Gordon Gibson, National Post

B.C. is making electoral history

By Gordon Gibson

National Post, 15 September 2004

VANCOUVER - At about 15 minutes past noon on Sunday, Sept. 12, came a historic moment in the life of British Columbia. It suddenly became clear that the electoral system -- and therefore the politics of this province -- were about to change dramatically.

To set the scene: All this year, a Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform has been studying electoral systems around the world and holding public hearings on the topic. It is now decision time. Choices must be made. This was Day One of that process.

After a masterly summary of the five families of electoral systems and how they relate to the process of government by research director Ken Carty, the 160 members of the assembly retired to 10 private discussion groups to consider which "desirable features of B.C. politics" an electoral system should serve and encourage. The selected "desirable features" of course might give some clues as to where the assembly might be going, for there had been no hint to date.

Members reassembled in the plenary session at noon and Chair Jack Blaney called for reports. By the third (of 10), observers were looking at each other. By the tenth, it was clear that two decisions of great importance had already effectively been made.

One of these is that full proportional representation -- the "PR" one finds in Israel or the Netherlands -- will not be in the running. This is so because full PR entails that all members be drawn from national lists presented by the parties, and none from individual ridings. Virtually all of the committees found that "MLAs chosen to represent a specific local constituency" was a "desirable feature." Cross out full PR.

The committees had been asked to identify three "desirable features" from a list (which they were free to add to), and also to say if there was one feature they thought unimportant. One listed feature was, "Single party majority governments."

Every committee -- every single one -- identified single party majority governments as unimportant.

That is the historic moment. Why so? Because the assembly has been very clearly told time and again that the delivery of single party majority governments -- the so called "First Past the Post" (FPTP) -- is a distinguishing feature of the current electoral system used federally and in all provinces. The very strong implication is that we can cross FPTP off the list as well, and that is a political revolution.

Now, the assembly can still make any particular decision it wishes. But it has clearly stated that the Holy Grail of most politicians -- "strong majority government" -- matters little to them. Thus we can expect the members to focus on the remaining three of the five "families" of systems, those being "majority" (of which the French "run off" is an example), the Single Transferable Vote (STV) using multi-member ridings (Ireland and the Australian Senate are examples) and Mixed Member Proportional (MMP --Germany and New Zealand).

Over the next several weeks, the assembly will sort through these options, but for today the mind blower is that the probability is very high that by our scheduled election in 2009 (yes, B.C. has gone to fixed term elections as well) the old system will be gone. The members may have second thoughts on this, but the evidence points very strongly to change.

What could derail this? Not the government. It has promised that the recommendation, whatever it is, will go unchanged to the voters in a referendum at our next general election on May 17, 2005. There will be powerful voices raised against change, arguing in essence that the current system has served us well, majority governments are stable governments, you can "throw the rascals out" when you want to, and why take a chance on something new?

My guess is that in spite of such forces, any reasonable recommendation of the assembly will be strongly endorsed in the referendum vote because people are concerned with how our political system is working. They don't think the system -- leave individual governments aside -- is good enough for this province or, I would hazard, in most of the other provinces and nationally. Thus, offered a change, thoroughly researched and considered by their peers they will grab at that change.

A new electoral system will produce new balances of power, and probably far fewer majority governments. That will mean legislatures and governments will have to operate in new ways. We will all have much to learn, but one can already guess that what happened in Vancouver on Sunday will have considerable influence on the future of Canada.