Marcelle is the young Senate page who during the Speech from the Throne held up sign saying “Stop Harper.”  She said:

“Harper’s agenda is disastrous for this country and for my generation,”… “We have to stop him from wasting billions on fighter jets, military bases, and corporate tax cuts while cutting social programs and destroying the climate. Most people in this country know what we need are green jobs, better medicare, and a healthy environment for future generations.”

I agree with each and every one of these points but I wonder what Stanley Knowles would have had to say.  I had the privilege of working on Parliament Hill in the 1970s and 1980s when Stanley was House Leader for the NDP.

He was without question one of the wiliest and most effective party House Leaders of the 20^th century.  He was first elected in 1942 and after losing only one election, retired from politics in 1984.  It is too long to go into the details here, but during the 1956 “pipeline debate,” Stanley’s knowledge of parliamentary procedure helped undermine the Liberal government of Louis St Laurent.  In 1957 John Diefenbaker defeated St. Laurent.  Diefenbaker had been so impressed with Knowles that the Prime Minister offered the CCFer the speaker’s chair – an honour that Knowles declined.

Knowles was a committed social democrat and played a large role in the introduction of the Canada Pension Plan.  But he was also a man of Parliament.  While no one could use the Parliamentary rules more effectively he also deeply believed in the institution and would not tolerate tactics that undermined it.

I believe Stanley would have admired Brigette Marcelle’s courage and been deeply offended at her tactics.

Respect for Parliament and its traditions may seem like an antique notion, but the democratic traditions that Parliament is elected to protect are steeped in antiquity.  The struggle for a sovereign parliament is 1,000 years old and it is a struggle that continues to this day.

If we applaud Ms. Marcelle’s actions, how can we oppose the Harper government’s trampling of Parliamentary traditions?  In the election the Prime Minister excused his Cabinet Ministers lying to Parliament as a mere procedural squabble – a mere peccadillo.  He issued his committee chairs with instructions on how to disrupt the work of Parliamentary Committees.  It is also a struggle going on in British Columbia but that issue is for another day.

I believe the problem we have is not too much respect for Parliamentary traditions, as Ms. Marcelle’s actions would suggest, but far too little respect.

Are there circumstances that would call for actions to disrupt Parliament?  I can think of some.  In the past suffragettes chained themselves to railings to disrupt Parliament in their struggle for the vote.  In 1970 Canadian women shut down Parliament for 30 minutes in their fight for abortion rights.

But these examples are very different from a young women coming to the end of her contract with the Senate as a Page holding up a sign reading, “Stop Harper.”  Which brings me to one other point?  Ms. Marcelle had a contract with the Senate.  It is my understanding that the contract specifically prohibits the sort of activity Ms. Marcelle undertook last week.  As someone who works for a trade union, to me contracts are important.

Ms. Marcelle could have done many things in defense of her beliefs, particularly when her Senate contract was complete in a few weeks.  Just because something is courageous does not make it right.

BC’s government has discovered from an independent study that their HST is not revenue neutral.  It will cost the average family $350.  And now the Premier claims she is going to “fix” it.  How did this come to be?

I think you could count on the fingers of both hands the people who believe this came as a surprise to the government.  People believe they were lied to.  People believe the HST was just one more move to raise their taxes and lower taxes for corporations. 

More than half a million people signed a petition to force a referendum on the HST and so the government acted.  They acted not because it was the right thing to do; they acted because they had been caught.  They were caught by a coalition of right and left who for their own reasons took the issue to the streets.

Last week I had the privilege of hearing American commentator Amy Goodman speak at the CCPA fundraiser.  Among the many things that stood out for me was a comment about Barrack Obama.  She told the audience that, fundamentally, it was hard for the President to take progressive actions unless he could point to thousands of people on the lawn of the White House and say, “They made me do it.”

BC’s new Premier, if she was honest, would say the same thing: “They made me do it.” 

That is what it is going to take to stand up to Stephen Harper.  A reinvigorated opposition with members from across Canada can play a critical role.  But without the credibility of a movement behind them they will have little authority.  Without the action of women, environmentalists, labour, first nations, farmers and people who simply believe in democracy, a Parliamentary opposition will not be sufficient. 

The federal election demonstrated the critical role young people can play in such a movement.  Tria Donaldson wrote an article on the Rabble web site where she accurately reports:

The election saw a crescendo of movement building across this country. Young people organizing across the country shaped the narrative of this election, and it looks like we increased voter turnout. We inspired thousands and built a strong foundation to build on in future elections.

That creativity and vigor played a critical role that we can only hope to earn in British Columbia in our own coming election, probably this fall.

It is not enough to be afraid of what our new national government might do.  If we want to do anything about it, we will need to push back.  The one thing we cannot do is let our fear make us silent.

And that is just fine with me.

I think there are some pretty good reasons to change governments but let’s leave that to other people and another time for now.  Instead let’s look at whether elections in general are a good thing.

A lot of people have been complaining about having an election.  They say it costs too much. I can’t help but think about people all over the world who are fighting and dying for just a little bit of democracy.

So if you like our federal government, go and vote for it.  If you don’t like it, vote against it.  But for Pete’s sake, don’t stay home and complain about too much democracy.

It’s not Goldilocks and the three bears.  There is no such thing as just the right amount of democracy.  You either get too little or too much.  Personally, I’ll take too much.

But let’s face it: the list of ills in our democracy is much longer than that a minor amendment to the voting age. We can let them vote, but why would they want to? The big problem of our day is that the people do not trust politicians, and they feel that the political system does not translate the will of the people into action. That is why voter turnout is down. So give 16-year-olds the vote, but also give them a reason to vote.

At a time when the public is engaged by the sheer deception over the HST, and another election lie from 2001, the promise not to sell BC Rail, democracy needs to be on the table. We need to be talking about ways to boost accountability, and root out crony capitalism, whether that be actual corruption (as in BC Rail) and the day-to-day influence of large corporations (who do not vote but seem to have no problem making “democracy” work for them). We need to think about what a more democratic society should look like and how our legislatures facilitate that democratic intercourse, rather than the highly centralized power of the PMO or Premier’s office.

Democracy is an evolving set of institutions, including legislatures and eligibility to vote representatives to those legislatures. But how those legislatures function (or do not) is of as much importance as who gets to vote. Electing a representative means little in our world of caucus solidarity – if our “representatives” do not get to speak their mind freely, we might as well just have a presidential-style election for premier. In BC, the legislature has only been sitting a few months of the year, so having a representative means even less than it used to.

At least, the evolving institutional framework has now brought forth a referendum on the HST, one small victory against despotism. Referenda are a rather crude form of democracy (as ballot initiatives in the US have demonstrated), but do have their place. But there are also participatory budgets, constituent assemblies, and other democratic engagement models to experiment with, some of which BC already has experience with.

As for the voting age, eligibility to vote was never clean cut: there have always been rules restricting suffrage. In the British tradition, the “vote” in the earliest Parliaments was with the nobility, who steadily wrested power from the king. That shifted to male property owners, then to all men, and to women. Periodically, religion has popped as a means for disqualification, so at times Catholics, Jews and others were banned from voting in England.

