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Throughout Ontario's provincial election campaign, most of the focus has been on the race between Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty and Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory. But whoever is premier after next week's vote, the election will likely be remembered for something else: a missed opportunity to improve the province's democracy.

A referendum on electoral reform could have made Ontario a fairer place – one in which the makeup of government better reflected voters' intentions. And it could have paved the way for other provinces, even the federal government, to follow suit. Disappointingly, both the timing of the referendum and major flaws in the new model of government being proposed make it impossible to endorse.

Campaigning in 2003, Mr. McGuinty promised that if elected he would strike a commission on electoral reform and ultimately put it to a vote. As premier, he has followed through on that promise. But by attaching the referendum on a proposed new system to next Wednesday's election, rather than holding it separately, the government all but ensured that it would be overshadowed by the political battle between Mr. McGuinty and Mr. Tory. The proposed reforms were unveiled earlier this year with minimal fanfare, and the rules prevent Ontario's political parties from campaigning directly for or against them. As a result, many Ontarians are poorly informed about the choice before them – to the extent that Elections Ontario is still running ads to alert voters that the matter is on the ballot.

This is no way to change democratic institutions. The proposed reforms would fundamentally change the way Ontario is governed. They should have been debated, publicly and around the dinner table, until voters had a chance to make an informed decision – not treated as an afterthought.

Those who do take the time to study what is on the ballot will find other, more damning problems. The proposed reforms represent less an improvement on the existing system than the introduction of an entirely new one. And while that new system would have its benefits, they are substantially outweighed by the costs.

The “citizens' assembly” that arrived at the proposed new model came much closer to getting it right than a similar panel did in British Columbia before that province's last election. There, the alternative on offer was an absurdly convoluted preferential voting system in which British Columbians would have required a political-science degree to figure out how to cast their ballot – and which, more important, would have severely weakened the party system such that effective and accountable government would have been impossible. In Ontario, the assembly opted instead for mixed-member proportional representation (MMP) – a system that, broadly speaking, is the one Canada should be moving toward.

In principle, mixed-member systems offer a reasonable compromise between the current first-past-the-post system and one in which a party's share of seats is directly proportional to the percentage of votes it receives provincewide or nationwide. Legislatures would consist not only of local representatives, elected the same way as in our current system, but also of a new pool of members – with each party's share of those seats determined by its share of the overall popular vote.

By maintaining the constituency system, these models ensure direct accountability to voters. But they also address key concerns with the existing system – that certain parties wind up vastly overrepresented or underrepresented, that majority governments are too easily won by parties with limited support (the Ontario NDP government's election in 1990 with 37.6 per cent of the vote is a favourite example), and that voters in “safe” ridings are often made to feel irrelevant.

Unfortunately, the citizens' assembly made a major mistake that undermines this compromise. The system it should have put forward is one in which non-constituency seats were distributed in direct proportion to the popular vote, independent of how many ridings each party won. Instead, it has proposed that the 39 seats added to 90 riding seats be distributed in such a way that each party would wind up with a total number of seats roughly equivalent to its share of the popular vote.

Like outright proportional representation, this would result in parties needing to win at least 50 per cent of the popular vote in order to form a majority government. In a multi-party system, that all but ensures perpetual minority governments. Research suggests that, had this version of MMP been in place, no Ontario party would have won a majority in the past 20 years. That would have spared the province an NDP government that it elected by accident, but it would also have meant no Common Sense Revolution under Mike Harris in 1995 and no clear victory by the Liberals in 2003 – both results that were in tune with the province's general sentiment and handed those governments the tools to implement tough policies. With constant minorities, no government would be strong enough to advance a clear agenda. Instead, each would be beholden to the interests of smaller parties that were keeping it in power, and would be handcuffed by the constant threat of another election. Ironically, the current system does a better job of providing a mixture of majority and minority governments than would the one being put forward.

There are other problems with what Ontario's assembly has proposed. The biggest is that the threshold at which a party would begin receiving seats is just 3 per cent of the popular vote. Not only would relatively established entities such as the Green Party receive seats, but so could an assortment of fringe groups: extremists on the left and right, single-issue parties, regional parties. Those parties would likely hold disproportionate influence in the resulting minority legislature. The threshold should be set at 5 per cent.

Then there are the vagaries of how exactly these additional members would be chosen. It appears party leaders would be free to handpick their preferred candidates, leading to even greater control over caucuses. Better to create some clear-cut nomination system, preferably broken down by region so that members would be accountable to a definable pool of voters rather than floating at large.

All of these are shortcomings that could easily be overcome. Rather than abandon electoral reform altogether if Ontarians correctly reject the current proposal, Ontario's next government should take a more serious stab at it. Instead of the populist pandering of “citizens' assemblies,” a smaller panel of experts should be tasked with designing a more workable MMP model. The matter should then be put to voters between elections, ensuring that the referendum receives the attention it deserves.

As for what is currently on the table, sadly, the proportionate response is to reject it.