Shut Up And Listen 133

The Race To Queen’s Park Week Five: Well, Kiss My Grits
The Liberals took Ontario with an overwhelming landslide victory. Out of 103 ridings, they won 72 of them. Yeah, I’d call that a pretty commanding win. To me, that wasn’t that big of a story because like most people, I knew the Liberals were going to win. The real thing to watch was how well the NDP would do. I was hoping they’d manage to pull out a stronger showing than the polls dictated because of unseen support--as is often the case with smaller, left-wing parties, but they didn’t. No, because of an overcompensation of people wanting to make sure the Tories got their asses handed to them by voting Liberal, the NDP lost two seats and now only have seven. That leaves the PC with 24.
	I watched the results on Thursday night as they came in and one thing I saw that I really, really hate is the presumed elected thing the media does. In my riding, London West, they had 10% of the results and were declaring Chris Bentley, the Liberal candidate as the winner. Come on. It doesn’t matter to me if he won or not, just that they were willing to say he’d won after only ten percent of the votes were in. Just because ten percent of the people voted one way doesn’t mean the other ninety percent will too--even in the same riding. Bentley did win, but like I said, that’s not the issue in my mind.
	Another big question that came up that concerns not only this election, but also the whole system in Canada is the idea of winner-take-all regional representation versus actual population representation. Te Liberals won 72 ridings, but if we went by the actual percentage of people who voted for them, they would really only get 48 seats out of 103. The PC would get 36, the NDP would get 15, the Green Party would get 3 and the Family Coalition Party would get the final seat. Now, I do think the discrepancy is too great to ignore, I don’t think we should necessarily shift to a system where we vote for a party and then they decide to fill their seats as they see fit. I think a big plus of the current system is that it is based on regional representation. The best solution would be, I think to divide the province into a few large regions and then give each one however many seats are warranted by the number of voters and then the parties that get the seats in that region have to fill them with people from that region. Like, the London/Southwestern Ontario region has ten ridings currently. Maybe combining them all into one region and then combining all the votes. So in this election that would mean the region would warrant nine seats based on the number of people who voted out of the whole. The Liberals won nine out of ten in the election with the Tories taking the other, but if done on the representation by population method the breakdown would be: Liberals with 5, the Tories with 3 and the NDP with one. Regional representation still there, but with more a more accurate showing of votes. Of course, this system has flaws too, but which one doesn’t?
	I’m still pissed at how poorly the NDP did. I mean, they don’t even get official party status because eight seats are needed for that, which means they’ll lack key funding for staff and research which would keep them as competitive and viable as before. This pisses me off mostly not because they didn’t have the support, but because they did and a large chunk of that support went and voted Liberal just to strike back at the Tories. They didn’t see the NDP as a viable choice when really if they all actually voted for the party they believe in, the NDP would be a stronger contender. Compromising to vote for the lesser of two evils is cowardly and cheap. I would have rather had the Tories win because I voted with my beliefs than have the Liberals win just to get rid of the Tories. That’s cheap, I think.
	Hopefully the Liberals will do a good job in power and actually follow through on the promises they made that are worth following through on. I don’t think they will though. I think they’ll be assholes and generally fuck Ontario over at every chance given to them. Fuck.