Thursday, October 25, 2007
When are they going to get to acceptance?
Watching the proponents of MMP fumble around with the referendum results is becoming a joke. There is a strong mixture of anger and denial. The denial came today from some hearty academics. The conclusions from this article is that if people had been told only good things about MMP they would have voted for it. Here we go: I propose a system of government that will have incomparable immediate economic growth, rapid decision making, high levels of security, low levels of crime and strong social cohesion. Do you agree? Well, probably. But you might not if you realized you were voting for fascism. I'm not comparing MMP to fascism. I'm talking about the ridiculous nature of that line of argument. Of course, if you talk about a system only in positives without any substantive detail people are going to agree. In a democracy, however, we have something called debate. This allows people to see the whole picture and make a decision. As I've argued before, the results of the referendum were predictable based on a reasonably well informed population. Knowing the exact make up of the citizen's assembly would not have changed the results.
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3 comments:
C'mon Aaron.. even you said the campign to educate Ontairons on this wasnt very good at all.
And in light of the recent poll done recently where a plurality of Canadians both indicate support for a national referendum on electoral reform AND a plurality on accepting a new system with some type of PR in it (including a plurality of Ontarions, your assumptions they would still vote no if better informed ring hollow.
It also gives us electoral reformers great heart that the hunger to change the current system is out there. It only needs a few courageous politicians to be their advocate.
I trust one poll. The one conducted by Elections Ontario on October 10th.
All that indicated was they rejected the current MMP proposal... either due to lack of info or because they werent fond of it. That recent poll taken only a week after the election shows that a plurality of Canadians - including Ontarions - are open-minded towards PR... and that the referendum going down to defeat for mMP was not the end of it.
Of course, the elitists, anti-reformers, and establishment guys like you will try everything in their power to put out the meme that no one is interested in reform, but obviously that isn't true and it will be countered every step of the way.
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