A letter by Brian Newman in Tuesday’s Ottawa Sun was way off base and did nothing but spread disinformation about MMP. They published my comments about it in today’s Ottawa Sun.
Don’t forget: The polls open at 9am!
On Wednesday, October 10th, voters in the Province of Ontario are being asked to cast two ballots: one for the person you want to represent you in the legislature and one to determine the future of voting in Ontario.
Currently, we use a system commonly called “First Past The Post” (FPTP) where people cast votes for the person they wish to have represent them in the legislature. The person who receives the most votes is the person elected. If the votes in a riding are distributed thusly:
Joe Blow would be elected to represent everyone in the riding, including the 60% of people who didn’t vote for him.
If the results in the rest of the province are similar, you could very well have Party B end up with a majority of the seats in the legislature, even though the majority of the votes cast in the province were not for Party B. This has happened in the past, and it will almost certainly happen again in the future.
So, what’s the solution?
Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP) is the solution put forward by the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. The Assembly was made up of one randomly selected voter from each riding in Ontario and was tasked with looking at the current system and coming up with changes that the government promised would go to a binding referendum.
The Mixed-Member Proportional system would see a legislature with 129 seats, 90 of which are for directly-elected representatives and 39 allocated to political parties.
Under MMP, you still cast a ballot for your representative in the legislature, but you also cast a ballot for a political party. The representative who wins the seat in a riding is determined using the same method as FPTP — the person with the most votes wins.
After the 90 directly-elected seats are filled, if a party has fewer seats than its portion of the party vote, that party wins some of the additional 39 province-wide at-large seats to ensure it has a fair share of the total seats in the legislature. Each seat represents roughly 3% of the population of Ontario, so a party must win at least 3% of the party votes to win a seat from the at-large seats.
For example, if a party wins 40% of the party votes, and the number of riding seats they win falls 10 seats short of giving that party 40% of the seats in the legislature, then the top 10 at-large candidates on that party’s candidates’ list are elected to fill those seats.
Each political party identifies a list of people who will fill the 39 seats prior to the election. Well in advance of an election, they’ll be required to make public the names, background information on each person and the process used to create their list.
I could go on about it, but it boils down to this: MMP is superior to the system currently in place because it will see a more-balanced legislature and give the smaller parties more of a chance to be heard.
It also allows you to vote for someone you want to be represented by even if they’re not in the party you want to support, because you get to cast a vote for your party, too.
On October 10th, vote for MMP. You can learn more about MMP at www.voteformmp.ca.
As you should know if you live in Ontario, there’s a provincial election taking place on Wednesday. While I haven’t completely made up my mind about who I will support this time, I do know who I will not support and his name is John Tory.
Apart from running negative attack ads from day one, something that I can’t believe converts any significant number of undecided voters, I just don’t find the messages in the Ontario PC Party ads, both negative and non-negative, credible.
For example, there’s an ad that has your “typical resident of Ontario” talking about deaths from smog. The number they quote is something like 1900 per year, and go on to say that equates to 5600 unnecessary deaths because Dalton McGuinty didn’t live up to his campaign promise of getting rid of the coal-fired generating plants. There may well be something like 1900 deaths a year in Ontario that can be attributed to poor air quality, but that doesn’t mean that eliminating the coal-fired power plants will eliminate the poor air quality. There are many other sources of pollution that contribute to poor air quality, particularly automobile that are a non-trivial source of the pollutants that make up smog. Other sources include heavy manufacturing such as refineries. But, the ad is worded to lead the viewer to believe that the coal-fired power plants in Ontario are directly responsible for 1900 deaths a year. What about the air pollution that is generated by extra-provincial sources upwind of Ontario?
Another ad talking about coal-fired power plants has John Tory bemoaning the fact that the coal-fire power plants weren’t closed as promised and outlining what he will do with respect to coal-fired power plants. His solution is to order the installation of scrubbers on the smoke stacks to reduce the pollutants emitted. A short-term plan — that’s all. He doesn’t go on to tell the viewer what the long-term plan is, which is a much more important issue. Is he going to commission new nuclear power plants, or gas-fired power plants, or build more hydroelectric generating capacity, or invest in alternative technologies such as wind or solar? Is he going to decommission the coal-fired power plants? Or are we going to increasingly rely on imported electricity, shifting the emissions from Ontario to another jurisdiction, some of which are using coal-fired generating plants that happen to be upwind of us, which brings us back to the previous ad.
Many of the other ads I’ve seen have similar messages that basically tells you that everything will instantly be wonderful if you vote for the Ontario PC Party. I find that hard to believe.
It’s the Autumnal Equinox. At 05:51 this morning summer ended.
Looking back at the Summer of 2007, I have to say it was a pretty good summer. I did some geocaching, played some golf and generally enjoyed the summer. Though I wasn’t able to steer for the Singapore Slings at the Ottawa Dragonboat Festival, I was able to steer for them at the Fall 400 in Carleton Place earlier this month.
