Bloggers (of all stripes) 4 MMP

As readers of this blog will know, a favorite topic of mine is electoral and democratic reform, so I wanted to do up a brief post giving a shout out to some bloggers - from all sides of the political spectrum - who have come out to endorse the Ontario Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform's recommendation of a mixed-member proportional (MMP) voting system for Ontario.

Erroneously, opponents of fair and advanced democracy often try to pretend proportional representation is about representing smaller parties. But really, it's about fairly distributing political power and ensuring that all citizens can make effective electoral choices. Supporters of all parties are affected by our antiquated voting system, particularly voters who live in "safe seats" like mine, where the election is often over once the dominant party's candidate is nominated.

MMP will provide voters all across Ontario with more choice, fairer results and stronger representation, but we will return to that over the summer.

It's great to see lots of Liberal bloggers starting to talk about how MMP will improve our democracy. Clear Grit has a long, but very good, discussion of why MMP will work in Ontario. ProgBlog leader Scott Tribe has long been a supporter. And mad props to Queer-Liberal who has a series of really super awesome posts on the issue. In particular, I like his latest post about why Liberals in Ontario would be smart to embrace MMP. After all, it was a fulfilled promise by the McGuinty government that brought us to this historic referendum.

There's even a Liberals4MMP blog that has started. I look forward to seeing the list of pro-MMP Liberal bloggers grow over the summer and into the Fall.

On the complete other end of the spectrum, we find prominent social conservative blogger Suzanne from the Big Blue Wave, who has been following the issue religiously. She has devoted numerous posts to the issue.

Hopefully, we'll see even more right-of-centre bloggers speak out for MMP as the campaign develops. We're still waiting for the first Tory MPP or candidate to come out for MMP, but I can't imagine it'll be too long before a Toronto Tory endorses it, after all, it's clearly in their self-interest.

Finally, to illustrate the broad multi-partisan support for MMP, maybe we should start building a list of bloggers that support MMP ... anyone more tech-saavy than I want to help with that?