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Record W4398768344 · doi:10.29173/mlj833

Why Electoral Reform Failed in Ontario

2013· article· en· W4398768344 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
William Kuchapski

Bibliographic record

VenueManitoba Law Journal · 2013
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicPolitical Systems and Governance
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsElectoral reformPolitical sciencePolitical economyEconomicsDemocracyPoliticsLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Dalton McGuinty, Premier of Ontario fulfilled a campaign promise by announcing the creation of the Ontario Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform.The purpose of the Citizens' Assembly was to examine and make recommendations for reforming Ontario's electoral system.After eight months of deliberation, the final report of the Citizens' Assembly recommended that Ontario adopt a Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) electoral system, instead of maintaining a Single Member Plurality (SMP) electoral system.As a result of this recommendation, a referendum was called concurrently with the province's general election to give Ontarians the opportunity to either adopt the Citizens' Assembly's proposal or maintain the status quo.On October 10, 2007 Ontarians decisively rejected the Citizens' Assembly's recommendation thereby defeating the attempt at reforming the province's electoral system.Electoral reform failed in the province of Ontario due to apathy amongst the province's electorate, partisan self-interest and a lack of information regarding the referendum.To understand how these aspects form the basis for its defeat it is necessary to provide an overview of: (i) the climate in which electoral reform developed at the federal and provincial levels across Canada; (ii) the emergence of electoral reform in Ontario; and (iii) the work conducted by the Ontario Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform. I. ELECTORAL REFORM IN CANADAElectoral reform became a significant issue in the early part of the 1990s, as Canada was gripped with "a democratic malaise evidenced by decreasing levels of political trust, declining voter turnout, increasing J.D. (2014) O 138 MANITOBA LAW JOURNAL VOL 36|NO 2 cynicism towards politicians and traditional forms of political participation, and growing disengagement of young people from politics." 1 Electoral results both federally and provincially began to trouble Canadians' sense of fairness and legitimacy, as many felt the outcomes did not represent their choice.Instead of being acclaimed for its strengths of producing accountable and stable majority governments, the SMP electoral system was assailed for its inability to produce representative governments. A. Federal LevelThe 1993 federal election saw massive upheaval in the federal political sphere as "the virtual destruction of one of Canada's two major political parties ushered in a period of effective one party dominance" 2 of the Liberal Party.Along with this dominance, regionalism grew as citizens in Western Canada and Quebec opted to support regionally based parties in the belief that they would be better represented in Ottawa.This included the Reform Party and its predecessor the Canadian Alliance in Western Canada and the Bloc Québécois in Quebec.As the decade progressed, it became evident that electoral results produced in 1993 were not extraordinary, but rather the new standard as they were largely replicated in the 1997 and 2000 elections.The electorate became increasingly frustrated with the SMP electoral system, as they felt the results no longer reflected the desires of Canadians.One aspect that concerned the electorate was the SMP electoral system producing "artificially swollen legislative majorities", 3 which allowed the Liberal Party to dominate Canada's political agenda for over a decade.Although the Liberal Party only received 41.30%, 38.50% and 40.80% of the popular vote in the 1993, 1997 and 2000 elections, they won 60%, 52%, and 57% of the seats in the House of Commons respectively.41

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.004
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.010
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.779
Threshold uncertainty score0.904

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0040.010
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.001
Bibliometrics0.0020.004
Science and technology studies0.0310.011
Scholarly communication0.0070.002
Open science0.0020.004
Research integrity0.0030.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0130.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.023
GPT teacher head0.251
Teacher spread0.229 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2013
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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