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Submission KAVANAGH-1187 (Online)

Submission By Patricia Kavanagh
AddressBurnaby, BC, Canada
Organization
Date20040812
CategoryElectoral system change
Abstract
We need to have a government that represents citizens' diverse views. I would like to see a more diverse legislature where several parties & independents play a significant role, & minority governments are not considered a failure. [2 pages]

Submission Content
I fully support the process of electoral reform presently underway by the Citizens' Assembly in BC.

Unless progressive electoral reform is obtained, we will continue to have ridiculous, polarized elections where a low popular vote percentage is enough to elect a large percentage of representatives from a party. The result is no opposition and governments that do not work hard enough to make effective decisions (since they can push their own agenda with no checks when in a large majority).

We need to have a government that represents citizens' diverse views as well as the 'majority' opinion on various issues. I would like to see a more diverse legislature/ parliament where, say, 3 or 4 parties plus independents play a significant role and where minority governments are not considered a 'failure'. I want politicians to work together and use the diversity of views to come up with creative solutions to problems and to design effective policy to prevent problems in the first place. Most issues should be analyzed objectively according to scientific, environmental, social, economic, ethical standards, rather than according to public/media opinion or political agenda - 'democracy' needs to be countered by good sense and knowledge.  Party 'discipline' that forces MLAs to vote along 'party lines' must be disallowed.

Since there are many ways to run elections, count votes, assign the groups and the representation rate for each group, it is not simple to select an appropriate electoral system. I suggest that a set of 5 different systems be proposed by the citizens assembly and we the citizens get to sleect the one we want. Each method would be analyzed according to a checklist of features to be defined by citizens' assembly, for examples:

  1. popular vote % (overall + in regions) must be within, say, 20%, of the number seats elected
  2. small parties or independents will get seats when more than 1% of people vote for them
  3. election results show a large diversity of parties when there is diverse views on a wide range of
    issues in the electorate
  4. will the government be effective at solving problems that need to be addressed (such as global warming, health care, social decay, or pulp mill pollution) etc.
I would also like to see a way for people to vote on particular issues of importance. Now, politicians do polling to assess citizens' views. This is inadequate and depends on the questions being asked and also there is no mandate to legislate according to citizens views. The selection of the questions could be determined by a diverse group of citizens (like the Citizens' Assembly). Some legal mandate is required to ensure that the citizens' answers to election questions are utilized in decision making (and politician election promises kept).

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