by Cameron Smith

As I read it, Ian Urquhart, the Star’s Queen’s Park columnist, has just implied that I’m a zealot, hand in hand with the “giddy” folks on Premier Dalton McGuinty’s citizens assembly who recommended proportional representation  — and I don’t take kindly to this. 

Calling anyone names is a poor way to make an argument. Typically, it means there isn’t much of an argument to be made. 

Besides me, there were 1,579,683 other people in Ontario who voted a week ago for mixed member proportional representation (MMP). I suppose they’re also tinged with the zealotry and giddiness that Urquhart so abhors. I imagine they’re not taking kindly to to his name-calling either.

Together, we more or less “giddy zealots” represent a big chunk of Ontario — 36.9 per cent of the people who voted. 

We speak for the electorally dispossessed. In many cases we are the dispossessed. We are — horror of horrors — reformers, which Urquhart defines as “zealots who oddly see a new electoral system as a cure for most of the province’s ills.”

Alas, I wish proportional representation were such a cure. No one I’ve come across has made such a claim. What we’ve said is that democracy is based on each person’s vote being worth as much as any other’s. In Ontario this doesn’t exist.

Look at the record: In 1990, the New Democrats won 56.9 per cent of the seats with 37.6 per cent of the votes; in 1995, the Progressive Conservatives won 63.1 per cent of the seats with 44.8 per cent of the vote; in 2003 the Liberals won 69.9 per cent of the seats with 46.5 per cent of the vote. And last week the Liberals again won, this time gaining 66.3 per cent of the seats with only 42.2 per cent of the vote.

Under proportional representation, the Liberals would have won 46 seats, the PCs 34, the NDP 18, and the Greens 9. Instead the Liberals won 71, the PCs 26, and the NDP 10. The Greens, with 8 per cent of the vote, were shut out.

To those who have been saying of the province’s electoral system, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” I say: The electoral system is indeed broken. It badly needs fixing. Representation in the Legislature does not reflect how people voted. In fact, it distorts the wishes of the public, and helps foster the attitude that there’s no point in voting, because the system ensures that the wishes of many will be ignored.

Urquhart frets that proportional representation will mean too many parties. In an earlier column, he pointed out that New Zealand, under proportional representation has eight parties. Such a system in Ontario might spawn a government like that of former premier Mike Harris, he wrote, because a few one-issue parties might join with a large hard-right party to form a coalition government. This could allow the hard right party to have its way on condition that the single-issue parties got what they wanted.

But the record shows that the chance of this happening is less than getting a hard right majority government because the electoral system failed to represent the wishes of voters, which happened under Mike Harris. Dennis Pilon says as much in an article published in the Star on Oct. 7.

Western governments using proportional representation have some of the best performance ratings for economic health, quality of life, and innovative policy responses, he said. Pilon is a professor of political science at the University of Victoria and author of a recent book on Canada’s electoral system.

Of one thing Urquhart can be sure. We “giddy zealots” won’t be going away — as Tommy Douglas used to say, quoting William Blake —
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In this our green and pleasant land.

Cameron Smith can be reached at camsmith@kingston.net