Bill 66 was introduced in the Ontario legislature just before the Christmas holidays. The short timeframe for discussion and consultation makes me think the legislators are trying to pass it before people have a chance to understand its effects. It is an omnibus bill, affecting dozens of different pieces of Ontario laws and regulations, many items of which are hidden behind indirect references, and all of which are to be voted on en masse. Omnibus bills tend to carry deleterious clauses which would never stand on their own, but which get passed only because of some other items in the same bill that are perceived to be more beneficial than the rest of the bill is bad.

A summary of Bill 66 is at the Legislative Assembly of Ontario website, called Bill 66, Restoring Ontario’s Competitiveness Act, 2018

Commentary on Bill 66 is plentiful:

• Stop Bill 66 – Save the Greenbelt and Protect our water
• Bill 66: What You Need to Know | wrgreens
• Comment on Bill 66 | Kitchener—Conestoga Greens
• Bill 66 Press Release — Hold The Line

Many groups joined together to provide information on Bill 66, and to make a concerted effort to bring our dissatisfaction to local municipal and provincial leaders. I made two delegations to Woolwich Township Council urging them to pass a resolution to reject Bill 66 and to pledge that if passed, not to use this legislation to bypass the environmental regulations currently in place. Woolwich did pass a resolution, but stopped short of adding the pledge not to use it.

The consultation period at the Ontario Environmental Registry ended yesterday, and below are the comments I made.

Bill 66 is a direct affront to the citizens of Ontario. Doug Ford made a pledge in May 2018 that the Green Belt areas would be not be subject to development. Now that Doug Ford is Premier of the Government of Ontario, I expect that pledge to be honoured.

Bill 66 affects existing laws and regulations at many Ministries, not just the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks. It detrimentally affects the protections for workers in many separate regulations, detrimentally affects the protections for children in childcare, detrimentally affects seniors and patients in long-term care, and detrimentally affects consumers protections from wireless carriers. This is not an exhaustive list.

Bill 66 detrimentally affects environmental regulations more than any other. Under Schedule 10 municipalities no longer have to follow the regulations under the Clean Water Act, Great Lakes Protection Act, Greenbelt Act, Lake Simcoe Protection Act, and the Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Act, among many others.

Ontario and its municipalities have experienced the greatest prosperity in the last ten years, without needing to circumvent the environmental protections put in place by previous Conservative and Liberal governments. Removing these protections now will pit one municipality against another — if one municipality allows development in a protected area, it creates pollution for all the downwind and downstream neighbours, both in that municipality as well as surrouding municipalities. There will be increased infrastructure costs for those municipalities that receive the extra traffic from the development, but none of the anticipated revenue. Bill 66 is not something municipalities have asked for for, nor is it something municipalities need.

Speculators may have purchased land in the currently protected areas. Just having Bill 66 on the table has affected land values. Currently permitted uses for protected areas will become unaffordable, and the pressure on local governments to bypass environmental protections will be great. I’m happy to see many municipalities have passed resolutions rejecting Bill 66.

The citizens of Ontario are clear: Bill 66, with all its recissions of existing laws, must not be passed. I hope the elected representatives in the Legislature will fulfill their mandate and represent their constituents’ demands to reject Bill 66.

There’s another Ontario General Election on the horizon (7 June 2018), so this is a good time to see how things went last time around.

The voting system that Ontario uses is First-Past-The Post, or technically, Single Member Plurality. That means that the candidate who gets more votes than the runner-up gets the single seat for the whole riding. No need for a majority. With five candidates in a riding the “winner” could have as little as 20% of the vote, and so up to 80% of the votes cast wouldn’t serve to elect anyone, and are wasted. It makes no difference if those voters had stayed home; the result would have been the same. In Waterloo Region things weren’t quite as bad as that, but not far off. Overall, 61.2% of votes cast in Waterloo Region were wasted.

