Three of Ontario’s Four Major Parties Say They Support Electoral Reform

Three of Ontario’s four major parties are promising to change the province’s electoral system, a lofty goal that some political scientists say may fall short.

The NDP and the Greens favor forms of proportional representation, while Liberal leader Steven Del Duca has vowed to resign if his party forms a government but fails to introduce preferential voting after a year.

Only Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford has remained silent on the issue, although he has indicated he is unwilling to reform the electoral system.

“We need politicians and leaders to figure out how to collaborate more, work across party lines, instead of getting stuck in the old way of doing things,” Del Duca said at a campaign stop in Thunder Bay, Ont. on Sunday. “Doug Ford might want us to get stuck in there and try to drag people back, but we want to make sure that our political system, our democracy, how we elect our parties and our leaders, keeps pace with the time.”

But Cristine de Clercy, an associate professor of political science at Western University, said that while electoral reform is a popular topic on the campaign trail, it’s easier to talk about change than to enact it.

“If you look at the history of electoral reform over the last 20 years in Canada at the provincial level, the evidence is not positive about the likelihood that we will achieve electoral reform even within the next 20 years,” he said.

British Columbia has held several referendums on the issue, but de Clercy said proposals for change have not come to fruition.

The federal Liberal government also promised electoral reform and failed to deliver.

Justin Trudeau committed to the promise in 2015, saying that the federal election held that year would be the last to use the first-past-the-post method, a promise he would ultimately renege on.

Under the system, voters choose a candidate on their horse, and the person with the most votes wins. The successful candidate does not need to win a majority of votes to participate.

Ford’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on electoral reform, but de Clercy said there are good reasons to stick with the simple majority system.

“Ontario has a competitive multiparty system,” he said. “If we were to introduce an electoral reform that was much more like pure proportional representation, it would be very unlikely that we would have majority governments in the future. So we would be perpetually in a state of minority government, which is inherently unstable because at any time coalitions can fall apart and we go back to the polls.”

He said it also makes sense for Ford to hesitate about electoral reform given the nature of his party.

“The Conservative Party ideologically tends to be the traditional party in Canadian politics,” he noted.

The other three parties have said that the current system simply does not pass the test.

Andrea Horwath’s NDP is in favor of a mixed member proportional voting system, which tries to bring some of the stability of the simple majority system to a fully proportional government.

Under the system proposed by the NDP, some legislators would be elected from local districts and others would be elected province-wide from party lists.

The system was designed by the Ontario Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform, which a previous Liberal government established in 2006.

“It’s really the people of Ontario, in the district assembly, who recommended the mixed member proportional system, and that’s why we adopted it,” Horwath said Saturday.

But when the proposal was put to a referendum in the 2007 elections, the province voted against it.

The Green Party, meanwhile, prefers a fully proportional system, but suggests in its platform that it would create a “diverse, randomly selected” citizens’ assembly, this time with a mandate to create binding recommendations.

Tim Abray, professor and doctoral candidate in political studies at Queen’s University, said the proportional system tends to be popular because it allows people to feel that their vote really counts.

“Proportional systems, no question. They do a much better job of representing the breadth and diversity of voting options throughout the jurisdiction,” he said.

He is also hesitant to accept the idea that proportional systems lead to unstable governments, saying instead that they lead to greater compromise.

“The system forces elected representatives to talk to each other to negotiate solutions, instead of using the pulpit of majority governments to push whatever agenda the ruling party chooses to implement,” Abray said.

But even so, he’s not sure Ontario’s system will really change. Polls suggest the Progressive Conservatives are in the lead, and if the NDP narrowly wins, it is unlikely to win the majority it needs to adopt a proportional system.

As for the Liberals, Abray said, he doesn’t see their ballot proposal classified as true reform because it doesn’t change the way people are represented in government.

With that system, voters mark their first, second, and subsequent choices. If no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote, the contender with the fewest votes is removed from the ballot and the second choices of his or her supporters are counted. That goes on until one candidate emerges with a majority.

“It’s pretty much identical to step one where you’re going to continue to pick people who don’t have the support of the majority of people within your jurisdiction,” Abray said.

All three left-leaning parties have said they would bring back the option for municipalities to use ranked ballots, the same system favored by Liberals across the province.

It was an option for municipalities for the first time in 2018, but not anymore.

Ford’s Progressive Conservatives ruled out the possibility in 2020 in a move Horwath described as “silly”.

This report from The Canadian Press was first published on May 22, 2022.

With files from Jessica Smith in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and Maan Alhmidi in Toronto.