News release - New Westminster public hearing

Assembly hears first defence of status quo

Presenter Terry Julian passionately defended BC’s existing electoral system at the Citizens’ Assembly’s public hearing in New Westminster Thursday night. 

BC’s single-member plurality system tends to produce majority governments, he argued, which gives government clear authority.  He contrasted this to proportional representation, which he said creates multi-party and coalition governments that “are messy, quarrelsome, inefficient and ineffective.”

Several others incorporated variations of proportional representation in their proposals.  Harold Daykin’s mixed member proportional (MMP) system proposed a “very small dose of proportional representation,” with some seats filled by losing candidates in electoral district races running under the banner of the parties needing “top-up” seats. 

Robert Broughton advocated party-controlled lists in his version of MMP – a concept explicitly opposed by Daykin.  David Lane, also a supporter of MMP, introduced the idea of an “electoral audit commission” that would provide annual reports of parties actions relative to their electoral platforms.

Saying MMP leads to too much party control, John Vegt advocated what he called Preferential Plus, a system that uses a preferential ballot province-wide, while maintaining single-member districts in less populated regions and multi-member electoral districts in urbanized areas.  Lamenting wild swings in government policy in BC, he attributed this to “the arrogance of majority rule without the majority support form the voters” 

The remaining speakers – John West, Charles Boylan, Guy Duperreault and Don DeMill – were united in their opposition to political parties.  While some of their proposals incorporated the existing electoral system, others advocated eliminating elections altogether. 

Duperreault maintained that “the problem with elections is elections.  The reality of the electioneering process is that it gets the wrong people into power.”  He advocated instead a random selection of legislative representatives via a process similar to that of the Citizens’ Assembly or jury duty.      

The next public hearings are in White Rock and Valemount – both Saturday afternoon (May 8).

Next week, hearings will held in the North and in the West Kootenay regions of the province. 

A full schedule of hearings, and information on how to sign up to make a presentation, is on the Assembly’s website at www.citizensassembly.bc.ca.

The Assembly is an independent, representative, non-partisan group of 160 randomly selected British Columbians. They must decide by December 15 whether to propose a change to B.C.’s electoral system. If they recommend a change, it will be the subject of a referendum for all voters in the May 2005 provincial election.