In Canada, women have only had the vote for less than 100 years, First Nations people for half that. The voting age was lowered to 18 forty years ago from 21. So lowering it to 16 is just one more step in the progress of democracy. Yet, every time that march has sought to take another step, the same patronizing arguments have been made in opposition. The most common complaint is 16-year-olds are too stupid/ignorant/inexperienced to vote. Substitute First Nations, blacks, Jews or women into that sentence, and have the rough history of arguments against suffrage.

True, teenage brains are flooded with hormones and they may lack real-life experience. But kids today are sophisticated and more prone to be idealistic that we can change things that are wrong with the world or our province. Because we teach them, so why deny them voice? Besides, it is their future that we are polluting, and they have a right to be angry about that at the ballot box. Even if you think 16 year-olds too dim, then I suggest we invest more in public education.

Lowering the voting age would, in fact, provide a great opportunity it would be to teach newly eligible voters about real issues during an election campaign, at school and at home. Just as 16-year-olds need a voice on climate change, they will have valid perspectives on the HST, fish farms and corruption. It would be great to see how 16 year olds would respond to reading David Basi’s personal memos.

But given the tragic state of our political system, it would be foolish to think that allowing 16 year-olds to vote is a panacea for voter participation. They may just get cynical faster — as long as politicians keep pulling betrayals like the HST and BC Rail. In the spirit of democracy I’d like to see Mike de Jong or any other Liberal candidate call for a full public inquiry into the corruption of the BC Rail affair (I’m betting the rot goes much deeper than just BC Rail).

If we want more democratic engagement we need institutions that are themselves more democratic. That is, we need a 21st century democracy, not a small tweak to the 19th century version. Younger voting ages should be part of that reform, but they are not the solution to an ailing system.

“For groups to be scared to speak up about the government…or scared to know what they could and could not do, is really bad. It was not a good feeling.”

The idea that everyone should be able to speak freely and that citizens should have access to a broad range of viewpoints are two fundamental principles of a democracy — and never are they more important than during an election. Yet the words quoted above — from the leader of a respected local charitable organization — speak to a very different reality, one that many non-profit groups experienced in the lead-up to the 2009 provincial election.

How did this happen? The answer goes back to legislation enacted in 2008. Bill 42 introduced new rules governing third party election advertising – meaning advertising by individuals and groups other than political parties and candidates. The rules capped third party spending at $150,000 province-wide, and $3,000 within a single constituency.

According to then-Attorney General Wally Oppal, these rules were needed to create a more level election playing field, to prevent “the hijacking of the process by wealthy participants.” Bill 42 set off a storm of controversy, most of which focused on the implications for “big spenders” – those groups most likely to spend money on election ads, such as corporate interests and large unions.

In the lead-up to the election, however, we heard from several small charities and non-profits that they were struggling to figure out how the new rules would affect them, and in some cases were self-censoring as a result.

The problem is twofold. First, Bill 42’s definition of election advertising casts an extremely wide net. It captures all kinds of activities most people would not likely think of as advertising, such as free or low-cost tools like websites, social media, email, petitions or public forums.

The definition of advertising also includes public communication that takes a position on any issue associated with a political party or candidate. Which in practice means just about anything under the sun.

Second, there is no minimum threshold below which a third party need not register with Elections BC. Even if a group plans to engage only in free or very low-cost activities, it must first register and be publicly listed on Elections BC’s website as a third party advertiser.

“We met in each others’ homes, in our living rooms, and we do it all for free…it’s a completely inappropriate law for a group like us.”

In practice, this means that in the lead-up to a provincial election, a group of citizens concerned about any number of public policy issues is required to register with Elections BC before it starts a Facebook group or distributes leaflets to neighbours, for example. And for non-profits, charities, coalitions and social service agencies, it means information and analysis of government policies long posted on their websites is suddenly redefined as election advertising when an election draws near.

“There’s a fine line between advertising and promotion, and then education and information sharing. And that’s where our efforts as an organization are – trying to spread information so that voters can make educated decisions.”

In late 2009 and early 2010, we conducted research with 60 non-profits, charities, coalitions, unions and citizen’s groups to find out if the problems we heard about leading up the election were more widespread.

Of the organizations that took part, about one third self-censored during the election campaign directly as a result of the third party rules, and not because they’d spent anywhere near the limits.

In six cases, groups kept their heads down because they did not want to be labeled as “advertising sponsors,” which they felt posed a serious risk to their non-partisan reputations or charity status. In other cases, groups had difficulty interpreting the rules and decided to err on the side of caution.

“We did limit what we did because we were scared of the rules and screwing it up…People just go so overwhelmed by it they didn’t do anything.”

The activities these groups censored had little to do with commercial advertising. For example, nine groups did not post new materials on their websites during the campaign, and four went so far as to remove previously posted materials. Four refrained from issuing or endorsing a call for changes to government policy or legislation. Five avoided commenting in media stories. Four cancelled or decided not to proceed with public events (in two cases, these were all-candidates forums). The list goes on.

Other organizations did not self-censor, but diverted extensive time and energy to figuring out the new rules and second-guessing their actions. For groups with only one or two staff members, or no staff at all, this was a waste of precious resources.

The clearest indication that these rules missed the mark, however, comes from the 232 disclosure reports filed organizations registered as third party sponsors for the 2009 election. It turns out that more than half of them spent a paltry $500 or less during the campaign, and more than three quarters spent less than $2,000.

The citizens of British Columbia were deprived of the full range of voices that would normally be heard during an election as a result of the new third party rules. Yet the groups most impacted by them – the small spenders – are also the least able to mount a costly court challenge. We need the provincial government to fix the law, and soon.

– To find out more, check out Election Chill Effect here.

However, it’s not just Harper.  The federal government, under both Liberals and Conservatives, has not only resisted environmental action in Canada, they have opposed international efforts to protect the Earth.

Indeed, George Monbiot wrote that Canada is “the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement.”

In his recent lecture, historian, journalist, and author Gwynne Dyer described how most countries are now doing long-term planning to cope with environmental destruction.  But not in Ottawa.

Dyer added, “We are going to go past the point of no return” in 15-20 years if we don’t get serious about global warming.

We must develop strategies that will have the greatest impact as quickly as possible.

The most promising approach is to put pressure on governments by using a multitude of tactics, including the ballot box, to demand an immediate Second World War-type mobilization to deal with the systemic crises.

Such “ecological Keynesianism”— massive government programs to protect the natural world—could create jobs in sustainable industries and promote a plethora of ecological initiatives (local food production, public transportation, energy conservation, and so on) – but only if people demand it.

However, even those who understand the seriousness of our situation often do nothing, due to distractions; despair, and busy lives.

The simple act of voting could make all the difference.

Nothing provides such a direct—and easy—route to politicians as voting does.

As Bill McKibben wrote: “We need to be able to explain to them that continuing in their ways will end something that they care about: their careers.”

In many ridings, even a small increase in “environmental” voters would make a difference.

I once asked Social Ecologist Murray Bookchin, when participation in elections is justified.  His response, regarding what he called, “the cesspool of bourgeois parliamentarianism” was undogmatic: “You do what you have to do.”