Here’s hoping for an autumn with nice weather that extends well into February or March!
Yesterday, the Rideau Canal celebrated its 175th anniversary and its recent inscription on UNESCO’s World Heritage Site List. To help celebrate, I proposed to the Rideau Canal people that the Manotick Amateur Radio Group operate a special event station, VC3R, at the Ottawa Locks. Their response was incredibly positive and they provided us with all sorts of on-site support. We had a tent, tables, chairs, as much electricity as we could use and lunch. About half a dozen club members showed up Saturday morning around 8am and unloaded our equipment. We set up three HF antennas in the trees around the site: a G5RVjr used by one radio; and a long spring antenna and a long wire antenna that we used by another radio. We also had a VHF/UHF station running and someone showed up with a Dstar HT, which is a new type of digital radio.
Darin (VE3OIJ) brought his digital mode stuff, so we basically had every operating mode, except CW and SSTV, covered. (Ironically, Darin apparently put his CW key by the door but forgot to grab it on the way out.) He was pleased to report log the first QSO of the day.
I had one QSO with a station on Moose Island, a small island off the coast of Maine near the Canada-US border, who boomed in at S9+10, but in general the conditions were poor. Naturally, just before we started packing up at the end of the day the conditions were improving.
Still, we had a good day and for a first-time event station we did quite well. The plan for VC3R is to operate at other lock stations along the Rideau Canal between now and the end of the summer.
A special thanks goes out to the Rideau Canal staff, the people who stopped by the tent and to my fellow hams who helped operate the station.
Note: The last week has been quite busy and I didn’t have a chance to post this until now, though I wrote it a week ago.
My friends Ken and Margaret got married a week ago this past Friday (June 22nd) and I had the honour of being the best man for their wedding. Of all the weddings I’ve attended, I think this one went off with the least number of hiccups and last minute problems. Ken and I spent a fair bit of time earlier in the week replacing all the brakelines on the 1954 Pontiac Laurentian Coupe they used and I’m happy to report it stopped when needed. 🙂
To pass the time before the wedding, the groomsmen, me and the groom, met up at one of the guy’s farm and shot clay targets for an hour or so before heading to the church. I’d never shot a shotgun (or any other firearm) before, and found it was a lot of fun, particularly as I managed to hit some of the targets.
The ceremony was very nice and didn’t drag on like a couple of weddings I’ve attended. Afterwards, we made our way to Strathmere for pictures and the reception. The food was amazing and the band was incredible. I gave the toast to the bride and groom, which, based on comments from people afterwards, was well-received. They had a trio that played music during dinner and a band for the dance afterwards. If you ever need a band for something, you should definitely consider The Stevens and Kennedy Band. “Wow!” is a good way to sum them up.
There’s been a lot of discussion over the last couple of days as to whether the videos sent to NBC by Seung-Hui Cho should have been aired. CBC was the first broadcaster to declare that they would not show the videos nor pictures of Cho holding guns. FoxNews changed its mind and stopped airing them and other news outlets, including CNN, have established policies on the use of the footage on their networks.
Should NBC have aired the footage? I don’t think they should have.
People who commit atrocious acts like this often want to receive attention and be remembered. Having their images and videos appear on virtually every television station and newspaper front page means that they’ve achieved this goal. Because many news outlets have websites, this inevitably means that it’s going to be immortalized forever because the Internet never forgets. Other people who are perhaps teetering on the edge of committing a similar act will see this attention and some will decide that it’s the way they can be remembered by history, as grusome as that may be.
One deterent would be to virtually eliminate this opportunity for celebrity by refusing to air the videos, pictures and writings that people like this create. It would go a long way to the person being little more than Seung-Hui Cho, 23, killed 32 people at Virginia Tech before taking his own life. No good is served by giving them an ever bigger soap box than they’ve already got.
The event was sad enough without having to subject the families of Cho’s victims to his rantings. And this includes Cho’s family.
Four days after the terrible shootings in Virginia, on the eighth anniversary of the Columbine shootings, a NASA contract worker at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston took two hostages, a man and a woman, and ended up killing the man before taking his own life. One has to wonder if this would have taken place if Cho’s videos and writings hadn’t been published.
CBS News’ website has an article that talks about NBC’s releasing the videos. It ends with the following, which I think hits the nail squarely on the head:
…FBI profiler Clint Van Zandt told MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson: “He wants to be able to reach his hand out of the grave and grab us by the throat and make us listen to him one more time.” He got his wish.
Incidentally, I have not seen any of the videos that Cho left behind and I have no desire to. My life will not be enriched by my seeing them.
My condolences go out to the families, friends, students and staff at Virginia Tech; the families, friends and co-workers of the NASA employees; and everyone affected by the shootings eight years ago at Columbine.
AKA Keeper of Maps, I'm a geocacher who lives in Ottawa, Canada.
