Ontario’s new Liberal Leader Steven Del Duca wants Ontarians to vote more and have longer weekends.
Del Duca revealed during the provincial Liberals’ annual general meeting in Toronto last weekend that he will fight for a ranked ballot system in provincial elections and push for a four-day workweek.
Ranked voting allows for voters to number candidates based on preference.
Within this proposal, the ranked ballot option for municipal elections would also be re-established.
Del Duca also said a pilot project would be launched to analyze the potential of a four-day work week, where the number of hours worked in five days would be condensed into four.
“Personally, I’m not sure if that would be the best option for me,” said Camilla Ferreira, a Toronto-based immigration consultant.
“It would be difficult to accommodate all my clients within this working period, and perhaps it would have the reverse effect, making me even more tired,” she said.
Marcos Reis, a Toronto-based filmmaker and casting director, told Humber Et Cetera the impact on his work would be less disruptive.
“This four-day journey may work better for some professions than others,” Reis said.
“In my case, it would be a relatively smooth adjustment, but for my wife, who is a housekeeper, maybe the working-day would get too intense,” he said.
Ranked ballot voting was scrapped for municipalities last year by the Progressive Conservative government.
Del Duca is not the first Liberal to propose a new way of choosing political leaders. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised electoral reform during his 2015 campaign when his party won a majority in Ottawa.
However, the ranked ballot system proposed by Del Duca — and one that Fair Vote Canada claims is favoured by Trudeau — would still use a winner-takes-all approach, but would take second- and third-place rankings in its calculation.
A simulation run by Antony Hodgson, president of Fair Vote B.C., revealed a ranked ballot system without proportional representation would have increased the number of seats won by the federal Liberals.
“When forced to rank parties, most voters who supported other parties ranked the Liberals second, not because they wanted Liberal representation but because they disliked other parties even more,” Fair Vote said in a statement.
Premier Doug Ford, the elected leader of his party through ranked voting, defended the maintenance of the current system, saying it would avoid voter confusion.
The first municipality in the province to use ranked ballot voting was the city of London in 2018 during its civic election, and other communities such as Guelph have explored the option.