Obviously, voting is not enough. The key to a successful ecological movement is Bookchin’s concept of “unity in diversity” – organizing movements that focus on common values and working together with mutual respect.

Other forms of action must intensify: organizing, letters to the editor, demonstrations, media reform, and public education – working inside and outside of the political system.

There may not be enough time to transform the global economy into one that is democratic, just, and sustainable. But as Noam Chomsky observed, while we can’t know if our efforts will prevent tragedy, we can be sure that inaction will guarantee greater disaster.

Cynicism is a luxury that we can’t afford.

We already have enough wealth, knowledge, and technology to solve the environmental crises, create a more humane society, end war, and eliminate global poverty – if we take democracy seriously, get organized and take control of our lives.

And voting is the simplest way to make a difference.



The fashionable electoral reform idea this year is to give corporations a real say. It’s time for individual citizens to share their electoral democracy with corporations to give meaning to those old legal rulings that said corporations are people too.

Of course, many were shocked at the Jan. 21st decision by the U.S. Supreme Court which said corporate entities have full First Amendment free speech rights, thereby trashing decades of U.S. legislation to limit election advertising spending by corporation and unions. There are now no limits on the amounts corporations can spend on political advertising in the U.S.

But did you know Gordon Campbell and the B.C. government are looking at the option of one-upping the Supremes  by giving corporations the right to vote?

It’s true.

Last October, the Premier announced the creation of a joint task force with the Union of B.C. Municipalities to review the rules for local government elections. The terms of reference for the task force direct them to examine giving corporations the right to vote in B.C. municipal elections. The committee is to report out in May and changes to legislation are expected not long after.

It seems corporations in B.C. feel they have inadequate influence on government decision-making, particularly about taxes. All that tax cutting and tax shifting of the last twenty years is apparently not enough.

Industrial ratepayers  in forest communities and commercial ratepayers in Vancouver have recently been pushing hard for homeowners to pay a greater percentage of municipal taxes. Starting in July, forest companies operating in six B.C. communities simply refused to pay their full tax bills and arbitrarily sent in cheques for only a quarter of what they had been legally assessed. The B.C. Supreme Court has ordered Catalyst Paper to pay in full, but the company is appealing and communities with Catalyst mills are feeling the crunch. Port Alberni is now planning to increase taxes for homeowners by 23.6%, while also reducing and contracting out services.

Corporations once had the right to vote in B.C. local elections, but that was eliminated by the Barrett government in 1973, restored by the Bennett government in 1976 and eliminated altogether again by the Harcourt government in 1993.

Today, there is no corporate voting in any other province and indeed – according to the task force discussion paper – the only place in the world which has it now is “The City”, that small portion of greater London which is home to much of the British financial sector.

The discussion paper also raises the amazing prospect that if B.C. does give corporations the right to vote, non-discrimination clauses in trade agreements like NAFTA and TILMA may make it impossible to restrict that right to B.C. corporations only. There’s every chance the trade agreements will force us to open up voting to foreign corporations doing business in B.C., as well.

Old fashioned ideas like “one human being, one vote” may soon be behind us. If this goes ahead, we can look forward to corporations finally having effective input and full equality with human beings.

It’s time for a refresher on all this. I think I’ll take another look at Joel Bakan’s outstanding video “The Corporation“.

The Case for the BC Single Transferable Vote (BC-STV)

by David Huntley and Michael Wortis

BC-STV has many advantages over the current First-Past-the-Post system (FPTP) used for electing our MLAs. BC-STV will achieve a reasonably proportional representation of parties, with the number of MLAs of each party in close proportion to its fraction of the popular vote. Voters will be able to vote for their preferred candidates without fear of wasting their votes, and they will be able to rank the candidates offered by their preferred party, thus determining which are elected. As well, BC-STV will reduce the imbalance of power between voters and parties. It achieves all this while preserving local representation.

Because BC-STV is a proportional system, the make-up of the legislature will reflect the party preferences of the voters. These party preferences will change from one election to the next; but, since they cannot be distorted as they are under FPTP, there is a lower probability of large policy swings from one election to the next. This seems likely to lead to increased political stability and a greater tendency towards consensus legislation.

Legislatures in which one party has more than half the seats will occur when a majority of voters cast their ballots for a particular party, but this happens rarely in B.C. Thus, single-party majority governments will become less frequent, and MLAs will have to work together, either in minority governments or, more likely, in coalition governments. The history of proportional and FPTP systems shows that both can lead to stable governments and both can lead to unstable ones.

Minority governments are usually unable to pass legislation that the majority of the people do not want and are likely to find common ground through compromise and accommodation. Minority governments in Canada have been responsible for some of our most progressive legislation, most notably Medicare and the Canada Pension Plan.

Coalition governments are ones in which two or more parties have a formal working relationship in order to form a majority. Nearly all European countries have coalition governments because they use some form of proportional representation for their elections. It is no coincidence that these countries have the most equitable societies.

Larger ridings under BC-STV will mean that there will be more names (~12-18) on the ballot, so the conscientious voter will need to learn the views of more candidates than at present. It is this feature which allows voters to decide which of the candidates from each party are elected, thus shifting party policy and removing deadwood.

Some people express concern that the larger ridings will mean a dilution of local representation, especially in sparsely populated rural ridings. This is not true. There will be the same number of MLAs and the average distance for a voter to his or her nearest MLA will be the same as at present. Nearly all ridings will have MLAs from two or more different parties, thus giving the voter a choice of MLAs to go to for assistance.

With BC-STV, voters with a strong preference for an independent candidate or one from a smaller party can mark their 1st preferences to such candidates without fear of “wasting” their ballots. If such candidates receive relatively few votes, these votes are transferred to the voters’ 2nd and possibly 3rd preferences, etc., during the counting process. If a candidate receives more votes than are needed for election, each of these votes is split into two portions; one portion, which is enough to elect that candidate, stays with that candidate, and the remainder is transferred to the next listed preference on that ballot, thus using the full value of that ballot. The result is that far more ballots count towards the election of a candidate than under FPTP.

After the election, each voter will be able to see which candidate or candidates his or her vote helped to elect. Under FPTP, it is usually the case that about 50% of the votes are for the candidate who is elected. By contrast, under BC-STV about 90% of the votes in a five-member riding will have contributed to the election of at least one MLA. Thus, a far higher number of voters will feel they have an MLA who represents them in the legislature, and this will lead to increased voter satisfaction and participation.

FPTP normally results in the winner-take-all (majoritarian) governments that we are used to. In contrast, proportional representation (PR) usually leads to governments that work by consensus. Which is better? In his 1999 book ‘Patterns of Democracy’, renowned political scientist Arend Lijphart studied 36 democracies and showed that consensus governments do significantly better than majoritarian governments, as measured by several indicators of quality, including proximity of government policy to voters’ preferences, voter satisfaction, voter turnout, ratios of the highest to lowest incomes, distribution of economic power, and women’s representation in parliament and in cabinet. Consensus democracies tend to be kinder and gentler as judged by social policies that enable all people to maintain a decent standard of living, environmental performance, energy efficiency (GDP/energy used), incarceration rate, use of death penalty, and foreign aid. None of the indices examined by Lijphart were significantly better for majoritarian governments than for consensus governments.

