A second chance for the single transferable vote.

AuthorRatner, R.S.

On May 12th, 2009, British Columbians will have a second chance to approve the single transferable vote (STV) electoral system recommended by the British Columbia Citizens" Assembly in December 2004. The creation of a Citizens" Assembly to deliberate over such highly important matters as electoral reform was a remarkably innovative moment in western political history. The voters" decision to replace the traditional Westminster single-member plurality electoral model would be equally so. This article looks at developments since the last provincial election.

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In recent years, the pall of citizen disengagement in the advanced democracies has spread alarmingly, signaling again what political analysts have been wont to refer to as the "democratic deficit". This is no less apparent in Canada, particularly when it comes to the solemn duty of exercising the vote. The downward trajectory in voter turnout in federal and provincial elections has now reached the point where little more than half the eligible population goes to the polls. Paradoxically, the sense of apathy and frustration felt by so many citizens runs parallel with their desire for more grassroots participation and involvement in politics. Brimming with information in this technological age, their representative institutions nevertheless seem increasingly ill-suited for the purpose of stimulating civic engagement and generating the halo of public legitimacy.

The root of the problem may be that our method for choosing our official torchbearers tends to discourage public involvement in the political process and consequently impedes revitalization of the democratic polity. In all federal and provincial jurisdictions of Canada the Westminster parliamentary system has long prevailed. Legislators are chosen by the electoral system known as single-member plurality (SMP), colloquially referred to as First-Past-the-Post (FPTP). The victor in a given riding is the candidate who receives the most votes, which is often less than a majority of the votes cast. The other contestants are all losers. As a result, minority parties are sorely underrepresented (if at all) in the Legislature, regardless of their overall portion of votes obtained, and 'wrong winners' (i.e., a victorious party with fewer total votes than another) can emerge, depending on the spread of votes across ridings. Increasingly, the FPTP electoral system, originally designed for two-party encounters, seems incongruous with the varied slates of parties and agendas seeking political terra firma. This now misaligned voting scheme has, in fact, produced several disincentives to casting a ballot: it produces disproportional electoral results which encourages tactical rather than appreciative voting; it renders politics acutely adversarial, restricting the number of parties able to enter the political fray; and it fosters the entrenchment of political elites who wield undeserved and largely unaccountable power. The resultant gap between the will of the people and the rule of Parliament undermines the perceived value in voting and induces citizens to bury their disgust in shameless and irredeemable cynicism. At best, the existing electoral system now entices just two of three eligible voters to the polls.

The corrective to this deplorable state may lie in the area of electoral reform--i.e., finding a better way to choose candidates who truly speak for the constituencies they serve.

Attempting Electoral Reform

In clear acknowledgment of the gravity of the problem, electoral reform efforts have been underway in Canada over the past several years, notably in five provinces and also at the federal level. All of these efforts have proposed some form of proportional representation in order to alleviate the so-called democratic deficit. Of course, most incumbent politicians are loath to change the system that permitted them to win office, but the momentum for change received a considerable boost in British Columbia when Gordon Campbell, the leader of the governing Liberal party, announced formation of the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly, whose mandate was to decide whether the existing electoral reform system should be preserved or changed. If the latter, the recommendation for change would be decided by voters in a referendum coinciding with the B.C. provincial elections in 2005. The Premier's ostensible motive for convening a Citizens' Assembly was the perverse results delivered by the FPTP electoral system in the 1996 provincial election in which the New Democratic Party (NDP) was able to form a majority government despite the Liberals gaining a larger share of the popular vote, and in the following 2001 election, when Liberals captured 77 of 79 provincial...

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