Here, for your information, is a comparison of the votes cast in the last 5 Ontario Elections to the seats given to the parties in the legislature under our current First Past the Post electoral system.
The results for the party that formed the government are in bold (all "majority" governments, all with less than 50% of the votes) and what I see as the most egregious examples of the skewing of the Legislature by FPTP are in red (Governments which had more than 60% of the power with less than 50% of the vote, or more than 50% of the power with less than 40% of the vote!!!).
Interestingly (and I was surprised!) the current Liberal government was actually helped MORE by FPTP than Bob Rae's 37.6% "majority" in 1990. Despite not being able to get 50% of the vote, McGuinty's Liberals have 70% of the seats at Queen's Park (well, 69.9, but you'll forgive my rounding!). As you're probably aware, despite Ontario's tradition of "majority" governments, the last time a single party actually won a TRUE majority (i.e. actually had more than 50% of the votes) was in 1937. And, TECHNICALLY, that 1937 majority (with 51.6% of the votes) was actually a combination of the votes of the Liberal Party, the Liberal-Progressive Party, and the United Farmers. Making the 1934 election the last time a TRULY single party won a majority of the votes in Ontario.
ETA: The 1987 Liberal government should be in red too! (47.3% of the vote, 73% of the power!), but I can't be bothered to edit the image now!
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Vote For MMP! The Election Results Edition...
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
An Editorial on the "veiled voting" "controversy"...
It seems the editorial writers at the Toronto Star have done something remarkable.
They actually READ the election law passed by Parliament!!!
This puts them ahead of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Official Opposition, and as far as I can tell, EVERY OTHER MP IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.
So now, TWO people in Canada have read the law that Parliament passed. Marc Mayrand, and the guy who wrote that editorial. Now if we could just get our elected officials to read their own legislation, maybe we'd be getting somewhere!!!!
I hope Mr. Mayrand DOES appear before a Parliamentary Committee this week....
... because someone has to read Parliamentarians the election law they passed!!!
It's pretty clear now that virtually none of our elected officials have actually READ the legislation they enacted!!!
LINK
Monday, September 10, 2007
Does anyone in Parliament read the laws they vote on?!?!?!?
Conservative MP Joe Preston of Elections Canada Chief Marc Mayrand:
“I'd love for him to come here and try to explain to us what he doesn't understand about photo ID.”
Well, I'd love to ask Joe Preston what he doesn't understand about the fact that the law he helped pass doesn't require voters to show photo ID.
I get the feeling he, and MANY of his colleagues from across the political spectrum haven't even read the law they passed!!!
If the law required you to provide photo ID before voting
this would all be different!
The biggest issue in the latest veiled voting "controversy" is that our law makers appear to have not read the law they passed.
Nothing in Canadian elections law requires voters to show their faces at the polling station.
More importantly, nothing in Canadian election law requires voter to show photo identification before voting.
Now, that second part is VERY important.
Many of our politicians (led by the Prime Minister, but including members of other parties as well, including Dion and Duceppe) seem to be trying to convince the public that Elections Canada is trying to thwart the will of Parliament by not requiring Muslim women who cover their faces for religious reasons to remove their veils for identification purposes before voting.
Now, the first important point is that nothing in the new election law requires someone to show their face before voting. That's a fact.
However, I certainly concede that if the law required showing photo ID before voting then it probably WOULD be "thwarting the will of Parliament" for Elections Canada to allow women to vote without removing their veil. After all, if you are required to show PHOTO identification, then it seems obvious, even if it were not written explicitly, that that requirement would be meaningless if people were simply allowed to show photo ID, while their faces remained covered! A requirement that voters show photo identification would implicitly require women with veils to remove them, as VISUAL identification would be the obvious motive of such a requirement.
However, very importantly, Canadian election law does NOT require you to show photo identification before voting. That is, it's true, ONE of the ways you can establish your identity under the law passed by Parliament, but you can also show TWO pieces of acceptable ID WITHOUT photos. Or, you can show NO ID, and swear an oath confirming that you are who you say you are, confirmed by another resident of your riding who has had THEIR identity confirmed by either one piece of photo identification OR two pieces of non-photo identification. NOWEHERE is there a requirement, explicit or implied, that a voter be VISUALLY identified before being allowed to vote. All Elections Canada is saying is that the will not "read in" a requirement that Parliament has left out of the law.
So, there is no requirement that voters have uncovered faces when voting (which one might not actually expect to seee explicitly required) but there is ALSO no requirement to show any visual (i.e. photo) identification. So if you don't need to show photo ID, why should Elections Canada be expected to "read in" that you must remove your face veil??? WHY??? It's not in the law, and given that voters are NOT required to provide a photo card that poll workers could compare their face to, what possible reason would there be to require voters to show their faces???
Parliament wrote an election law with a hole big enough to drive a truck through. It's not Elections Canada's responsibility to throw up a roadblock after the fact. In fact, they specifically SHOULD NOT be doing so. Elections Canada FOLLOWS the law, they don't write it, and it's the fault of Parliamentarians if they wrote a law that doesn't actually do what they (they now claim, after the fact) apparently wanted it to.