In conclusion, the legislature or parliament we get with FPTP is frequently not the one the voters wanted or voted for, resulting in public policies that are different from those wanted by the public – a situation which risks leaving voters cynical and weakening democracy. Many of these problems can be solved or, at least, alleviated by adopting an alternative electoral system. The Single Transferable Vote system (BC-STV) was overwhelmingly recommended by the BC Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform as the best system for B.C. We agree.

David Huntley and Michael Wortis are Professors Emeriti in the Department of Physics at Simon Fraser University. A comprehensive article of theirs on STV appeared in the April 2007 issue of the CCPA Monitor. David is a long-time member of the CCPA.

The Case Against STV

By David Schreck

Will STV “make your vote count”? Actually, BC-STV can make your vote worth less and make your MLA less accountable. Our existing first-past-the-post (FPTP) system is not perfect, but it is better than BC-STV.

Inequality is inherent in BC-STV. The Northeast (Peace River) would get two MLAs while the Capital Region would get seven. Some voters would see their vote dead-ended, not electing anyone and not transferred, while others would see their vote help elect more than one MLA. What’s fair about that?

No one should vote for STV unless they can understand how votes are counted. Supporters of BC-STV say that it doesn’t matter if people don’t understand how votes are counted. They argue that most people don’t know how their car works but they can still drive it. That analogy is misleading. In deciding whether to buy a GM or a Toyota vehicle, prospective purchasers need to know a lot more than just how to drive each car, such as whether the company will be in business next year and whether the warranty will be any good.

In deciding between voting systems, British Columbians need to know a lot more than just how to vote. They also need to know how votes are counted in order to be able to adequately compare FPTP and BC-STV. B.C. voters are not test driving BC-STV; we could be living with it for decades

The first word in STV is “single”. That is exactly what it is, a single vote, even though a constituency will elect from two to seven MLAs. With BC-STV the minimum number of votes required to win, the “Droop quota”, varies depending on the number of MLAs to be elected. In percentage terms the quota is equal to 12.5% of the total votes cast in a seven-MLA constituency, rising to 33.3% of the total votes cast in a two-MLA constituency. Those percentages are important because any votes in excess of the quota get redistributed to other candidates based on the instructions each voter gave by way of candidate rankings.

It can take a dozen rounds of adjusting votes before the count is finished. The last candidate to be elected usually has fewer votes than the quota, because there remains one position to fill and no further votes to transfer. The remaining candidate with the most votes in the final round is declared elected. That means that in a seven-MLA constituency, the seventh candidate to be declared elected wins with less than 12.5% of the total vote.

For a real-life example, look at the actual count in the May 24, 2007 Republic of Ireland election for the district of Dublin North, which had four representatives to elect and 13 candidates. The website ElectionsIreland.org allows you to see how votes were counted, how complicated vote counting is under STV, and that there are always some voters whose vote doesn’t count as much as the vote of others. In Dublin North, the vote count took ten rounds of redistributing votes, but the 5,256 people who voted for Brendan Ryan (who lost) did not have their second preferences transferred. You can pick any other real life example of STV and you’ll see that there are always some voters whose vote doesn’t get transferred and whose first preference doesn’t win.

Anyone who has ever had more than one boss at the same time for the same job knows that accountability can go out the window. With BC’s existing system of single MLA constituencies, accountability is clear. If you don’t like what your MLA did, or what your MLA’s party did, vote for a different candidate. With five MLAs representing one enormous constituency, each could say a problem is someone else’s responsibility or fault.

From an MLA’s point of view, large multiple member regions would make it impossible to service all the school boards, municipal councils and community organizations that would be in regions two to seven times larger than our existing constituencies. Supporters say that candidates would carve out their own constituencies within the large regions, which, if true, is another way of saying they would ignore large numbers of voters in the region since they would know that they could get elected, not with the most support, but with a minimum support of 12.5% to 33.3%.

Many of the assertions made by proponents of BC-STV cannot be verified, including the claim that STV is more likely to produce coalition governments because it is more likely to elect MLAs from more than two parties. Actual experience with STV, apart from municipal elections, is confined to Ireland, Malta, the Australian Senate and Tasmania. Only two parties have ever had their candidates elected to Malta’s parliament, although other parties continually try. By contrast, with our existing first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system, British Columbians elected MLAs from four different political parties (NDP, Social Credit, Reform and Liberal) as recently as 1991 and from three different parties in 1996.

There are 37 registered political parties in BC. They don’t all run candidates in all of the ridings, but most of them run candidates in one or more ridings. It is hard to support any claim that FPTP limits the choice offered voters or the ability of small parties to elect MLAs in BC; witness the Reform Party, or Gordon Wilson’s Progressive Democratic Alliance in 1996. The issue for STV enthusiasts is not electing an MLA or two from small parties as much as it is about holding the balance of power in a coalition government.

For no apparent reason, STV proponents are fond of claiming that the voting system would be the same, and yield similar results, in BC as it is in Ireland where coalition governments are common. There are big differences between Ireland and BC: BC is less homogeneous (Ireland is predominately white and Catholic); Ireland has 166 Members of Parliament for roughly the same population for which BC would have only 85 MLAs; and the Northwest, just one of BC’s 20 BC-STV electoral districts, is more than five times larger than all of Ireland.

There is no reason to believe that a government formed after an election using BC-STV would be like Ireland’s or any other. British Columbians would be rolling the dice with a new electoral system and would have no basis for predicting the consequences. The only thing that can be said for certain about BC-STV is not about what kind of government it might deliver but about what the 20 regions with 85 MLAs would look like, how votes are cast and how votes are counted.

STV should be rejected because its multiple-MLA electoral areas decrease accountability, its complex rules for counting votes are not fair, and allegations made by its proponents are not true.

David Schreck is a political commentator, economist and former NDP MLA for North-Vancouver Lonsdale. Retired, he keeps active with his website, StrategicThoughts.com. He is Secretary-Treasurer for the No BC-STV Campaign Society.

MAY 12 DECISION DAY FOR B.C. VOTERS: Change to STV system would be helpful to progressives

By Dennis Pilon

May 12, 2009 will be the “make-or-break” day for voting system reform in British Columbia, and perhaps the country. On that day, B.C. voters will decide in a province-wide referendum whether to change the provincial voting system.

Since 2005, there have been three referendums in Canada asking voters if they would like to change the voting system – in P.E.I., Ontario, and B.C. – and all three have failed to pass. Of course, B.C.’s referendum “lost” with 58% of the popular vote, which is why the province is putting the question back on the ballot in the 2009 general election.

If B.C. voters turn down this second chance to discard the existing undemocratic first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system, it will send a message to political élites that they can ignore the issue of electoral system reform for a long time. The choice is stark and limited: voters can choose to keep the existing FPTP system or opt for the single transferable vote (STV) form of proportional representation (PR), as recommended by the B.C. Citizen’s Assembly.

The problems with the current system are well known by now: phony majority governments, uncompetitive elections, unrepresentative results in terms of party representation and our social diversity, strategic voting pressures, and so on. And yet progressives forces in B.C. appear to be, at best, half-hearted and divided about the decision they have to make.