No candidate won a riding with a majority. The closest was Diaene Vernile in Kitchener Centre, who received 43.1% of the votes cast in that riding. Kathryn McGarry won the seat in Cambridge with only 38.9%, comparable to Ontario, where the Liberals received 38.6% of the vote, but received 54.6% of the seats (58 out of 107 seats). This is yet another false majority, directly attributable to the single-member seat allocation. The worst showing was in Kitchener–Conestoga, where Michael Harris retained his seat with only 36.4% of the votes. That means 63.6% of the voters voted against Mr. Harris! Even worse, only 17083 of 94886 eligible voters voted for Mr. Harris. He won with the approval of only 18% of the electorate!

With only five parties and four ridings in Waterloo Region it is difficult to assess the how proportional the seat count is compared to the vote count. The Liberals are over-represented with two seats, 50%, with only 36% of the vote. The Progressive Conservatives are under-represented with one seat, 25%, and 30% of the vote. The NDP is properly represented with one seat, 25%, and 26% of the vote. The Greens and Libertarians together received 7.3% of the votes cast, and would not have gained a seat in the Region even with a proportional voting system.

It would not take a large shift in voter preference to significantly change the outcome. Note how small the plurality for each of the winners is, only a few thousand votes. Kitchener–Conestoga is especially fragile, where Michael Harris won by only 1419 votes. Even a small increase in voter turnout would add more votes than that. An increase from 49.5% to 51.0% would add 1423 votes, more than enough to topple the Progressive Conservative seat in favour of the Liberals.

Region-wide, voter turnout was abysmal at 50.9% of eligible voters casting a ballot. No wonder 49.1% of the voters stayed home, when there is such a high number of wasted votes. It is said that a system with proportional representation will improve voter turnout, because almost all votes cast contribute towards some representation in the legislature. I sure hope to see that for the next election!

Here are the results for the four electoral districts in Waterloo Region:

	Cambridge		Kitchener Centre		Kitchener–Conestoga		Kitchener–Waterloo		Totals
Liberal	* Kathryn McGarry *		* Diaene Vernile *		Wayne Wright		Jamie Burton			50.0% seats	Liberal
	18763	38.9%	18472	43.1%	15664	33.3%	16534	30.1%	69433	36.0% votes
Progressive-Conservative	Rob Leone (Incumbent)		Wayne Wettlaufer		* Michael Harris * (Incumbent)		Tracey Weiler			25.0% seats	Progressive- Conservative
	15694	32.6%	11550	27.0%	17083	36.4%	14450	26.3%	58777	30.5% votes
NDP	Bobbi Stewart		Margaret Johnston		James Villeneuve		* Catherine Fife * (Incumbent)			25.0% seats	NDP
	10413	21.6%	9765	22.8%	9958	21.2%	20536	37.4%	50672	26.3% votes
Green	Temara Brown		Ronnie Smith		David Weber		Stacey Danckert			0.0% seats	Green
	2726	5.7%	2472	5.8%	3277	7.0%	2859	5.2%	11334	5.9% votes
Libertarian	Allan R. Detweiler		Patrick Bernier		David Schumm		James Schulz			0.0% seats	Libertarian
	605	1.3%	557	1.3%	1001	2.1%	481	0.9%	2644	1.4% votes
Votes Cast | Turnout	48201	48.1%	42816	51.5%	46983	49.5%	54860	54.3%	192860	50.9%	Votes Cast | Turnout
Eligible Voters	100130		83170		94886		100972		379158		Eligible Voters
Approval (Winning votes / Eligble Voters)		18.7%		22.2%		18.0%		20.3%		19.7%	Approval (Winning votes / Eligble Voters)
Plurality | % votes cast	3069	6.4%	6922	16.2%	1419	3.0%	4002	7.3%	15412	8.0%	Plurality | % votes cast
Wasted Votes	29438	61.1%	24344	56.9%	29900	63.6%	34324	62.6%	118006	61.2%	Wasted Votes

And that’s how it was in 2014. I hope to have an analysis of the 2018 Ontario General Election once the excitement has worn off a little…

–Bob Jonkman is the Co-Chair for the Fair Vote Canada Waterloo Region Chapter.

As requested by Fair Vote Waterloo, I have responded to the Ontario government’s consultation on the Municipal Elections Act Review. As a member of Fair Vote the issue of ranked ballots was most important to me, but I also answered some of the other questions.

