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Del Duca tries to reframe question on voter reform

Martin Regg Cohn Twitter: @reggcohn

Fresh from the last federal election, months away from the next provincial campaign, Steven Del Duca wants to talk about how people vote. And why they don’t.

The question is whether Del Duca, the leader of Ontario’s Liberals, can do anything to reverse the steady decline in voter turnout — and turn around the electoral fortunes of his own party after hitting bottom in 2018.

After all, his party did its bit to boost democracy in the last election, even if inadvertently. Whenever people are angry enough to “throw the bums out,” as they were with Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government, voters come out in force and the turnout goes back up — but it’s a blip.

Unfortunately, the lopsided results from those massive swings can sometimes prove even more vexing for voters: Premier Doug Ford won 40.2 per cent of the vote in the 2018 provincial election fair and square. Yet that percentage handed his Tories a disproportionate 76 of the 124 seats at Queen’s Park, giving him a rock solid 61.3 per cent majority in any legislative vote.

Ford’s boasts of winning a landslide were built on shaky ground. The vast majority of the electorate — who supported NDP, Liberal or Green alternatives — were sidelined in opposition, shut out of government.

It doesn’t add up. Yet nothing seems to change — and likely never will if we don’t rethink things.

Now, Del Duca is trying to reframe the reform question by recasting the way voters cast their ballots. He may be a voice in the wilderness, but given the wild gyrations in our electoral system, his idea deserves a hearing from voters even if his political rivals refuse to listen.

For too long, Canadians have boxed themselves in with a false choice between two rigid alternatives — proportional representation (PR) that reflects the popular vote, versus our current winner-take-all system (dubbed first past the post) that generates disproportionate majorities out of whack with voter sentiment.

The problem with PR is that it’s a poor fit for a vast territory like Canada or Ontario with strong geographical and historical allegiances to the constituency system. There’s a compromise solution to that problem, but it’s a hard sell — and voters weren’t buying it when they had the chance in a 2007 referendum that flopped spectacularly in Ontario.

(I won’t recap that failed footnote to history here, except to note that the hybrid PR system on offer in 2007 was Mixed Member Proportional or MMP, which combines a constituency system with a party preference option in a double-barrelled ballot. But never mind — the voters’ verdict on MMP was RIP.)

Speaking to his party’s annual general meeting, Del Duca proposed a better fit for Ontario: The ranked ballot.

Think of it as an instant (or electronic) runoff: If no candidate wins more than 50 per cent of the vote, the also-rans are dropped from the ballot and their supporters can indicate their second choices, until someone wins a majority of the votes.

Yet Ford’s Tories have long opposed it, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath turned thumbs down Monday, and even the Greens are unenthusiastic. Their intransigence is as indefensible as it is inconsistent.

The equivalent of a ranked ballot is how Ford was elected leader of Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives — it took him three ballots to get more than 50 per cent of delegate votes. Horwath, too, won the New Democratic Party’s 2009 leadership convention on the third ballot.

How peculiar that they believe in the primacy of the ranked ballot for internal party democracy, but not for general elections that determine the composition of government. Could it be that Tories and New Democrats fear their supporters might opt for the centrist Liberals as their second choice under a ranked ballot system?

Even if true — and it’s utterly unproven, for the ranked ballot wouldn’t have saved Wynne’s Liberals in 2018 — how do true democrats deny Ontarians the right to a second choice any more than a first choice on their ballot? The answer is that Ford’s PCs prefer to stick to the status quo because every few elections they win a whopping majority with a minority plurality; the NDP prefers the devil they know (it gave them government when the stars were aligned in 1990) instead of the vagaries of a ranked ballot.

Del Duca is not the first to note that a fringe benefit of ranked ballots is that they discourage negative campaigning against rivals, instead forcing politicians to court second choice support from loyalists of other parties by being constructive and consensual: Ranked ballots would “suck the poison out of the politics that we have right now,” he told reporters Monday.

The Liberal leader raised the stakes in a weekend speech by promising to “work with all parties” to enact the ranked ballot, adding with a flourish, “If I don’t deliver electoral reform in my first term, I will resign on the spot.”

Easier said than done. The Liberals have a long way to go, but if he somehow became premier in a minority legislature, how would Del Duca get buy-in from rival parties that view ranked ballots as political death, and which he’s made a do-or-die promise?

As Ontarians ponder the so-called “ballot question” in the next election, it’s a safe bet that a ranked ballot doesn’t top the list. But if the Liberals were to win a mandate with that explicit promise, it would surely change the democratic dynamics.

That’s up to voters in the next election.

For too long, Canadians have boxed themselves in with a false choice between two rigid alternatives — proportional representation that reflects the popular vote, versus our current winner-take-all system (dubbed first past the post)

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2021-10-19T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-10-19T07:00:00.0000000Z

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