Gordon Gibson, the Globe and Mail

British Columbia, birthplace of a new kind of democracy

By Gordon Gibson

The Globe and Mail,  01 November 2004

In an historic decision last week, British Columbia's 160-member Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform voted overwhelmingly (146 to 7) to send to referendum a new voting system for the province. The chances of it passing and being implemented are high. If that happens, our politics will change in important ways that may spread to the rest of the country.

The proposed system is the "single transferable vote" in multimember ridings. Ridings will vary from two to seven members. For the voters, it is simple: On the ballot, they mark candidates in order of preference, as in 1, 2, 3, etc. This gives tremendous choice.

In a four-member riding, for example, voters might vote for a Liberal of their choice, a New Democrat community worker they know, a Conservative woman and a well-liked local Independent - in the order they prefer, and all on one ballot. In the counting process, the four most-preferred candidates (transferring and adding together first, second and even further choices as required) are the ones elected.

Under the arithmetic of STV, only 20 per cent of the vote is required to win a seat in this riding (surplus votes are then redistributed as second choices), so any sizable group of voters will get at least one representative and, in practice, party results turn out to be quite close to percentage of votes cast. Unlike a pure system of proportional representation, the voters, not the party, decide which of several party candidates rank ahead of the others. Independents have a much better chance.

While no electoral system can address all desirable objectives, this one comes close. STV gives the voter more control over a legislature's shape; it contains powerful incentives for politicians to behave with civility and co-operation, as they have to seek second-preference votes from others.

B.C. citizens' assembly chairman Jack Blaney said members' top four priorities were local representation, a rough proportionality of party seats to party votes, expanded voter choice and reducing the control of party bosses over the election process and elected MLAs.

STV delivers all of these desiderata better than our current "first past the post" system. The STV system is not widely used - since 1922, Ireland has been the main example. That's because politicians almost always design the electoral system, and politicians don't like this one because it reduces party control. Irish governments have tried twice to do away with theirs; the people have said "No!"

Large parties trying to perpetuate our traditional four-year-elected-dictatorship model don't like the proposed system because it increases the likelihood of minority or coalition governments. But this didn't bother the voters who elected the current government in Ottawa. And minority governments are normal in other developed countries. (Indeed, citizens' assembly members kept returning to the theme that Canada has evolved, and so should our voting system.)

Perhaps even more important than the electoral reform itself, is the citizens'-assembly process that was used to develop it. This brand-new technique is being watched around the globe. The assembly was chosen by a random process and is made up of ordinary citizens. Divided equally between men and women by design, it is balanced for geographical representation and age groups, and is about as good a mirror of British Columbians as you could find, ranging as it does from a quantum physicist to a bicycle courier.

At the beginning of the year, the assembly went through an education phase, hearing from experts about systems from many lands. They held public hearings - 50 of them, around the province; they received more than 1,900 submissions, posting them on the web. After four weekends of debate this fall, they arrived at a surprisingly strong consensus, which gives this new system tremendous momentum going into the referendum.

With our assembly, we in B.C. have invented and field-tested a new addition to the toolkit of direct democracy. Most democracy is "representative" - i.e. we elect others to make the decisions. But a few things people reserve for direct control, most fundamentally the right to vote for representatives. "Initiatives," referendums or recalls are other examples used in some parts of the world.

The randomly selected citizens'-assembly process with referendum rights is totally new, and very exciting. Now proven, it will surely be used for other special purposes in Canada, in areas where politicians are inherently conflicted. Think, for example, of Ontario's promised electoral reform. The power and legitimacy of this process could even break through the constitutional barriers to senate reform at the federal level. It could, in due course, become one of Canada's gifts to the democratic world. Great credit to the politicians in the B.C. government and Legislature who unanimously authorized the trial run.

Gordon Gibson, former leader of the B.C. Liberal Party, a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute and author of Fixing Canadian Democracy, designed the Citizens' Assembly process for the B.C. government.

[© Copyright 2004 Gordon Gibson. Reproduced here by permission of Mr. Gibson.]