A considerable academic literature exists detailing the flaws of B.C.’s traditional first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system. We call it “representative democracy,” but how well does it represent what individual voters want? How well does it represent the collective votes cast for each political party? How well does it represent the social diversity of our society? The answer in all cases is: not very much, if at all.

FPTP does a poor job of translating what individual voters say they want their votes to produce. In every election, roughly 50% of the votes, on average, fail to contribute to the election of anyone. FPTP tends to exaggerate the support for the larger parties, allowing them to turn as little as 40% of the vote into as much as 70% of the seats. And it also inflates the support for smaller parties, such as the Bloc Québecois, whose support is concentrated in one region.

FPTP also fails miserably in representing the diversity of the populace. Its legislatures look completely different from their voters. Few women, people of colour or indigenous people get elected, and working people of all ethnic groups and cultures are left out. The problem is in the all-or-nothing nature of the FPTP system. Because there can be only one winner in each riding, the winners tend to be those with the power and financial clout to win nominations – typically affluent white males.

The FPTP system is patently adverse to free and unfettered political contests. It places many barriers in the way of new political forces (such as the Green party) intruding on traditional party turf. Because it’s a “winner takes all” vote, new parties have to gain at least 40% of the ballots cast to be competitive. With such a high threshold for new parties, voters tend to be conservative, voting strategically for candidates and parties they think can win, even when they might want to vote otherwise. Even many supporters of the bigger parties are poorly served by the present system, in the sense that many of them are “orphaned” when their votes for a losing candidate go for nought. Reminding voters of how constrained their choices are under FPTP might whet their appetite for a voting system that would give them more freedom to choose as they like.

STV and PR myth-busting

On their website, the No-STV forces offer a concise set of reasons to oppose changing the voting system: STV is complicated, confusing, prone to errors and delay; it reduces local accountability, increases the size of ridings, allows MLAs to avoid direct accountability for their decisions, increases party control, and allows special interests to dominate party nominations.

None of these claims is backed up with any credible evidence. Let’s take each in turn to assess how serious these problems really are.

Simplicity vs. complexity

Critics of STV claim it is too complicated. They compare the ease with which votes under FPTP are tabulated with the seemingly Byzantine complexity and time-consuming nature of counting ballots under STV. They claim this complexity may confuse voters at the ballot box, perhaps disenfranchising some of them, or preventing them from understanding how the count is conducted and where votes go, leading perhaps to incidences of fraud. Neither claim can be backed up with evidence.

The present system is admittedly simple when it comes to counting the ballots on election night. But its results are often far from clear. For instance, if the critics of STV asked voters to explain how the Liberals gained 97% of the seats with just 57% of the votes in the B.C. provincial election of 2001, very few would be able to do it. On the other hand, while few would dispute that STV is more difficult to count (though computers make this less of an issue), its results are often much more transparent. If we look at Irish election results under STV, the percentage of the popular vote for different parties is pretty close to the percentage of seats they win. Thus the results make intuitive sense: parties with 10% or 20% of the votes tend to get 10% or 20% of the seats.

The question is not about simple or not simple, but which trade-off in terms of simplicity makes the most sense, given what voters need. Is it more important to have easy counting but suffer with less than transparent election results? Or should we risk complicated vote counting but have results that match up with voter expectations? Given that few voters are actually involved with the vote counting process but nearly all want to know the results, clearly simple results should trump simple vote counting. Irish voters tend to see it this way, and have twice voted to keep the STV system when politicians have tried to get rid of it.

Critics of STV argue that its relative complexity will create confusion and chaos at the polls. The evidence from the jurisdictions using STV refutes this claim. In Ireland, where STV has been used for nearly a century, people seem to grasp how it works, and this is also true in Australia, which has used the STV system for its Senate elections since 1949 with no problems. Even Canadians have used it – for about 35 years at the provincial level in Alberta and Manitoba – and again the evidence is strong that voters have few problems voting by STV.

Complaints about corruption are also baseless. What such claims overlook is that the public is not the key watchdog over any electoral procedure. Voting systems are effectively watched over by the competing political interests. If any funny business were going on with STV in Ireland, for instance, clearly the main parties affected would notice and be loud in their opposition to it. The same would be true if STV was introduced in B.C.

STV not anti-party

STV critics claim that the system will ruin parties because it forces members of the same party to run against each other. Because each member of the same party will want voters to rank them first, they will have an incentive to slag each other and this will lead to legislative parties that cannot work together effectively. If we turn to STV-using jurisdictions, however, this is not what has come to pass. Ireland has maintained a stable party system, and strong party discipline has characterize its politics for most of its history as an independent state. Two nationalist parties have traditionally dominated the legislature, with a small Labour party gaining some support. Since the 1970s, two new parties have emerged, a centrist party and a Green party, but the system remains stable and anchored by the two traditional large parties.

Australia, too, has seen STV produce stable party dynamics in Senate elections, with some openings for new parties. So, on the whole, the evidence of what happens in countries using STV is that stable party systems emerge, but the systems are very competitive, which means that, when voters do want an alternative, they can get one.

Local links

Whether one accepts the criticism that STV would weaken the local link between an MLA and local constituents depends on how we understand the strength of that link in B.C.’s current FPTP system. Most “local” people in B.C. do not feel represented by their local MLAs because they did not vote for them. Of course, under STV, many more voters might find a local representative who shares and supports their views. But a bigger problem with the “local representation” argument is simply that it is a lot of romantic nonsense. Academic studies of voter behaviour regularly report that people do not vote on the basis of local identities or issues, but rather vote on the basis of party identification and the broad issues that the parties represent.

Critics are saying we should keep a system focused around a feature – local representation – that no one really cares about politically and, in doing so, sacrifice the one thing – accurate party representation – that we do know people want.

The local link rationale does not even stand up within the context of how our present voting system has worked. The facts are that this alleged concern for good local representation has not stopped politicians from ritualistically increasing the size of these “local ridings” over time. B.C. ridings have doubled in population size since the 1950s, hardly the mark of a system that values a close link between electors and the elected.

Another line of argument here focuses on the geographic size of the STV ridings in B.C. and the challenges that will arise in campaigning across vast territories, particularly in the province’s interior and north. Some say this will particularly hurt female candidates. But the critics overestimate the degree to which campaigns happen locally. Most of the costs in elections are province-wide, since that is how messaging and advertising is focused. Furthermore, the increased size of STV ridings will be offset by the lowering of the threshold to win. A winner under STV just needs to get a proportion of the total, rather than more than any other single candidate. This will alter the campaign strategies of candidates and their parties.

Will it hurt women? Some parties have adapted to make running for office more viable for women under the current system and they will do the same under STV, aided by the way PR systems in general promote diversity. Basically, more women and visible minorities tend to get elected in PR systems in Western countries.

Critics claim that STV is bad for diversity and the representation of women, and here, at least, they do have some evidence, citing Ireland, Malta and Australia as examples. Some who get into the details point out that STV ridings are too small. Good PR systems, they claim, have multi-member ridings of 10-20, whereas STV typically has just 3-5 members elected in each riding. Others simply look at the percentages, and point out that the number of women elected to national legislatures using STV is not impressive. But this is a misreading of the evidence. Women have actually made progress with STV since the 1970s in all the jurisdictions where it is used. Their numbers still fall well short of matching male representation, but this is not because of any barrier inherent to STV, any more than it is in the FPTP system.

