What's proposed for Ontario: just to make things clear

As the Mixed-Member model proposed for Ontario is being discussed on blogs and forums, it appears that not everyone understands how it works. Some believe that the proportionality will only apply to the 39 list seats with the 90 local seats being left out. So, they assume, if a party wins 50 local seats (out of 90) and 41.1% of the vote on a party list ballot, it will receive 39x41.1%=16 list seats on top of the 50 local seats it already has, thus winning majority of seats without majority of votes. Even Giuseppe Gori, the leader of the Family Coalition Party of Ontario made similar mistake in one of the interviews when he mentioned that the party would need a little over 2.5% of the vote to win a single list seat. Such system is called Parallel Voting but that's not how the Mixed Member Proportional system works.

Under the proposed model, the proportionality will apply to all 129 seats. The number of local seats will be taken into account when list seats are distributed - to provide overall proportionality. Therefore, a party that wins 50 local seats and 41.1% of the party list vote, will be entitled to 129x41.1%=53 seats. Since the party already won 50 local seats, it will only receive 3 list seats.

But what happens if that same party wins 55 local seats? The party keeps all the local seats but of course it receives no list seats. Initial proposal also suggested adding "overhang" seats to accommodate fair share of seats to other parties. But the final report published by the Citizen's Assembly (page 23) states that the size of the legislature won't change in this case. So if the party wins too many local seats - it will remain slightly overrepresented.

As for the smaller parties - they must win more than 3% of the province-wide party list vote to qualify for list seats, so 2.56% of the list vote won't be enough. However with just over 3% of the vote (3.1% to be precise) the party will be entitled to as many as 4 seats. That may not sound much but that could make a difference in a minority Parliament.