In the final analysis, democracy in action looks a lot like Don Ferguson, on a website, telling a penis joke. Oh, Ontario.
It's a sobering thing, trying to make sense of the upcoming Ontario referendum. Voters are being asked if they want to adopt a new way of electing representatives, something called Mixed Member Proportional. The media, ever helpful, more or less ignored the subject until Labour Day, then lurched into gear and starting complaining that the man-on-the-street doesn't know what's going on.
So the man or woman on the street is left at home with his Google, wondering how hard it could be to glean from the Web everything needed to make a good decision. The answer, unfortunately, is harder than it should be.
When you boil it down, it's not that complicated. Mixed Member Proportional works like the current system, but in addition to voting for their local MPPs, electors are asked to also vote for their party of choice. The resulting legislature would comprise 90 locally elected members and 39 MPPs selected from lists of qualified candidates supplied by the parties. Each party's share of the additional candidates will be determined by the percentage of votes they win in both the local and party ballots. The purpose is to ensure that a party's share of the 129 seats is roughly equal to its share of the overall vote. Theoretically, a party that gets 33 per cent of the overall vote will end up with roughly 33 per cent of all seats.
The referendum springs from the most idealistic of places. The recommendation comes from a panel of 104 randomly-selected Ontarians called the Citizen's Assembly on Electoral Reform. Set up as a result of a Liberal campaign promise to revisit the province's electoral system, the assembly operated on the optimistic premise that a panel of laypeople would make a solid decision, as long as they were provided with the right information and the means to work through it.
So the Assembly was assembled and experts were brought in to lecture. Public consultations around the province were arranged and deputations were recorded from Kenora to Cornwall. The Assembly could have recommended that Ontario stick with the status quo, but instead, it came to the conclusion that Mixed Member Proportional should be adopted. You can dig through a lot of their working materials at http://www.citizensassembly.gov.on.ca, which is probably the single best resource on the question. A cartoon tutorial starring "Billy Ballot," which you'll find on the front page, is especially cogent, if a bit cloying. (TVOntario also has an excellent, concise documentary at http://www.tvo.org/citizensassembly.) But the Ontario government presents something entirely different to enquiring voters. Search for election reform, and you'll quickly find a government site called Your Big Decision (http://www.yourbigdecision.ca), a title that sounds like it belongs on a high-school sex-ed pamphlet.
It's a studiously even-handed affair, but it fails to do the two things it needs to do: first, making the proposed system as plain as day, and second, communicating why the Assembly thought it was a smart enough idea to recommend.
Instead, what we get is a presentation that's so dreary and neutral it says almost nothing. You can hunt around to find some paragraphs of small print explaining Mixed Member Proportional, or you can watch a strangely off-kilter video that bogs down in the mechanics of the referendum itself, before blowing past the new system with a perfunctory explanation. Neither will leave you with a clear picture of what's being proposed here.
Worse, it doesn't satisfactorily explain the critical "Why?'s" - like why should we support MMP? At first blush, it makes sense that the government should remain neutral. But this high-minded approach manages to imply that the Citizen's Assembly came up with two equally valid systems of government for us to consider. In fact, the Assembly decided that Mixed Member Proportional was the better way to elect MPPs, and that our current system should go out the window.
This referendum is really a ratification of their decision. To make an informed vote, we don't merely need to know how MMP works; we need to know what made the Assembly think it's such a great idea compared to the status quo. And that's where this site falls down: To give a complete picture, it needs to broadcast the results of the process it set in motion, and it doesn't. By hiding behind a neutral stance, the Ontario government has hung its own election reforms out to dry.
Where the government fails, others step in. Unfortunately, venturing out into the online ecosystem only distances you from the Assembly's careful work. The pro-MMP and anti-MMP camps have set up duelling websites, voteformmp.ca and nommp.ca, respectively, and it's politics as usual.
The anti-MMP site reads like one long sneer, long on rhetoric and short on facts. There's a list of luminaries that have come out against the proposal, including the likes of Sheila Copps, John Tory and - speaking of educated citizenry - John Snobelen.
Meanwhile, in the pro-MMP camp, its website says its opponents have been "reduced to name-calling and fear-mongering." The site prominently features a little online video that amounts to three minutes of the Royal Canadian Air Farce's Don Ferguson, bless his soul, making jokes about "electoral dysfunction," complete with a digitally altered photo of a drooping Peace Tower (Air Farce humour: timeless).
This whole exercise began with a new form of decision-making that might have spurred some faith among the disenfranchised, a return to the fleeting, happy thought that educated citizens could make good choices. And, in the home stretch, this is where it winds up: half-baked voter education, mud-slinging websites, dumbed-down ads.
Democracy staying true to its dumb, ugly self.
