Ontario held an election and 63% of us were ignored!...

Ontario Liberal landslide — with only about a third of the votes – is a powerful argument for proportional representation

By handing Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals an apparent majority with perhaps a third of the popular vote, the outcome will be held up as a powerful argument in favourr of proportional representation.

The fact is that only a handful of parties have governed with a mandate of over 50% of the population since Confederation. In other words this has happened before, and yet politicians and electoral officials wring their hands worrying about falling numbers at the polls. Indeed, they have tried every solution from studying the situation to death, to blaming it on voter apathy while ignoring the elephant in the room—the one in the pink tutu.

The message which they just don't seem to get is that the public is not stupid. They see very well that something is wrong when a large percentage of votes have no effect. In this past election a good 63% of the electorate voted against Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal Party, and yet she ended up with a majority with only 37% of the popular vote. How can you call this democracy?

While it is true that a referendum was held on some form of proportional representation in 2007, but the proposition (that came from some airy-fairy study group) was so convoluted that even I voted against it. 

Given this scenario, one can only conclude that the politicians and officials who have studied the problem in the past have either been myopic, or had other things on their mind. It is no secret, of course, that the present “first-past-the-post” system favors the two major parties, as well as regional, "single-issue" parties (i.e. Bloc Québecois), both of which are at the expense of  broad-based third parties (e.g. NDP). Moreover, since these studies have invariably been conducted by one or the other of the two major parties, it is not an unreasonable stretch of the imagination to suggest that they were not anxious to upset the applecart.

However, there is a movement afoot to lobby for proportional representation voting, and from all appearances it is gaining momentum. You can see their mission statement at the following URL: Fair Vote Canada Mission Statement.

Please do yourself a favour, as well as your fellow electors and all aboard.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bx38vorBQgfmdkdGVnJzUVlsWGM/edit