They’ve appointed Michael Fenn and Ken Seiling as Special Advisors for the review.
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| Michael Fenn, experienced and respected bureaucrat |
The review will examine Ontario's eight regional municipalities (Halton, York, Durham, Waterloo, Niagara, Peel, Muskoka District, and Oxford County), the County of Simcoe, and their lower-tier municipalities.*
We’ve been told that the advisors will work with the Ontario Government for the People to figure out how to make it easier to access municipal services. They will identify processes to deliver efficient and effective services, ways to cut red tape and, of course, ensure municipalities are open for business.
A Useful Resource
A paper entitled The Potential and Consequences of Municipal Electoral Reform, published in 2017, would be a useful resource.
The paper was written by Aaron Moore, an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Winnipeg and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of City Planning at the University of Manitoba.
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| Aaron, Moore |
Moore puts forward five categories that capture many of the key factors to look at when considering the effectiveness of municipal electoral systems. They are local democracy, representation, engagement, intelligibility and accountability. Some elaboration follows:
1. The ideal of local democracy should mean the public has easy access to their elected officials.
2. Representation suggests that equal or adequate representation of societal groups that have traditionally gone unrepresented is attempted.
3. As elections are the primary means citizens have to indicate their support for or opposition to government and government policies, a system that strives for greater engagement of the electorate is preferred.
4. An electoral system should allow voters to easily find information on candidates and to navigate the system. Moore uses the term intelligibility to describe this goal.
5. Voters should also be able to use the electoral system to hold elected officials accountable for decisions. Correctly connecting elected officials to policy decisions addresses the goal of accountability.
Using that framework, Moore then looks at four variants of municipal electoral systems that can be part of reform efforts.
Council size, ward versus at large elections, the electoral formula ( First-Past-the-Post vs. Ranked Ballots) and political parties aren’t the only potential changes that could be made to local councils, of course. They may be the most commonly talked about though.
There is a fair bit more research that Moore has looked at can be helpful than I would have imagined.
For example, the idea of ranked ballots is a change that is long overdue in my view. San Francisco has had a ranked ballot system since 2004. But research studies have shown it is confusing and causes voters to over vote (voting and ranking more candidates than allowed) thus spoiling their ballot.
In his conclusion, Moore states that “any argument for reform must clearly state such reasons and keep them at the forefront of the ensuing debate…”
That is good advice that it is hoped the Ontario government takes into account.
Moore’s paper can be found at https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/78793/1/IMFG_perspectives_20_electoral_reform_AaronMoore_Oct_17_2017.pdf
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*A quick look at Regional governments shows that the results of this review could impact 73 local councils who are part of two-tier or county systems that have been identified for the review and more than 5 million local voters.
