Democracy in our lifetime

An editorial in the Golden Star, Golden B.C.

Democracy in our lifetime

The Golden Star , 03 November 2004

We wanted choice, we asked for choice. We wanted control, they gave us as much as they could.

We wanted change, and surely we’re about to get it.

The Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform is proposing a fantastic new system that we’ll all get to vote on, referendum-style, during the provincial elections in May. The new system, called a proportional representation by single transferable vote system, or PR-STV system, mashes all 79 provincial ridings together in groups of two to four, and lets voters choose from all the candidates in those areas — in order of preference.

That’s right. If you don’t get your first choice, you could very well get your second. Or maybe your third. Gone will be the days when a government could take a province by the horns with little more than half our approval.

The Green party must be celebrating their environmentally-friendly butts off. Finally, a system that may even get them a seat or two, if that’s what enough of us ask for.

What’s even better, is that party bigwigs can’t pick all the candidates for us. In our current system, we have little choice. You can vote for a party or vote for the individual you trust the most, but heaven help you if the two don’t happen to be one and the same.

The real tragedy is that you’ve probably never voted for anything you really wanted anyway, since a good chunk of Canadians tend to vote against, rather than for anything.

With a PR-STV set-up, not only do you get more than one shot at picking your favourite party, but you get to choose which individual will represent that party in your area. Your top four choices could be every NDP candidate in the four ridings on your ballot. Or all the Liberals. Or one of each with a couple of Greens tossed into your electoral salad. Don’t like her as your Conservative ambassador? Pick him.

It’s truly brilliant.

There are still some bugs to iron out, such as which ridings exactly will be lumped together. But overall, it’s very encouraging news, and the closest thing to a huge improvement the province’s electoral system has seen in decades.

The rest of the country will be watching closely this May, no doubt with the notion that this system could work in other provinces or even at the federal level.

This, quite frankly, is big, big news.

Once implemented, this clever little system could coax thousands of apathetic voters out to the polls this May, driven by the hope that their vote might actually mean something for a change. Excited by the notion that the government is asking their opinion not once, or even twice, but as many times as it takes to fill the available seats.

For once, we can vote for someone.

Oh yes, we wanted change, and we’re going to get it. We will live to see real democracy in our lifetime.

But chances are good we’ll be so satisfied with the changes the government makes, that we won’t bother to do our share. We’ll blow it in our good ol’, traditional Canadian way.

We’ll forget to vote.

[© Copyright 2004 The Golden Star. Reproduced here by permission of Andrea Lewandowski, editor.]