The Big Lie About MMP

The Big lie about MMP is that candidates on "the list" are somehow selected differently, and less democratically, than local candidates.

Referendum Ontario, the agency responsible for the referendum states:

‘List Members’ are candidates from any registered political party. Before an election each political party prepares an ordered list of candidates they would like considered as ‘List Members’.

These lists, and the way they are created, would be made public well in advance of any election in a Mixed Member Proportional system.

Is this different than the way local candidates are chosen. In fact, according to the Ontario Election Act, local candidates are chosen by the political parties and "endorsed" by the party leaders.

The Ontario Elections Act states:

Ballots

Names of candidates

34. (2) The names of the candidates shall be shown on the ballot in accordance with the following rules:

5. The official name of the registered party that endorses the candidate shall be shown after his or her name if,

i. a statement of endorsement signed by the party leader is filed as described in section 28.1, and

Endorsement by Party Leader

Statement of endorsement

28.1 If a candidate is endorsed by a political party that is registered or has applied for registration with the Chief Electoral Officer under the Election Finances Act, a statement of endorsement signed by the party leader may be filed with the Chief Electoral Officer, on or before the close of nominations. 2007, c. 15, s. 17.

In fact, while most local candidates are selected through party nomination votes, the Party leaders can hand pick candidates, and have done so in the past.

The law (and proposed law) is in fact no different as far as the selection of local and list candidates. It is up to the parties to use democratic selection methods and up to the voters to judge them on the methods they use.

"First Past the Post" - Who Dreamed This Up

I am referring, of course, not to the concept but to the term, which Wiktionary defines as "voting system where the candidate with the most votes (a plurality) wins, without any form of preference transfer".

There are no firsts or posts, metaphorical or otherwise, involved. The winner is not decided when a candidate reaches some defined number or percentage of votes (the metaphorical "post") before another candidate (the metaphorical "first"), but by whoever receives a plurality (the most) of votes when all the votes are counted in a particular constituency. Wikipedia uses the more sensible term "Plurality voting system".

The term "winner takes all" has also been used, and this at least makes some sense as it refers to the votes for the winning candidate electing that candidate, while the votes for other candidates or parties are of no impact at all.

At least "Mixed Member Proportional" makes sense as a term.

End of semantic rant.

Vote for MMP

While it may not have been my first choice I want to state that I unequivocally support voting for MMP in the Ontario referendum.

After the Citizens Assembly process that we have gone through, if we do not support electoral reform now we may be stuck with the current system forever. On the other hand, because this will be a new system, I believe MMP will be open to fine tuning, such as improving the party list selection process.

It seems that the main criticism of MMP is that we will not get majority governments unless the voters give one party a majority of the votes. That is right, under MMP if voters vote for a minority government they will get a minority government. That is the main criticism of MMP - that voters will get what they vote for. That seems to be a rather strange criticism of a democratic process.

I am voting for MMP because voters will get what they vote for.

Public Education and Public Health - The HPV Vaccine

I was all set to go on a tirade against the Catholic school system for attempting to thwart local health units HPV vaccine programs. However it appears that the boards have backed down from their threat to put religion before public health. But it could have happened.

The Catholic Church is free to have it’s religious position on non-marital sex but do the church leaders really believe that Jesus would have thought cervical cancer was an appropriate punishment for engaging in non-marital sex.

Our public health system uses the school system to provide effective and efficient vaccination programs. None of the vaccines provided are without controversy, including the HPV vaccine. But it is the responsibility of our public health system to decide which are appropriate to be provided, not the responsibility of religious leaders. The HPV vaccine program is supported by medical experts as well as federal, provincial and local health officials.

This is just another example of the problem with publicly funded religious based schools. It goes beyond education into public health. The Catholics may have backed down but there are certainly many “Christian” and other religious schools that will not allow public health units to use their schools to provide the HPV vaccine, or perhaps any vaccines. With the extension of public funding to all religious schools this will become a real problem, whether the schools co-operate or not.

The benefit of using the school system to provide vaccinations, and this applies to all vaccines including the standard childhood vaccines, is the efficiency provided by only having to deal with two school systems in each community. With public funding of all religious schools we will undoubtedly have more of them and the effectiveness of using the school system to provide vaccines will be greatly diminished.

And, of course, the effectiveness of sex education to prevent the spread of STDs and HIV/AIDS, as well as reduce teenage pregnancies, will also be reduced by the increased number of religious based schools.

Public education and public health go hand in hand and that is just one more reason to have a single public education system.

On Blogging

It seems like I have always wanted to have a blog even before there were blogs.

When I attended Laurentian University I was active on the student newspaper, Lambda, and had a regular column, the Fifth Column, for which my blog is named.

My first personal computer was an Osborne 1 and I remember watching the dots go by as I downloaded files from computer Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) . My first Internet experience was with the Freeport based National Capital Freenet and I was one of the NCFs first information providers and one of the first NCF information providers to go to HTML web format with the Bridlewood Electromagnetic Fields (EMFs) Information Service.

My political perspective was formed, as with many people, during my university years where I studied Political Science and was involved in student politics as well as the New Democratic Party. When I moved to Ottawa to work for the House of Commons (indexing the House of Commons Debates and Committee Proceedings), I continued my involvement with the NDP. After moving to Kanata, I became involved in municipal politics as well, in particular the Bridlewood Residents Hydro Line Committee. Since then I have stepped back from active political involvement but remain an interested observer.

Upon retirement it seemed natural to bring my interest in the Internet, politics and journalism together in a blog. My blog is still young and struggling to find it’s place. I do not think I have reached my goal of providing the type of writing that I think I am capable of - original and thought provoking. Finding a distinctive style, beyond avoiding using question marks (as my daughter informs me I do), is another challenge.

