Yesterday's provincial election

This afternoon one of my students asked me whether I was happy with the results of yesterday's election here in Ontario, which saw Dalton McGuinty's Liberals rather handily defeat Ernie Eves' Progressive Conservatives. I told him that I am rarely happy with election results, whoever wins.

Sometimes I wish I could manage to be more partisan than I am -- to be happy at seeing one party win and another defeated. I wish the world were a much simpler place with clearer blacks and whites. It would be so much more satisfying if one party were evidently the repository of goodness and truth and the others obviously evil. But that's not the case. So no matter who wins, the resulting government will inevitably be a mixture of good and bad.

I suppose I follow Winston Churchill in holding that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others. It is certainly no panacea. But, given the alternatives, having it is better than not having it.

The one modification I would make to it is to abandon our current winner-take-all electoral system. One of the reasons I favour PR is that it would force a party to moderate its own ideologically-driven agenda and to compromise with the other parties. Back in 1990 I was uneasy at Bob Rae's socialist New Democratic Party possessing all the reins of governing power in this province. Five years later I was hardly more enthusiastic about Mike Harris' so-called Common Sense Revolution having uncontested control of Queen's Park. Why then should I be happy at the Liberals being in the same position?

PR would make for a more responsible use of power, simply because a party with only a plurality of popular support would no longer be able to depend solely on party discipline to enact its agenda. It would have to make tradeoffs with the other parties. And that would be not at all a bad thing.