The referendum about to happen in Ontario is important - and not just because it novelly challenges the hegemony of plurality electoral rules in Anglo-America. It could be a referendum on fairness.

Opposition to mixed-member proportional representation has dominated coverage of the upcoming October 10 vote. It falls into one of three general themes. (1) List members will not be accountable to residents of any riding, but to the party elites who nominate them. (2) MMP will let “fringe parties” into the provincial parliament. (3) MMP will lead to “weak coalition governments.”

Most of this coverage is predicated on distorted understandings of MMP. The first objection represents a better informed sense of the system, but the claim about accountability is sweeping. Based on conjecture alone, it seems overblown. We are talking about reform of a parliamentary - not a presidential - system with disciplined parties. That is, everyone answers to the party leadership anyway.

The second objection fails to take seriously the limits of MMP as a reform. Single-member districts with high thresholds of exclusion will remain the dominant feature. To win just one list seat, moreover, a party will have to win 3% of votes province-wide. That means “extremists” like “burka wearing Muslims, evangelical Christians and the ultra-orthodox Jews” face an uphill battle. Not even the Green Party was able to win 3% at the last election.

The third objection represents a conscious choice of ’stability’ over fairness. To form parliamentary majorities, the argument goes, winning parties will have to form coalitions with other parties. To preserve its majority, the winning party will have to incorporate some of the desires of the runner-up into its program for government.

There is nothing inherently unstable about this arrangement unless (1) the winning party is hell-bent on excluding a runner-up program and/or (2) the runner-up is hell-bent on its program to the point it would rather force a new election than compromise. Both are admittedly possible - and that has been the problem with PR in Italy and Israel, not simply PR writ large - but they push the bounds of probability. So those who oppose MMP on this basis prefer a system that minimizes the representation of another major party (I’m talking about the NDP) to one that increases the likelihood of (but does not guarantee) coalition politics. They have chosen rock-solid, single-party majorities over fairness.

Appeals to fairness do not have much truck in politics and, indeed, the criterion could be used to scrutinize MMP itself (i.e. why not eliminate all district seats and increase the size of parliament so that “extremists like burka weaking Muslims” get seats in proportion to their votes?). But some interesting developments have come of coalition governments that included Canada’s major partisan voices:

Despite the doom and gloom perspective extolled by critics of MMP, history has shown that minority governments have been good for queer rights — a Liberal-NDP coalition added sexual orientation to the Ontario Human Rights Code in 1986. And let’s not forget that minority governments at the federal level gave us universal health care, old-age pensions, and unemployment insurance among other popular legislation.

Any decision about electoral rules is, in the final analysis, a decision about who gets pieces of the fairness pie. October 10 is unlikely to see a referendum strictly on the question of fairness. Imperfect information (I prefer the term “lousy”) and the default “no” position with which most voters approach any ballot measure, not to mention a 60%/50% threshold, mean the deck is stacked against. But MMP would make Ontarian elections just a little more proportional, that is, fair. I wait with baited breath…