No serious student of representation and voting systems has ever claimed a direct causal relationship between using one system and getting a specific result. Experts note how social factors combine with the incentive structures of voting systems to create openings. Culture matters. It should be noted, in that context, that many STV-using countries are culturally if not politically conservative. A PR system is structurally more democratic and competitive, but it still requires political action and pressure to be appropriately responsive to social needs such as diversity. Given the influence of the women’s movement in B.C., the introduction of STV in this province would make a fascinating laboratory to see how these social and institutional factor would interact.

Not PR, not PR enough

Recently, some have tried to argue in B.C. that STV is not actually a form of PR at all. They look at the election results in Ireland and Malta and note that there is not a perfect correspondence between popular votes and seat totals. Of course, anyone who studies voting systems seriously knows that none of them translates votes into seats in an absolutely proportional manner. All systems tend to over-represent the largest parties, for instance. But we still call them PR. Thus this charge that STV is not PR is clearly unfounded, but others make a more serious case that STV is simply not proportional enough. Here they reason that, with multi-member constituencies of just 3-5 members, the threshold to get a seat could be very high – that in a 5-member riding, for instance, the quota to get a seat would be roughly between 17% and 20%. In B.C., with existing voting patterns, that would mean that the Green party would be shut out, despite getting between 8% and 12% of the provincial total.

Again, however, an examination of the facts tells a different story. In Ireland, despite ridings of just 3-5 members, the results have been roughly proportional. The Labour Party gets about 10% of the national total and regularly gets 10% of the seats. The Progressive Democrats regularly poll 5% and get 5% of the seats. Even the Greens, with just 2%-3% of the national popular vote, gain 2%-3% of the seats.

What the critics forget is that support for smaller parties, while small at the national level, can be concentrated regionally, thus allowing them to win seats in particular areas. This would probably be the case in B.C. as well, with the Greens benefiting from strong pockets of support in different multi-member ridings.

Instability

The claim that STV or any other form of PR leads to political instability tends to focus on anecdotal evidence from just two countries: Italy and Israel. Italy is alleged to have had “50 governments in 50 years,” while Israel is accused of excessive fragmentation of its party system and weak coalition governments.

Of course, the story is more complicated in these two cases. In Italy, many of the so-called different governments were more like cabinet shuffles in the British parliamentary system, as many of the same people were in successive “governments.” In fact, some argue that Italy’s problems involved too much stability, rather than the other way around, as one party (the Christian Democrats) dominated the polity from 1948-1992.

Israel, too, is poorly understood if people think the country’s instability is just the product of its voting system. Indeed, the voting system itself was a product of a society that thought it required maximum political inclusion to weather the challenges it perceived to its existence from without.

But the real problem with such instability arguments involves the narrowness of the evidence. Most Western countries use PR, not just Italy and Israel, and they have produced very different results that those two countries. If we use the frequency of elections as a measure of stability or instability, we discover that PR countries have actually had fewer elections, on average, than plurality-using countries. So PR countries, on average, have enjoyed very stable government.

Conclusion

Voting system reform in Western democracies is very rare, and public input into the choice is almost unheard of. Until the recent spate of Canadian referendums, there were just three historical examples (Switzerland in 1918, France in 1946, New Zealand in 1992-93). So anyone thinking that the defeat of STV in this second B.C. referendum will still leave a choice in the future for some other kind of PR had better think again.

An unusual set of circumstances created this opportunity for electoral reform in B.C. — wonky election results in 1996 and 2001; a Premier with a one-track mind for pet projects; a Citizens’ Assembly keen on reform — and, as is often the case in history, voters have to make the most of the rare opportunities that arise.

The vote before us is STV or the status quo. There are no good reasons to stick with the existing voting system and many good reasons to embrace STV. It may be the last chance for voting system reform in B.C., and indeed for the whole country.

It would be tragic to miss this chance to make history and create a political system that is more democratic and thus more conducive to success in the struggle for a better province, a better country, and a better world.

Dennis Pilon is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria, a national council member of Fair Vote Canada, and the author of “The Politics of Voting: Reforming Canada’s Electoral System.”

Reflections on the Citizens’ Assembly

By Wendy Bergerud

Have you ever had your name pulled out of a hat? I did! And it gave me a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: to be one of the 160 members of BC’s Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. In 2003, one man and one woman were chosen at random from the lists of voters in each of BC’s 79 ridings to form this assembly, along with two members from the aboriginal community. This innovative process created a group of people that closely mirrored the population of BC.

The Assembly worked throughout 2004 to learn about voting systems, consult with our fellow citizens, and decide if we thought a change would be appropriate and, if so, what that change should be. Like most assembly members I knew very little about voting systems when I started. I did know that I wasn’t happy with how negative our politics had become.

I was puzzled how a party could form government with less of the popular vote than the other party got, as happened in 1996. Or how, in 2001, a popular vote of almost 58% gave the former opposition most of the seats while the former governing party got only two seats with 22% of the popular vote. Huh? Our voting system wasn’t creating legislatures that mirrored how we voted. I didn’t know if there was a better voting system out there, but I hoped there was at least one.

Our common goal was to make a decision, whatever it might be, that most, if not all of us, could agree on. We met at the Wosk Centre in downtown Vancouver in a room with tiered circular rows of seats, similar to the parliaments of many European countries that use proportional representation. It was a great place for 160 people to work together in a truly democratic fashion. We met every second weekend during the learning phase. During plenary sessions we would learn about voting systems, then engage in smaller breakout group discussions.

At the end of the learning phase we were asked to produce a preliminary statement that would include which alternate voting system we were considering. We didn’t feel this was appropriate – how could we honestly say that we were listening to the public if we had already made a choice before attending the public hearings scheduled for April and May! So our report instead discussed our criteria for judging voting systems. It included a description of our process, as well as encouraging people to come out to our 50 public hearings – about 3,000 people did! And during the summer, we received 1,600 written submissions. Most commissions hold only a few public hearings and might receive a hundred or so submissions. So the response to our work was incredible!

As some of us read through these submissions, we discussed them using a private online forum. This inspired some intense discussions that informed our weekend deliberations. Without the online forum and its debates I wouldn’t have been able to develop my thoughts as well as I was able to.

At the beginning of the deliberation phase, we had two clear contenders for the alternate voting system: STV and MMP, or Mixed Member Proportional (a system that looks like the current system of ridings but gives additional seats to parties in order to achieve proportionality; Ontario voted on and rejected this system in 2007). We built a specific model of each one, debated their merits and finally chose STV over MMP by a ratio of four to one.

An important issue for us was rural representation. It got a lot of “air time” during our plenary sessions. How could we design a system that was fair to all, regardless of where we lived? This led us to ask what local representation was. We decided that it had two different meanings: 1) the constituency work of the MLAs; and 2) the partisan representation of voters in the legislature, that is, the ability of your MLA to represent your point of view about how government should be run and how it should handle the big issues. Given that only about half of us who vote get the MLA we chose means that most of us don’t feel represented in this second way, even if we have an MLA who does great constituency work.

