Its leadership may be dysfunctional and distracted, but Toronto City Council can still be innovative: witness the decision to be the first large municipality in Canada to ban plastic bags, effective in the new year.
Maybe it will also decide to introduce a voting system that better reflects the wishes of the electorate. A city staff report is expected in the next two months on a preferential ballot, where a candidate is successful only if he or she receives the support of more than half the voters.
It’s a pretty simple idea and is widely used by political parties when they choose their leaders, though in Canada those parties have never wanted to extend the practice to elections at large. Those who watch leadership votes know that after the first ballot if no one has half the votes then the candidate with the lowest number of votes is dropped, and a second round of voting is held. That process continues until one person has half the votes — for some campaign watchers it seems to go on much too long, but it produces a good result.
Fortunately, no one is talking about runoff elections to choose members of Toronto City Council. That would occupy too many weeks and a great deal of money. Instead, the idea being studied is a preferential ballot. Rather than just putting an “X” beside the candidate you want elected, you also indicate your second and third choices. The ballots are then counted. If the person with the most votes does not have the support of half the electorate, then the candidate with the least votes gets dropped off, and the second choices on ballots for the dropped candidate are added to the first choices on the others. That process continues until one candidate has support from more than half the voters.
Currently, more than half the members of Toronto City Council achieved their positions without receiving support from a majority of voters in their ward. Preferential balloting would provide legitimacy to those holding public office — they could show that a majority of voters supported them.
Preferential balloting sometimes threatens those running for re-election. Take councillor George Mammoliti, for instance: enough people voted against his re-election that with preferential balloting he might have been defeated. It also helps someone who is trying to achieve broad support at the cost of a single issue candidate. Debate about who the most appropriate candidate for a community is becomes more important than just a spokesperson for a particular issue.
One problem is money: new technology would be required to register and count choices, and one can already hear the objections of those councillors who claim the city doesn’t have the money needed to improve voter choices. Another is timing: six years ago the provincial government unwisely changed the municipal elections cycle from either two or three years to four years, effectively making it difficult for community people to challenge elected officials to either make the changes needed or be replaced.
Another problem is that those most directly affected by the decision — the current elected politicians themselves — make the decision on this issue. Some of us are strong enough to transcend the weight of making a decision that has a personal negative impact, but most of us are not. It’s never a good strategy to appoint the fox to guard the chicken house, and that could be a problem here.
But preferential ballots are a terrific idea, and Toronto City Council should jump at the opportunity to introduce them for the 2014 election. It could change the way municipal politics works in Canada, and it would make for much livelier elections in a city that clearly needs change.
Post City Magazines’ columnist John Sewell is a former mayor of Toronto and the author of a number of urban planning books, including The Shape of Suburbs.
