News release

Prince George hosts key Assembly meeting

Members of BC's Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform are coming to Prince George June 26-27 to hold pivotal meetings.  These meetings bring to a climax the Assembly’s public inquiry process and mark the start of its decision-making. 

The Assembly will meet in the Prince George Civic Centre, 808 Civic Plaza, Prince George and plenary sessions are open to the public.  These open sessions are tentatively scheduled for: Saturday June 26 at 9am, 1pm and 3:45pm and Sunday June 27 at 8:30am and 10:45am.  There is no reserved seating.

These meetings in Prince George follow two months of public hearings held throughout the province during May and June – and mark the first time Assembly members have met together as a whole since March 21. 

Members will use this opportunity to review and discuss what they heard from British Columbians during the course of these 50 public hearings. They will also review what they have read in the more than 700 submissions provided to the Assembly to date.  And, they will discuss how the Assembly will conduct the deliberation phase this fall – what process it will use to come to a decision and formulate a recommendation.

In the fall, members will reconvene at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue in downtown Vancouver for five or six weekends of deliberation, beginning September 11. 

Assembly members must decide by December 15 if they will propose a change to BC’s current system of translating votes into seats in the Legislature. If they recommend a change, it will be the subject of a referendum for all voters in the May 2005 provincial election. The government has committed that any change approved by voters would take effect with the 2009 BC election.

The Assembly's 160 members – 80 men and 80 women – were randomly selected from the voters’ list and come from all regions of the province.

British Columbians can learn along with the Assembly by accessing reading and presentation materials from Assembly meetings on the Citizens’ Assembly website www.citizensassembly.bc.ca.  Submissions to the Assembly can also be made online through this website.