As we studied STV we realized that it would improve local representation. Even in a two-member district we are likely to have one MLA in the governing party and one in opposition. This gives us a choice of MLAs to approach about our concerns. And, since STV is a proportional voting system, the numbers of seats each party receives will closely match how we voted, further improving our partisan representation in the legislature.

Women’s representation was another important issue. We learned that people vote as willingly for women as for men; the main stumbling block in the past was cultural. As culture has changed, countries with proportional voting systems have responded faster and elected more women. With our current system, the nomination process has been a roadblock for women getting on the ballot. But with STV, parties can easily create gender balance within the lists of candidates they put forward in each district.

After lots of debate, our final decision was to recommend BC-STV to our fellow voters: 146 voted yes with just 7 against. We had reached our original goal: that most of us would support our final decision, whatever that might be.

We now have a second chance to consider which voting system is more likely to produce legislatures that actually reflect the way we vote. While my personal choice is clear, I urge you to study both systems based on the issues most important to you, choose one or the other, and support it with your vote on May 12, 2009.

Wendy Bergerud has worked for the Ministry of Forests since 1981. In 2003 she was chosen at random to be a member of the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform from the Victoria-Hillside (now Victoria-Swan Lake) riding. She is now a director with Fair Voting BC (www.stv.ca) and is on the national council of Fair Vote Canada (www.fairvote.ca). She has been a member of CCPA for many years.

UPDATE (April 30): It seems that there is some confusion about the term Single Transferable Vote and its applicability to the 1952 and 1953 elections. Dennis Pilon, also from U Vic wrote to say that what was being called STV in the 1950s was a system designed to produce a majority government not a proportional outcome, even though some of the design features are similar. This issue came up when Ben ran the original piece in the Times Colonist, so he has revised the text as follows. I have also appended some of Dennis’ comments about the differences after Ben’s piece for those interested in the subtleties of voting systems.

The Ghost of Elections Past: The Transferable Vote in the 1952 and 1953 BC elections

By Ben Isitt

As the May referendum on electoral reform approaches, we should not ignore our history. Rarely mentioned in the current discussion is British Columbia’s previous experience with the Transferable Vote.

In the 1952 and 1953 general elections, voters ranked candidates according to an adapted “transferable vote” or alternative vote system. The ruling Liberal government of the day – BC’s last until 2001 – had amended the Provincial Elections Act to keep the opposition Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (precursor to the NDP) out of office. In the words of contemporary observer and future Liberal leader Patrick McGeer, it provided W.A.C. Bennett’s “ladder to power,” inaugurating the Social Credit dynasty that contained the CCF threat.

The 1950s was a period of social and political flux. The Liberals and Conservatives had formed a Coalition government a decade earlier, after the CCF won the most votes in a general election. This succeeded in keeping the socialists at bay, preventing a wartime victory like the one in Saskatchewan, where Tommy Douglas’s CCF took power. On the heals of the Douglas government’s innovative social policies, the BC Coalition enfranchised Asian and Aboriginal voters and implemented the Hospital Insurance Act before the 1949 election. But this new social program’s precarious financial structure produced spiraling cost-overruns and the Coalition’s collapse in 1951.

The final act of co-operation between the Liberals and Conservatives was passage of the Provincial Elections Act Amendment Act, introducing the transferable vote in the spring 1951 legislative session. Both parties had endorsed the voting system at conventions in the 1940s.

The new system required voters to rank candidates by preference (first, second, third, fourth choice). Candidates receiving the fewest votes were eliminated and preferences transferred until one candidate received a majority of ballots cast. Distinguishing itself from the modern BC-STV model, the system in the 1950s employed different counting procedures in both single-member and multiple-member constituencies, such as those in Vancouver, Burnaby, and Victoria.

The Liberals expected to receive second preferences of Conservative voters, while Conservatives expected to be ranked second by Liberal voters. One or the other party was anticipated to retain power and keep the CCF out. But William Andrew Cecil Bennett, the eclectic Kelowna hardware merchant and erstwhile Conservative who had left the Coalition in its dying days, stymied their plans.

Bennett aligned himself with the ruling Social Credit party in Alberta (in office since 1935) and another dissident Tory, Tilly Rolston of Point Grey. He toured the province by car and invested $10,000 of his own funds propping up the skeletal campaigns of 45 Social Credit candidates – none of whom had served in the legislature. They were accountants, school teachers, musicians, and small-town businesspeople, political “outsiders” like himself who resented the political clique ensconced in the Vancouver Club and Victoria’s Union Club.

On election day, 12 June 1952, British Columbians went to the polls. The results were unclear for a month, as ballots were counted by hand through the new voting system. Initially, the CCF received the most first-preference votes (which would have translated into 21 seats in BC’s 48 seat legislature under the old voting system, a strong claim for a minority CCF government). But as the second, third and fourth preferences were redistributed, Social Credit emerged as the victor, the second choice of supporters of the established parties.

Social Credit – untested and untainted in the legislature – edged out the CCF, 19 seats to 18. The Liberals and Conservatives fell to six and four seats respectively. W.A.C. Bennett became premier with a minority Social Credit government. The next spring, he engineered his defeat in the legislature, won a majority mandate in a snap election, and promptly repealed the Provincial Elections Act changes. British Columbia returned to the old first-past-the-post voting system that prevails to this day.

Except for a brief NDP interlude in the 1970s, Social Credit ruled BC until 1991 as the new form of Coalition, benefiting initially from the transferable voting system and later by campaign donations from major resource companies. Mired in scandal, this Coalition fractured for a time, translating into a decade of NDP rule, but the Liberals returned after 49 years in opposition, as the dominant free-enterprise Coalition in 2001.

The new premier, Gordon Campbell, appointed the Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform to explore changes to the voting system. The assembly, aided by staff appointed by the government, recommended a “BC-STV” model, which received support from fifty-eight percent of voters in 2005 and will be decided again in May’s referendum.

Dr. Benjamin Isitt is Assistant Professor and Postdoctoral Fellow of History at the University of Victoria.

Comment from Dennis Pilon:

When this piece originally ran in the Times Colonist myself and others wrote in to clarify that the 1952/3 system was actually the alternative vote, not STV. It is a common mistake, indeed it was one committed often at the time the system was used in BC then, but it is and was nonetheless wrong. BC did not use STV in 1952 and 1953. What gets confusing is that the ’1,2,3′ preference voting aspect can be combined into two very different voting systems, one a majority voting system, and the other a proportional one.

BC used what Australia calls the “alternative vote” where the point was to assure that elected members had a majority of the votes in a riding. The STV system was used in 19 municipalities in western Canada at various times and for urban ridings to the provincial houses in Alberta and Manitoba from the 1920s to the 1950s. The confusion over the terminology in 1952 so incensed Enid Lakeman, director of the British Electoral Reform Society, that she wrote to various Vancouver papers at the time correcting on their misuse of the term STV.

