voting. It sticks in the craw of my heart. No good can ultimately come of it.

Or can it?

Strategic voting is the unnatural outcome of an ill-fitting electoral system that no longer functions properly. Negative campaigning and voter apathy are its bastard spawn. It promotes a race to the dirty, dank abasement basement, urging politicians to campaign on a platform built purely on I’m Not As Bad As The Other Guy planks. All desperation and no inspiration.

But there are moments when the alternative, of just letting the chips fall where they may and voting with your heart threatens a much, much less palatable result. Suck it up time, you might call it. Leave what’s left of your principles at the polling station door and do what needs to be done. There is a greater good to be served than your good conscience.

Now may be one of those times.

It would seem at this juncture of the federal election campaign there are only two passionate blocs of committed voters: rabidly ideological conservatives who somehow still believe Stephen Harper has earned the right to lead a majority government and those who can’t think of a worse outcome. The latter group will do anything within their democratic means to stop it from happening including strategically casting their ballot behind whatever candidate is in the best position to defeat their Conservative rival. For their part, Conservatives and their flock see nothing but evil behind such machinations.

Project Democracy is a group set up to battle against a Conservative majority government. You can go to the site, find your riding and see if it’s been determined to be a strategic voting hot spot. That is, one where the Conservative candidate is in the running and an ABC vote could well defeat them.

One of the founders of Project Democracy is Alice Klein, NOW magazine editor. In a Toronto Star article published last Wednesday, Ms. Klein described herself as “a passionate post-partisan progressive”. However, I might think of her more as a passionate post-partisan strategic voter. Last October just four days before our municipal election, she endorsed George Smitherman based largely on voting strategically to defeat Rob Ford. While all her dire predictions of the adverse results of a Ford victory are bearing fruit, I just think progressives like Ms. Klein have grown comfortable with simply strategic voting and not demanding that so-called progressive candidates and parties actually court progressive voters. It encourages the likes of George Smitherman, Dalton McGuinty and Michael Ignatieff to ignore left-of-center voters while campaigning essentially on a platform of We’re Not As Bad As ____________ [Fill in the blank with the conservative candidate of your choice.]

If we’re going to be forced to vote strategically, how be we vote strategically to stop any party from forming a false majority government instead? Unless someone can secure more than 50% of the ballots cast, no one deserves to win a majority of seats. That parties can zero in on 40% with the expectation of majority status should be regarded as the biggest affront to our democracy. We need fewer passionate post-partisan progressives and more passionate partisan democratic absolutists.

Any place where more than two parties (or candidates for the same office) contest an election that still utilizes a first-past-the-post electoral system should be the target of our strategic votes. It encourages ruinous partisanship and quells positive participation. Pluralistic societies deserve better than pluralistic outcomes of their elections where, ironically, only the candidate/party with the most votes/seats gets all the power regardless of how many voters voted for/against them.

We should be comfortable with minority governments, coalitions or whatever other name anti-democratic forces use to try and smear it with. It is the best reflection of where we are as a society currently. The square peg being pounded into the round hole these days is the first-past-the-post system that ensures nothing else other than a majority of the voters wind up having voted against the government that now represents them with near impunity until the next election. Majority governments, whatever political stripe they may be, should be seen as the aberration, the surprise outcome of unusual circumstances where 50% + 1 of the voters have come together and voted along party lines. The regression to the mean, the default position, should always be a minority government.If we voters get comfortable with that, come to see that circumstance as natural, then the parties and candidates will adjust accordingly. Rather than scheming, scratching and elbowing their way to a phoney position of absolute power, they will instead endeavour to collaborate and put together a government that actually reflects the will of the majority of people. A situation that has only occurred 3 times at the federal level. And we wonder why we’ve become disenchanted and disengaged?

So yes, strategic vote away but do it for the right reason. Not to stop one particular party from earning a false majority government. To stop any party from gaining a false majority government. Starting there, we may set the process in motion of forging an electoral system that genuinely reveals our intentions when we drop our ballot into the box.

— submitted by Urban Sophisticat