Since I am now almost completely out of touch with the outside world, I just learned via a mailer that we will be having a referendum on October 10th here in Ontario. The referendum gives Ontario residents the chance to change the way we are represented in the House, to be the first province to have proportional representation for the various parties.

The proposal goes something like this. There will still be 90 ridings, and in each of those, one person will be elected — the person who gets the most votes. However, each voter will receive a second ballot, and will use this ballot to vote for a party, not a person. This second batch of votes will go into one big pot, and they’ll use the percentage that each party received of these votes to allocate the remaining 39 seats in the house. The people who get these party-only seats will have been nominated ahead of time, so you can know who will be sitting in the house before casting your vote; if a party didn’t nominate enough people, there’s some sort of complex system of approval that candidates will go through.

I’m cautiously excited about this change. There’s been growing support for the Green Party in Canada, but this new party can’t quite get off the ground, because although they receive a noticeable portion of the vote, they can’t get enough voters in one riding to get together and elect a candidate to actually sit in the House. This way, some new voices and new opinions will have their say, and may even become influential swing votes. Very exciting times.

But I’m also a little afraid at having some members of the House not be accountable to a riding. If I were head of a party, I’d use our party-only section to appoint people that I want to have in the cabinet — powerful people, my most trusted advisors — so that these people would be practically guaranteed a seat, and not have to face a possible electoral loss. But doesn’t that create a group of cronies in Parliament, who will work as a unit to promote their agenda, not having to fear answering to their local people in the next election? Will this lead to a two-tier Parliament, in which the party-only MPs are the real power players, and the rest are just back benchers?

I’m painting a pretty bleak picture here, and I don’t really think it will be like that. I believe this could be a good change. But I really don’t know much about the government or election processes, so I thought I’d throw this open for comments from the more informed and more intelligent.