Election Blues

“Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.”

  - Harry S. Truman

Now that the Ontario election of 2014 is finished, there will undoubtedly be more cries for electoral reform.  The argument will again be made that a majority government has been elected with less than 40% of the popular vote.  They will also point out that the Green Party got 5% of the popular vote and yet again gets no seats.  All of this is true, and is a common outcome for the type of voting system we have. 

Our present system of the winning candidate being the one with the most votes comes to us from the British parliamentary system and is still used there and in the United States.  The US system relies of the fact that there are only two parties of any consequence in that country.  A viable third party, as has sometimes been the case in the past, raises the same concerns there as here.  Is the system flawed?  Probably.  Can it be fixed? Possibly.

Ontario tried to introduce a different voting system in a referendum in 2007.  It was dubbed the MMP (mixed member proportional) system and would have had a proportional representation system for most of the members plus a group of 39 seats (“the gang of 39”) set aside for candidates to be nominated by the parties in proportion to their elected seats.  As I said at the time in a letter to the editor, my “concern is a conviction that the voters will never get to directly vote for party leaders or prospective cabinet members.”  It was a system that could only have been devised by a committee.  Fortunately, in my opinion, the electorate turned down the proposal.  But the attempt points out one of the problems with the various ideas that have been floated for electoral reform.  Each of the ones proposed so far have been a mish-mash of ideas like the MMP system above.  Each has seemed to try to address a number of factions while satisfying none.  All have appeared to be designed by committee.  

Are there other options?  There are two methods of candidate election that are used extensively in other democratic nations and they are much more straightforward than any of the ones being discussed in Canada.

The first is straight proportional representation.  It is widely used in Europe.  Under this method, the recent Ontario election would result in about 42 Liberal, 35 PC, 24 NDP and 6 Green seats – a minority government, but representative of the popular vote.  There are, however, some downsides to this method.  They invariably result in minority governments which in turn bring about coalitions – a word that is somehow anathema to Canadians.  They also tend to open the door to new parties so that many represent very special interests.  This not to say they are unworkable – they just take more effort to work out the necessary coalition dynamic that can rule effectively.  However, the major defect in my case is that the elected representatives are drawn from a party list with no apparent concern for local representation.  The first seat goes to the party leader and so on down the party’s list.

The second alternative is the use of run-off elections.  In this case, when no candidate gets 50% of the vote for his/her riding, there is a run-off between the first two vote-getters.  This ensures that the winner gets over 50% of people’s first or second choice.  Of course it takes a bit more time with the run-off, usually held one or two weeks after the main election.  And we are an impatient lot who demand instant answers, so that wait might not be popular for some.  However, it is in my opinion, the best of the alternatives.  It is straightforward, fair and effective.  It can produce majority or minority governments, depending on the mood of the electorate.  Other supposedly similar schemes such as ranking preferences on the initial ballot with some sort of numerical scoring to select the winner can become confusing for many voters and could be open to question of the results.  The run-off format is clear and transparent.

So, in a country that is essentially a three party system, which method of selection of your governments would you like to live with?  

“Too bad the only people who know how to run the country are busy driving cabs and cutting hair.”
  - George Burns

What Price Security

Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.
  - Michael Crichton

I was having a discussion (actually a political disagreement) with a neighbour the other day and I happened to mention my concern about the Canadian (and other) government’s ever increasing encroachment into our private communications under the guise of saving us from terrorists, child molesters, child pornographers, or any other excuse they can make hay with.  I told him that I did not like the idea of the government having relatively unfettered access to my communications, whether phone, smart phone or internet.  And of course, I got the same old answers that I have come to expect, “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about” and “We have to protect ourselves against terrorists,” always invoking 9/11.  So I thought about these reasons and came to the following conclusions.

If we start with the, “If you haven’t done anything wrong” argument, I like to paraphrase the statement as follows, “When they came for the Gypsies, I said nothing for I wasn’t a Gypsy.  When they came for the Jews, I said nothing because I wasn’t a Jew.  When they came for the Catholics, I said nothing because I wasn’t a Catholic.  When they came for me, nothing was said because there was nobody left to speak for me.”  While you may not think you have done or said anything wrong, somebody else, or some other group may think otherwise.  Who’s to say what will be considered wrong by someone at some point now or in the future.  We pride ourselves that we have always had a rational government; a government that supposedly has all of our best interests at heart.  But as politics in this and many other countries gets more partisan and polarized; as the income gap gets wider, with the rich able, in some cases, to pay to get sympathetic politicians elected; as the issue of climate change gets more contentious; and as transnational companies get more and more above the law of any one country, who’s to say what ideas you may have that will run afoul of the prevailing “rightness” of the day.  The problem with your privacy and freedom of thought is that once it is gone it is very hard to get back.  Once the damage is done, it is done

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The argument about 9/11 is another one that needs examining.  Apparently the laws that had provided for our safety for dozens if not hundreds of years were no longer adequate to protect us from another 9/11.  In light of that event, new intrusions into our lives had to be devised.  This subsequently led us to the ability of the NSA and CSEC to monitor any e-mail or telephone call in their respective countries.  The fear of another terrorist attack raised the level of paranoia to such an extent that many people were willing to accept this intrusion.

But let’s look at the facts.  There has not been a successful terrorist attack in North America since 9/11.  The security minded point to this as proof their argument is right, although we are told by authorities that none of the attempted attacks was first detected by phone or e-mail.  This being the case, the prior intelligence could well have been used to request a warrant for legal eavesdropping.  But maybe that’s not the reason.

The question is do foreign terrorists really need to expend the money and effort to strike another attack against North America?  Let’s look at what the terrorists accomplished from that original attack.  They made the world paranoid and many western countries willing to pass draconian laws to curb many of the personal freedoms that had been the hallmark of western civilization.  They caused the United States and other western countries to undertake two debilitating wars in the Middle East.  Canada fought in one of those wars.  These wars caused massive debts that now make it impossible for these western countries to afford to fight new disturbances around the world.  In this way the terrorists could be said to have won.  They don’t have to strike the west again.  The damage is done.  The major terrorist groups now seem to be concentrating of participating in the more conventional (by today’s standards) wars in the Middle East.  They are now heavily engaged in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and some of the old Soviet republics with a view of establishing governments that conform to their view of religious states.  That should keep them busy and focussed for many years to come.

I’m not paranoid about my well-being, but I do resent agencies having unfettered access to my personal correspondence without knowledge or recourse.  And it’s getting worse, because new laws being proposed would open such access to corporations and agencies beyond the police and government security agencies (law societies, medical societies, corporations to identify copyright infringements).  Who’s going to police them?  Who’s going to ensure that they don’t abuse the privilege?  Now you’re making me upset.  Now you are going too far.

You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.
  - John Kenneth Galbraith

All human situations have their inconveniences. We feel those of the present but neither see nor feel those of the future; and hence we often make troublesome changes without amendment, and frequently for the worse.
  - Benjamin Franklin