Sunday, September 30, 2007

Vote No To MMP

After a lot of consideration, I will be voting "No" to MMP. There's a few reasons:
  • MMP tends to result in minority governments. While I recognize minorities can keep a "dictatorial" leader in check, and prevent any one party from implementing radical reforms, we have Senates in Canada (a house of 'sober second thought').

  • A minority government implies nothing gets done and too many games being played as the government remains busy trying to keep governing rather than getting anything done. I would rather the government push forward its agenda - whatever it is - and be judged on it, than 3 years of no action.

  • A minority government implies the government has to compromise its agenda, which is really what they were elected on in the first place.

  • I prefer Instant Runoff Voting, which is not on the ballot.

  • So a party gets a majority of the seats with only 35% of the people voting for them. I fail to see what the problem is. If more people voted it would have been fairer, but you know - the guys who didn't vote - consciously made that choice.

  • I don't like MPs being beholden and being blindly loyal to the party and party leaders. Even as it is now the "whip" has too much power.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ontario has no Senate. Even federally, the Senate is no longer an effective control on a majority parliament.

Minority governments do not imply that nothing gets done, that's a massive assumption. In the current system, there's no motivation to get things done in a minority as everyone is jockeying for a majority. Don't assume government will stay the same under MMP, it will change for the better.

Compromise is not necessarily a bad thing. It will likely mean rounding out policy to reflect the views of the other parties who are, you know, representative of the majority of voters.

Instant runoff means you may end up supporting your second or third choice. Are you happy with that? Wouldn't you rather see your first choice working with other parties to ensure your views are reflected in legislation?

Democracy is based on majority rule. If you can't see the problem with a minority establishing its agenda then I question your definition of democracy.

MPs being beholden or holding the party line helps representative democracy, as it means consistency of message and policy from a party. If you want "every rep for him/herself," then look to the US, where voters really have no idea what they're going to get as parties can't reliably enforce their platform since reps can vote in any direction.

Idealistic Pragmatist said...

Your conclusions would be good ones if it were actually true that MMP resulted in minority governments. It isn't, though.

Borges said...

Yeah, no Senate in Ontario, hasn't for a longggg time, and if you look at the history of MMP in Scotland, you will see that it is not as flawed as you claim