April 4, Toronto - Freedom Party today released a video to encourage members of Ontario's Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform not to recommend replacing Ontario's Single Member Plurality (SMP or "first past the post") electoral system with the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system.  The Assembly makes its decision on the weekend of April 14-15, 2007, and issues its written recommendations on May 15, 2007.  

VIDEO URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVarP6LG79M

Titled "Electoral Reform: Replacing Reason with Majority Whim", the video features a key excerpt from Freedom Party leader Paul McKeever's testimony to Ontario's Select Committee on Electoral Reform.  McKeever's submissions to the Select Committee apply with equal force to the decision that will be made by the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform.

The key difference between the two electoral systems in question is that whereas the SMP most frequently yields single-party majority governments, the MMP would make single-party majority governments the rare exception, and minority or coalition governments the rule. 

"When we replace majority government with minority or coalition government", says McKeever, "we move from a system that accommodates ethical decision-making, to a system based on the rejection of ethics and the substitution of whims and numbers...we move from a government guided by reason, to one guided by emotion; one guided not by what's right, but simply what you want.

"[The committee] is not truly dealing with the issue of democracy.  It is dealing with the issue of right versus might; with the issue of ethical rule versus majority rule; with the issue of individual freedom versus the tyranny of majorities. 

"If we are to protect democracy, we can do nothing more important than ensure that ethical limits be placed on government authority.  Those limits, I submit, are facilitated only by an electoral system that makes majority governments the rule rather than the exception."

For further details, contact: Paul McKeever

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