On October 22, Saskatchewan Premier Lorne Calvert said that if he is returned to power at the provincial election on November 7, his government will initiative a Citizens Assembly to examine proportional representation. He also said, if the Citizens Assembly then recommends proportional representation and the matter is submitted to the voters, that the government will fund efforts to educate the voters about the proposal. Calvert is the leader of the New Democratic Party, which now controls the Saskatchewan government. This month’s vote in Ontario Province on the same type of proposal was marred because a large proportion of the Ontario voters received no information about the proposal, prior to the election. Thanks to Thomas Jones for this.
Citizens Assemblies controlled by so-called *experts* are NOT needed.
Party Seats = Party Votes x Total Seats / Total Votes = Democracy = Majority rule and minority representation
Too much for ANTI-Democracy gerrymander / plurality regimes and so-called *experts* to understand.
A few years ago when BC conducted an electoral reform vote (I think it was on STV) an acquaintance of mine was a poll worker. She said most people coming to vote had no clue about the proposal and we’re asking the poll workers for information, many angry and not even getting the concept as they were voting on the topic.
The Ontario Citizens’ Assembly was a wonderful process with no government interference and a first rate impartial staff. The members of the Citizens’ Assembly did their homework and crafted an excellent system for Ontario, a moderate and reasonable proposal that preserved the current system while adding an element of proportionality.
Unfortunately, we then learned how a referendum can be quashed by simply suppressing the final report of the Citizens’ Assembly. Obviously, this report should have been circulated to every household in the province as soon as it came out on May 15, 2007.
But that has not yet happened. None of the excellent explanatory materials produced by the Ontario Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform was distributed to the voters by Elections Ontario, who got all the money for voter education and delivered none.
This information vacuum left a huge opening for a well coordinated campaign of misinformation by those with a vested interest in the status quo.
You can read the actual report and recommendations of the Ontario Citizens’ Assembly on their website here:
http://www.citizensassembly.gov.on.ca
Lots more good information here:
http://www.VoteforMMP.ca
http://www.VoteforMMP.ca/blog/44
How many times must we go through this? Three different provinces have had a referendum and all three times the voters defeated it. Tens of millions of taxpayers money spent pursuing the pet project of a special interest group, with nothing to show for it.
Despite attempts to convince them otherwise, voters want to elect their representative directly, they don’t want their vote to go into a black box that spits out a different representative than the one they and their neighbours selected.
As one of the coordinators for the campaign Mr Smith talks about, I assure you there was very little coordination going on. And of those I know who worked on the campaign, mostly students and political neophytes and all volunteers with day jobs, none has any vested interest in the status quo, with the possible exception of members of minority groups who are better served by the current system. With a campaign budget of one quarter cent per vote, all that was required for people to vote against it was an explanation of how the proposed system works. More explanatory materials would have been great – polls show the people who understood the system best were the ones rejecting it. Personally I only made up my mind after reading the full report of the Citizens’ Assembly and I kept referring people to it.
Laplante:
I don’t know how you could be more wrong. First off, a MAJORITY of voters in BC accepted the citizen’s assembly recommendations. It simply fell short of the anti-democratic 60% threshhold imposed by those in power who wanted to maintain the status quo.
I live in Ontario and talked to people days before the election. They did NOT know much if anything about it.
As for your statement that “polls show the people who understood the system best were the ones rejecting it”, it’s funny how I read the opposite in the Globe.