Publication: Brockville Recorder & Times
Title: Local women have a chance to redraw electoral system, p. A1
Date: June 8, 2006
By: RONALD ZAJAC, Staff Writer
About a dozen women from Leeds-Grenville will attend a meeting in Cornwall next week for a chance to be included in the group that might redraw Ontario's electoral system.
The Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform, a $6-million effort spearheaded by the provincial government, aims to examine the system governing how Ontarians elect representatives to Queen's Park.
Its mandate is to assess the current system and others around the world, then "make a recommendation as to whether we should retain the current system or adopt a new one," said Barry Koen-Butt, spokesman for the secretariat appointed to assist the assembly once it is chosen.
The McGuinty government has already committed to taking the assembly's final recommendation, due next May, and putting it to a vote in a referendum during its current term, Koen-Butt said Wednesday in a telephone interview from Toronto.
That means, should the panel recommend changing the system and that recommendation get the backing of the voters, the planned 2007 provincial election will follow the new system, he said.
Discussions of the electoral reform effort have centred on the possibility of Ontario switching to a system of proportional representation. But Koen-Butt said there is more to the assembly's job than a choice between PR and the current first-past-the-post system.
"They could come up - and probably should come up - with a made-in-Ontario solution," he said.
Elections Ontario is looking after the selection process for the assembly, which will be made up of 103 randomly-selected citizens - one for each riding.
To ensure gender balance, 52 of the members will be women and 51 men.
At least one member will be Aboriginal.
George Thomson, of Kingston, a former senior civil servant and family court judge, has already been appointed the assembly's chairman by Ontario Lieutenant-Governor James Bartleman, making it an even 52 for each gender.
In the first step of the subsequent selection process, Elections Ontario chose nearly 124,000 people at random from the province's Permanent Register of Electors and sent them letters asking if they were interested, said Elections Ontario spokesman Paula Chung.
That resulted in about 12,000 positive responses, which were again whittled down at random to get 11 to 13 candidates per riding, she said.
In order to ensure the gender balance, ridings were designated male or female, to ensure the selected members and their alternates were of the same gender, said Chung.
Koen-Butt confirmed Leeds-Grenville has been designated female, meaning all the candidates are women.
The Leeds-Grenville candidates will head to a regional selection meeting at Cornwall's Ramada Inn at 7 p.m. Thursday, June 15, where members and alternates from this riding, Stormont-Dundas-Charlottenburgh and Glengarry-Prescott-Russell will be selected, again in a random draw. Other selection meetings will take place across the province until June 25.
The neighbouring ridings of Stormont-Dundas-Charlottenburgh and Lanark-Carleton have both been designated male, said Koen-Butt.
Lanark-Carleton's representative will be chosen, along with those of three other Ottawa or Ottawa-area ridings, at an Ottawa hotel on Saturday afternoon.
Elections Ontario is not disclosing the names on the lists until after the meetings, said Chung.
The full assembly will meet in Toronto on September 9, said Koen-Butt, adding they will meet about every second weekend at a York University campus from September through November to be brought up to speed on Ontario's and other electoral systems by Jonathan Rose, an associate professor of political science at Queen's University.
After that, from November through February, they will hold public consultations, allowing people to make submissions in different formats, including over the Internet.
Assembly members will then deliberate until they produce a final report due on or before May 15, 2007.
The assembly's meetings will be open to the public, said Koen-Butt.
The government is now drafting legislation to put the assembly's recommendation, should it call for change, to a provincewide referendum in the current mandate, he said.
That would mean a referendum next year, since the government has also committed to a fixed provincial election date in October 2007.
The province has set aside $6 million for the entire process, covering such things as staff salaries, assembly members' honorariums and expenses and the assembly's website, at www.citizensassembly.gov.on.ca, said Koen-Butt.
The random selection system ensures the process remains fundamentally democratic, empowering ordinary citizens, said Koen-Butt.
"This is power for the people," he said. "This is not a Royal commission. This is not a panel of experts."
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