I think my blog is going to find it’s place somewhere between a personal blog and a political blog. As an avid outdoors person, hiker, mountain biker, kayaker and cross county skier, I am more than just a “political animal”

I have recently disciplined myself into writing something every weekday. I wonder if this is hampering my writing of longer more thoughtful blog entries, but then if I cannot think of at least one interesting thing to say each day should I really be doing this. Blogging daily has certainly increased the readership of my blog which encourages me to spend more time researching and writing this blog..

Let me know what you think of the Fifth Column. I look forward to seeing how it evolves

Why I Am Not Voting NDP This Election

Since I started voting in 1968 there have only been two previous times I did not vote for the NDP. Once was as a protest vote after the Waffle was expelled from the NDP and I voted CPC-ML, and the other was a strategic vote for Marianne Wilkinson (who had left the Tories to join the Liberals because of Mike Harris's regressive policies) in an attempt to unseat the sitting Tory, Norm Sterling, and the Harris government.

This will be the third time, and it is essentially over one issue. I do not usually believe in voting based on one issue but in this case I have an opportunity to vote for a party not afraid to raise the issue of one public education system for the province. It should be the NDP, but it is not. On this issue I even find myself agreeing with John Tory, rather than Howard Hampton, on the fact that the existing funding of Catholic religious schools only is discriminatory. Of course I disagree with John Tory's solution, which would only make things worse.

In the entire history of the province only the Green Party has had the political will to stand up for equality and public education in Ontario, and for that they will be rewarded with my vote.

Listen Up - Stephen Lewis on Climate Change

I happened to luck out Saturday and catch this lecture by Stephen Lewis at McMaster University on TVO's Big Ideas. Lewis was as compelling as ever in addressing the subject and making the case that if Canada would take leadership on the issue the world would follow.

Listen Up

Fashion Industry Contradiction of the Day

A British Fashion Council report recommends models be screened for eating disorders. So far so good.

The report notes "The facts of the modelling profession are not so glamorous; it is peopled by young and potentially vulnerable workers — the majority of them women — who are self-employed and do not have adequate support".

It then goes on to recommend "that starting next fall, models arrange and pay for the certification themselves from an accredited list of medical experts".

The Rule of Law and "Veiled Voting"

Canada is not a police state. The police cannot simply tell people to do something because they are the police. They must have legal authority. And neither can other government officials. It does not matter whether everyone thinks that requiring voters to show their faces is a good thing, whether it be the Prime Minister, all political parties, all Muslim organizations and leaders and veiled Muslim women themselves, or even a Parliamentary committee, if the law does not provide the authority election officials cannot require Muslim women to show their faces to vote.

Perhaps the law should be changed. But if the law is to be changed to require photo identification of voters then it must apply to all voters. So why was it not applied to all voters when the act was amended. Perhaps it was because many voters, particularly the poor and disadvantaged, do not have photo identification and requiring it would effectively disenfranchise many of the poor from voting. Do we want to do that simply because veiled women make some people uncomfortable.

And what of those who vote by mail, who do they show their face and photo identification to. Indeed, mail in ballots are a greater concern because there is no guarantee of a secret ballot, one of the basic principles of democratic elections, when mail in ballots are used.

Perhaps we should stop and think before implementing knee jerk reactions to what is in reality more of a theoretical, rather than real, problem.

Bossership vs Leadership - The Failure of Ottawa Mayor Larry O'Brien

It is not a year into his mandate yet, but clearly his record is clear. Larry O’Brien is probably the biggest disappointment in Ottawa history. While a majority of voters clearly believed we needed a change from Bob Chiarelli’s mediocre leadership, this is not what they expected. Indeed, the most disappointed are his own supporters. But even those of us who opposed O’Brien did not expect this. In fact, some of us realized that he could not do too much damage with just one vote on council and hoped that his hyped high tech private sector background might even provide some innovative ideas. But there were none. While we expected policies and leadership in a direction we disagreed with, this complete failure of leadership was not expected..

Rather than recap all the failures of our new mayor I will refer you to Dawg's Blawg: Bull in a china shop, where he does an excellent job of summarizing them.

In hindsight we should not have been surprised. For all they hype about his background as a high technology leader, in reality he was the boss of a gloried temporary help agency that made his money by taking a cut of the salaries of people who worked for other companies or the federal government.

We had our first clear clues that Larry O’Brien was not up for the job when he admitted to never attending a City Council meeting, and made no effort to attend any, even after announcing his candidacy, and saw no need to learn the structure of city government until after he was elected.

Ironically many voted for Larry O’Brien because he was not a politician, but his lack of political skills have been his downfall. He may, or may not, be a great private sector boss, who is used to making the decision and telling everyone else what to do, but he obviously lacks the political skills necessary to build the consensus and coalitions necessary to get things done in municipal government.

Larry O’Brien is simply not a leader. He has clearly demonstrated that. He was clearly a boss masquerading as a leader. It is easy to get people to follow you when you are the one signing the pay cheques. But when, as mayor, he started hiring people not accustomed to being “yes men” he saw his key staff resigning in droves, as he refused to listen to the people he hired to give him advice.

What Larry O’Brien has done is demonstrate clearly that mayors are not as powerful as people think. The mayor is just one member of council. We forget that sometimes because we see the accomplishments of great mayors of the past in this city and others. In fact their accomplishments did not come because they had power, not because they were the bosses. Their accomplishments came because they showed leadership. Larry O’Brien has clearly not shown any leadership as Mayor of Ottawa.

It appears that Larry O’Brien may even be recognizing his own failures as a leader and giving up on trying to be the leader and trying to be the boss instead, by attempting to take over the role of the City Manager. That is not his role. If Larry O’Brien does not want to lead this city he can sit back and fulfill his ceremonial duties and let City Council run the city without him.