Blessed by the Potato

The Ontario Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform has finished its deliberations and decided that Ontario needs an updated, fairer, more proportional electoral system. To keep the options simple, they’ve also deliberated on the alternatives and settled on Mixed Member Proportional. This fall, on October 10th, as part of the general provincial election, we will have a referendum on whether or not to change to this new system. The bar has been set high: rather than a simple majority, the Premier has stipulated that to change the electoral system, the vote must be at least 60% in favour provincewide, and at least 50% of the ridings must be in favour (that is, over half the people in over half the ridings). I’m hoping this will go through; while MMP wasn’t my preferred voting system, it’s still a big step up from first-past-the-post. Although party lists give me the heebie jeebies sometimes, at least the “proportional” part is kept to 30% of the seats. Of course, BC had a similar referrendum not too long ago, and despite being supported by a majority of the people, the motion died just short of the 60% threshold.

While there has been some media coverage of this long, slow process, it certainly isn’t at the forefront. I don’t even know if it will gain much (or at least, enough) ground in the collective consciousness for people to really know what the referendum is about when it falls upon them. So, I hope you all will learn about it, and start working it into your conversations at work and elsewhere… get people around you thinking about this sort of issue, and, hopefully, preparing to vote yes in the upcoming referendum!

Other news today out of the federal government is that they’re also planning on banning incandescent lightbulbs…

Finally, I’d just like to say that over at XKCD the algorithm constantly finds Jesus. The algorithm fears velociraptors, yet constantly finds them.