Ranked Ballots

What are your thoughts on using ranked ballots for Ontario municipal elections?	Ranked ballots are a much fairer method of electing our representatives. A single run-off vote for a one-office position is acceptable, but where there are multiple similar offices (councillors) the election should always be multi-member. Single-member wards do not give the voters a full spectrum of elected candidates. Only one view is represented in any one ward; a plurality view tends to be replicated in every ward, so minority views are not represented at all. Multi-member elections will allow a wide range views to be represented by different elected members.
Should municipalities be able to use ranked ballots for certain offices and not others? For example, only for mayor?	All offices should be elected by ranked ballots, with similar offices (councillors) always represented in multi-member ridings.
Should public consultation by a municipality be required before implementing ranked ballots or before changing from ranked ballots back to the current system?	In a democracy, the citizens should make the decisions in how they’re governed. There should be a referendum, province-wide, that has a well-worded explanation of the proposed ranked ballot system, including multi-member elections for council positions. However, all municipalities should use the same voting system. There is no fairness in the electoral system if the citizens of one municipality are to be better represented in a multi-member riding than other other citizens in a different municipality with single-member wards.
What form should that consultation take?	There should be a province-wide referendum at the next municipal election, with the voting system and a clear referendum question chosen by a citizens’ assembly composed of at least one citizen from each municipality. It will be difficult for such a citizens’ assembly to come to an agreement, but democracy was never designed to be fast and easy.
Unlike the current system, ranked ballots can involve multiple rounds of counting before all the seats to be elected have been won.
How much information would you want about election results? For example, where there have been multiple rounds of counting would you want to see the results of each round of counting or just the final results?	All the results, including intermediate rounds of ballot counts, should be published. Complete voting data should be made available as government Open Data, curated by the province instead of each individual municipality.
There are a number of other important decisions that the province will need to consider when determining how ranked ballots could work in Ontario. Throughout this review we will be consulting with Ontarians, municipalities and experts on ranked ballots to help us make these decisions.
Are there other ideas you wish to share on ranked ballots that you would like us to consider?	Don’t rely only on appointed experts when evaluating a new voting system. This is an opportunity for participatory democracy, where citizens themselves can determine how they wish to be governed. The citizens of Ontario are well-educated, and can make the best decision for their own governance.
Please do not provide any additional personal or identifying information such as opinions about individuals or names and addresses as part of your response. To help us make the most effective use of your comments, please consider identifying your municipality or, if you prefer, your geographic region of the province (for example, Southwestern Ontario) or whether you live in a rural or urban area. If you are providing comments on behalf of an organization, please provide its name. If you are providing comments on behalf of a municipality, please provide its name and indicate whether the submission has been endorsed by a council resolution.
Name of municipality/region/organization: (optional):	resident of Woolwich Township, Waterloo Region.
Your responses may be used for the purposes of the ministry’s consultation process. Please note the ministry may summarize and share them, including with other ministries and the public. Names of organizations and persons who indicate an affiliation may also be shared.

Overview of the Municipal Elections Act

From your experience, what parts of municipal elections in Ontario currently work well?	In my municipality the ballots are OMRX (optical marks) sheets, so that the ballots can be counted electronically, but remain available for verification by hand-counting. This is a good system, far preferable to a purely electronic voting system.
From your perspective, what parts of municipal elections in Ontario should be changed?	Municipal elections seem to be run well in my municipality.
Is there anything else you want to tell us about your experience with municipal elections?	Nothing else…

Accessibility

Have you experienced accessibility challenges or barriers related to voting or running for office? If so, what were those challenges and what would help overcome those barriers?

In my municipality, there have been no physical obstacles to voting.

Enforcement

In light of recent events in Woolwich Township, the secion on Enforcement was particualry relevant:

Do you feel that municipal election rules are effectively enforced? Why? Why not?

Municipal elections rules are not effectively enforced. In my municipality, Woolwich Township, there have been irregularities in elected members’ finances. The Elections Act seems to be clear that such elected members are to be immediately suspended or removed from office, yet the municipality chose to ignore that and allowed the members to continue to sit on Council and govern. The Act is clear; and so municipalities should have no discretion when it comes to enforcement.

–Bob.

Trillium by Laurel L. Russwurm is used under a CC BY 2.0 license.