Preville on Politics

Up Your MMP

Posted on October 12, 2007 by Philip Preville

Today’s newspaper punditry is insisting that the issue of electoral reform is dead. Fine. I’ll shut up about it too, after these last words.

• In all, 58 per cent of Ontarians voted against the McGuinty Liberals. By any standard other than the first-past-the-post system, that would be considered a massive rejection.

• With 42.2 per cent of the popular vote, the Liberals won 66 per cent of the seats. Political strategists call the ratio of votes-to-victories “seat conversion.” And this is the seat-conversion standard: If you can meet a threshold of 41 per cent of votes, you’ll be rewarded with a majority.

• The Liberals and the Conservatives like it this way; it gives them the freedom to govern to the dissatisfaction of a large majority of the population with impunity.

• This reality, in turn, leads voters to disconnect themselves from the electoral process. To wit: Only 52.8 per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot.

• The historical voter-turnout standard in Ontario provincial elections is around 65 per cent. In the last 15 years those numbers have fallen dramatically. Lower turnout is the new normal. It will take a miracle to get 60 per cent of voters out to the polls. Despite their mealy mouthed professions of grave concern over this trend, it actually suits Liberals and Conservatives just fine.

Last point: The Green Party garnered eight per cent of all votes cast. In other words, Liberal support + Green support = 50.2 per cent of the vote. According to numbers published in today’s Globe, under the proposed MMP system, a Liberal-Green coalition would have produced the majority of seats needed to govern. Opportunity lost.

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Charles Oberdorf October 19, 2007 at 5:02 p.m.

WHy is it that 42 percent of the vote for the Liberals constitutes a "resounding victory" while 38 percent of the vote for MMP is a "resounding defeat?"


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Philip Preville

Veteran freelance writer Philip Preville lived much of his life in Montreal and Edmonton before he was lured, like so many Torontonians before him, by the promise of more work and a better living. A National Magazine Award winner and former Canadian Journalism Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Massey College, Preville writes Toronto Life’s politics column. He lives with his wife and one-year-old son in Riverdale, just close enough to the Don Valley Parkway that he can hear it when he steps outside his house—but just far enough away that it doesn’t keep him awake at night. On his office wall hangs a 1938–39 press pass belonging to his grandfather, Elias Gannon, who wrote for the Montreal Star.


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