Some more thoughts on the Ontario election

I've been thinking about electoral reform in Ontario at the provincial level.  If it were up to me, I'd add to the 107 riding seats 33 more to be distributed in a way that reflected the overall popular vote. (This system would be simpler than the two-ballot proposal that Ontario voters rejected seven years ago.)

Of these 33 seats, 27 would be distributed to each party so that the total of them and the riding seats--134 in all--would be as close to their popular vote as possible. (There could be a 3% minimum level for a party to share in this distribution.) And I'd give the remaining 6 to the party that had the greatest share of the popular vote, improving the chance of a majority government.  

But what if the leading party won so many riding seats that these alone were greater than its popular-vote proportion of the 134 seats?  Then the 6 seats would go to the other parties to make up for their seat shortfall.  (If they still fell short, they'd share the shortfall equally.)

How would this work in practice?  Take the results from this election.  The Liberals got 38.7% of the popular vote and 59 seats; the Conservatives 31.2% and 27 seats; the NDP 23.7% and 21 seats; the Greens 4.8% and no seats.  The Liberal popular-vote share of 134 seats would be 52, so the 6 seats would go to the opposition and the Liberal total would remain at 59 seats.  The Conservatives would get 42 seats, including 15 additional ones; the NDP 32 seats, including 11 additional ones; the Greens 7 seats, all of them additional. (I can dream, can't I?)

The Huffington Post has switched to having all comments entered through Facebook.  The new system is flawed:  whenever someone likes a post I've written I get a Facebook notification, and some of my posts have attracted dozens of likes!  And Moira no longer has a single webpage she can open to read all my comments.

I saw in the news that Tesla is putting all its electric-car patents in the public domain.  That's a generous move, which reminds me of Canadian hero Norman Bethune.  When he was a surgeon in Canada he invented quite a few medical instruments, and could have made good money by patenting them.  But he was too principled to make money that way, and he put his inventions into the public domain instead.  A great man!