Form of PR would serve us better

Todd Whitcombe has written three rants now on proportional representation and still does not seem to see any advantages of the system so I feel compelled to write.

Some years ago I spent seven months in New Zealand and talked to numerous Kiwis about their mixed member proportional representation (MMPR), introduced in 1996. Permit me to explain how it works.

As the name implies, there are two types of members: riding MPs (or in our case, MLAs), and list MLAs. The first are nominated in the usual way and voted for in the usual way. However, for the second, each party makes public a list of candidates at a set time before election day. On election day, each voter is presented with two ballots. The first is for the riding MLA; in each riding the one with the most votes wins. The second ballot asks which party the voter wishes to govern. It is thus the popular vote and is totalled province-wide.

After the ballots are counted, a party whose percentage of riding members less than its popular vote receives members from its list and in order. Thus, if party A receives, say 39 per cent of the votes from the second ballot, it will receive approximately 39 per cent of the members (both riding and list). In order to avoid unnecessary proliferation of political parties, there is a threshold of five per cent of the popular vote; a party which gets below this is not entitled to list members.

Here are the advantages of MMPR:

1) A political party that receives less than 50 per cent of the popular vote cannot receive an absolute majority of members (“one day of democracy and four years of dictatorship” which is what we have now).

2) Smaller parties would get the number of representatives appropriate for their popular support. It was patently unfair for the Green Party in the last federal election to receive almost a million votes nationwide and elect only one member. Under MMPR, the Greens would have received by my calculation about 15 members, which is much more appropriate, given their wide support. A similar situation occurred some years back when the federal Conservatives received two million votes and two MPs.

3) Another benefit, recently pointed out by a Green Party MLA is that, under MMPR, there are no “swing ridings.” Think about it: governing parties very much want to stay in power and, as such, pay attention to their support in the ridings. Their own strongholds are not of great concern, and neither are the opposition strongholds as voting patterns will not change much with government decisions. However, it is the ridings that could go either way that are of the greatest concern. These ridings tend to “get the goodies” to the detriment of everyone else. Under MMPR, this will not happen.

4) Every vote counts. For a given voter under the present system, if the riding always goes to the other party, there is not a lot of incentive to vote, as his/ her vote does not really matter. Under MMPR, all votes count towards the popular vote, which determines the government.

Now it is time to address the disadvantages of MMPR. The most obvious charge is that supposedly it gives minority parties too much power. However, I would assert that the voters are not stupid, and any minority party that overplays its hand gets punished at the next election. True democracy is the art of compromise and that is what happens with minority governments.

Another supposed weakness of MMPR is that the list MLAs are not directly elected by anyone. However, I would claim that any non-effective list member would reflect poorly on that party at the next election and the party would suffer the voters’ wrath.

All in all, I would assert that MMPR would serve us much better than the present “first past the post” system which has many defects. It is my information that Canada and the U.K. are the only parliamentary democracies still clinging to this outdated system. From Wikipedia, we find that the following countries use proportional representation: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.