I would first like to begin by expressing my gratitude and
appreciation to all members of the Assembly for the hardwork and
dedication they have shown to their task. I applaud each and every
one of you for your own contributions to this very important and
ground-breaking process as well as all members of the public who
have made submissions, attended hearings and shown an interest in
the health and future of our democracy.
I have been very strongly in favour of Proportional Representation
(PR) since 1990 and specifically in favour (since 1994) of some
form of mixed-member system (MMP/AMS). I have no set-in-stone
fundamentalist views on the exact form and nature that such a
mixed-member system should take--indeed, that is one of the many
beauties and benefits of such systems, that they can be tailored to
the unique characteristics and needs of whatever jurisdiction has
chosen to adopt them. Having looked over a great many of the
submissions made to date, it is quite clear that a consensus has
emerged amongst the interested public in favour of some form of
mixed-member system rather than the unwieldy and deeply haphazard
Single Transferable Vote (STV) system.
I was originally a supporter of STV many years ago (pre-1994)
because it is a system that looks and sounds great in theory, but
does not quite work out well in practice. Meeting, speaking with
and learning from some Irish MPs (or 'TDs' as they are called) who
are not fans of STV because they have experienced its dodgy nature
in practice for many years also helped bring me to this view.
While I do not doubt the ability of the voting public to be able to
understand how to mark ballots under STV, the notion that the
system's outcomes would actually make real sense to people is
doubtful. How can one claim that it is democratic for the second,
third and fourth choices of supporters of fringe parties like
Natural Law, Marijuana and others to determine outcomes of an
election? Yet under STV (and its sister system, the Alternative
Vote) that is precisely what would occur. The accumulated votes of
a winning candidate would be a hodge-podge of second, third and
fourth choices of other voters and second, third and fourth (and
even fifth and sixth) choices of yet even more voters, and so on
and so forth, all reduced to mere fractional values. The election
outcomes depend largely on pure accident and chance: i.e. which
candidates fail to be eliminated in the early stages of the count.
Indeed, had even a small cluster of voters marked their preferences
in even a slightly different order the results can be radically
different. This defies basic common sense. I could go on and on
about this in several pages but plenty of academic work and
analysis of these flaws has been done and I am sure (and hope) that
members of the Assembly have examined such works or will be
examining them in their deliberations. STV can be a good system for
electing upper houses like the Senate or municipal government
bodies, but as a system for electing the chamber in which
governments are formed it is very inappropriate.
As the title of the excellent book "Mixed-Member Electoral Systems:
The Best of Both Worlds?" (a book I certainly hope all Assembly
members will be diligently studying) puts it, mixed-member systems
do indeed offer the best of both worlds. A mixed-member system
preserves the virtues of the present First-Past-the-Post (FPTP)
system while correcting its defects. Under our present FPTP system,
a voter must use one vote to try to pick, among other things, who
he/she believes would be the best local representative, the party
he/she supports and who he/she would like to see form government.
Rarely do all voters get to cast a vote that exercises all three
important choices effectively--and one all too often comes at the
expense of the other two. In making these choices under FPTP,
voters must also factor in whom they would not like to see be their
local representative and whom they would not like to see form
government and in assessing those things their choice is
affected--often adversely. That is where the beauty of a
mixed-member system kicks in as it solves this dilemma by providing
every voter with a two-vote ballot. Voters can assess who is the
best local representative without worrying about where they live
determining the value of the vote for the party of their choice.
Since a consensus does seem to have emerged (based on the
submissions to date) around a mixed-member system, the question
then becomes 'in what form?' Some submissions have called for a
mixed-member system consisting of a list/top-up element of roughly
15-20% (and called this 'PR Lite') rather than the 50/50 ratio
between constituency and list/top-up members that exists in
Germany. In my view this would be a good compromise. It would also
help solve the legitimate concerns about PR that some have
expressed (and, indeed, the only concern that I believe has
merit)--namely, that it provides disproportional power to smaller
parties. With a smaller list/top-up element this would help provide
an important psychological reminder to smaller parties not to
overstep their bounds.
The other reason a smaller list/top-up element would be better
would be to prevent constituencies from becoming ridiculously
large. Furthermore, under the MMP/AMS system as it exists in
Germany and New Zealand (and unlike in Scotland, Wales and Italy,
among other places) it is the 'party vote' which determines the
overall number of seats that each party is entitled to and if the
number of constituency seats a party has won exceed their overall
share of seats as determined by the party vote an anomoly can occur
known as 'overhang seats'--resulting in the total number of seats
in parliament being enlarged to accomodate this. I severely doubt
British Columbians would be very keen on this and therefore a
mixed-member system in which the party vote is treated as a
seperate top-up to the constituency results rather than the crucial
election-outcome determinant would be far preferable (and this is
what exists in Scotland, Wales and Italy, among other places).
Whether the MLAs elected from the list/top-up element would be
elected from province-wide or regionally-based lists is the next
question that would need to be answered. It might be interesting to
experiment with province-wide lists for two elections and then
examine afterwards how that has worked or else devise some sort of
region-by-region topping-up formula as did the UK's Jenkins
Commission in their electoral reform proposals. Regions could be
based on clusters of constituencies and the top-up seats could be
allocated via some sort of formula based on the election results
region by region. There are so many possibilities as to how this
could all be done and in deciding that, as with everything else, I
wish all Assembly members the very best of luck.
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