Having followed developments there, I should report that the referendum failed with 37 percent voting in favor.

Fruits & Votes has a good analysis of the vote in the wider contexts of the concomitant provincial election and other, past referenda in Canada. (The provincial Liberals won 66 percent of seats on 42 percent of votes.)

In other words, the systemic factors predicting a reform process in Ontario were always weak. But there was some partisan-interest factor at work for the Liberals. The problems with partisan-interest factors, of course, are that they (1) may make it harder to convince voters who favor other parties to think reform is also good for them, and (2) the very interest-based factors may shift if the party starts doing better…