In the study of voting systems there are three broad families: plurality systems, majority systems, and proportional systems. These voting systems are comprised of three distinct parts: a formula, a districting rule, and a ballot structure. Formula choices include plurality, majority, and proportional (thus the family names), the districting choices include single or multi-member, and the ballot structure varies from nominal (x-voting) and ordinal (1,2,3 etc). Thus if we examine AV (BC’s 1952 voting system) and STV (the one we are voting on May 12), they typically share only one feature: the ballot structure – voting by preference using 1, 2, 3 etc. I say typically because 1952 saw BC use multi-member AV ridings as well, though voters were randomly given ballots in those ridings with pre-structured choices of candidates to choose from (e.g. in a two member riding, the two CCF, Liberal, SC, etc. candidates would be split between the two ballots). Arguably the crucial difference between the two systems, and thus why the family names take on this
particular characteristic, is formula used to count the votes. In AV it is a majority formula while in STV it is a proportional formula.

Keith outlines the case against STV below. And while the CCPA has no official position, I’d like to weigh in with why I strongly support STV.

No electoral system is perfect; each has strengths and weaknesses. But one thing is clear – our current first-past-the-post system produces perverse results and does not deliver good government.

It tends to produce majorities that govern with impunity, prepared to put their ideological agenda ahead of the public will. So why not experiment with another system?

A common concern about STV is that the ridings (particularly in rural BC) will be too large, undermining representation. Yet how effective was people’s representation between 2001 and 2005, when the current system produced a Liberal sweep across all ridings save two in East Vancouver. I can recall traveling around the province in 2002 giving talks, as communities sought to mobilize against the cuts of the Campbell government’s first mandate, and I frequently heard the lament that people’s MLAs simply refused to meet with them. It did not matter if the MLA’s office was just down the street; if the door remained barred, representation was illusory.

Wouldn’t it be far preferable to have a few MLAs representing your constituency, at least some of whom share your political orientation?

Another concern about STV is that the ballots will be large and complicated, much like the at-large municipal ballots. It is true that the ballots can be large under STV, but it is not complicated to simply rank as many choices as you wish. (The counting is, as the critics claim, more complex, but reasonably easy to understand with a little effort; check out this excellent video cartoon produced by the Citizens Assembly for Electoral Reform. Keith feels the video demonstrates how complex the system is; I disagree.)

And unlike the municipal at-large system, which allows one party to virtually sweep all seats, because votes are ranked under STV, the result will more closely reflect the distribution of the popular vote (that’s why STV is rightly viewed as a form of proportional representation).

Some don’t like proportional representation because they fear that regular minority governments will result in gridlock and instability. But progressives have been well served by minority governments. They have produced important changes that most Canadians support, including the Canada Pension Plan, the Guaranteed Income Supplement, increased federal transfers to the provinces, and Canada’s most cherished social program –– Medicare.

And given the historic breakdown of the popular vote in BC, proportional representation (including STV) will tend to produce coalition governments made up of left-leaning parties (the NDP and Greens).

The public is disillusioned with our current system. Voter turnout is falling. Let’s try something new with the potential to breath new life into our democracy.

My two personal greatest concerns about STV relate to the size of some constituencies and the difference in voting patterns among income groups. The riding that contains Prince Rupert, for example, runs from the Alaska Boarder as far south as Kamloops. (See map) That giant riding would have three members, perhaps all elected from the same community. My second concern is that high income people vote in much greater numbers than low income people. Will STV simply cement the power of high income people in the electoral system?

In summary, from my point of view, I have come up with a one sentence description of STV. STV is a system of voting that permits a portion of your vote to be transferred, in a way you don’t understand, towards electing someone you don’t want to represent you in a riding that may be so large that they will have no accountability to the public.

The following material was put together by the NO STV campaign.

Our current First-Past-the-Post electoral system is easy to understand – the candidate with the most votes wins and represents one single riding. The party that wins the most ridings forms government.

But the Single Transferable Vote would create giant ridings of up to 7 Members of the Legislative Assembly representing over 300,000 people – losing local accountability and responsibility of MLAs to voters.

BC-STV’s complicated voting system means your single vote will be “fractionalized” and distributed so that you may never know how it was counted.

BC-STV would replace our current 85 constituencies with just 20 large areas electing 2 to 7 MLAs each.

That replaces local representation with regional representation by a group of MLAs, who would be hard to hold accountable for their actions.

Our First-Past-the-Post system is used by much of the world, including the United Kingdom, the United States, India and Canada.

Many of the claims that are made about STV cannot be demonstrated. They frequently depend on assumptions of how parties and voters would behave, but they behave differently in Ireland, Malta and Tasmania. Since there is no STV jurisdiction in the world that has the land mass and rural / urban population differences that B.C. does, there is no place you can go and see how STV might work if it were adopted for BC.

Hypothetical examples purport to demonstrate that BC-STV would give more proportional election outcomes, helping small parties to elect MLAs. In Malta where STV is used there have been four occasions, including in 2008, when the party with the greatest popular support won the fewest seats. In Ireland’s 2007 election, Sein Fein won 6.9% of the vote and elected 4 TDs while the Green Party won 4.7% of the vote and elected 6 TDs. Ireland’s long governing party, Fianna Fail, won 41.6% of the vote and elected 78 TDs (47.0%).

No STV takes no position on whether other electoral systems – such as Mixed Member Proportional – might be an improvement but if BC-STV is not rejected by voting for First-Past-the-Post system, BC-STV will be in place for a recommended minimum of three elections – 12 years.

Vote First-Past-The-Post on May 12 – don’t take a chance on STV.

Our pre-election edition of BC Commentary takes a closer look at that other vote on May 12, the referendum on the Single Transferable Vote, aka STV, a system of proportional representation. With an economic crisis on our hands, and controversies about the carbon tax, few people are talking about STV in the lead-up to the vote. That is a shame, because whether you end up voting for or against STV, the referendum provides us an opportunity to take a step back and look at what we like, and do not like, about our electoral system.

In the spirit of democracy, our special edition breaks from our usual publishing pattern, and includes a number of articles written by CCPA members who have taken an interest in the issue of democratic reform, including one who served on the 2004 Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform that recommended STV. We have also included a simple primer on the STV process, and since CCPA has no organizational position on STV we have both the yes and no sides represented.

Over the coming days, I will post articles from the BC Commentary on this blog, and maybe some of our other bloggers will weigh in, too. But let’s begin at the beginning. I think one of the downfalls of STV the last time around was that proponents had a hard time explaining it. So here is Ross Johnson on how the system works:

A Primer on STV

By Ross Johnson

Single Transferable Vote, or STV, is a preferential voting system intended to reflect in the number of seats won by each party elected the overall proportion of votes received. It differs from other proportional systems in that it minimizes wasted votes and allows voters to cast votes for different parties. Voters are able to vote for their favoured candidates regardless of party affiliation.

A BC STV system would have 20 multi-member ridings with between two and seven elected members per riding. More populated urban ridings would have more elected members, while rural areas would have fewer members because they have smaller populations. To allow the sparsely populated northern areas of the province to have anywhere near manageable-sized ridings the number of seats in the Legislature has been increased to 85.

To see how this works let’s take a five member riding as an example: A political party could run anywhere from zero to five candidates. All party candidates have an equal chance of being elected since the political party who nominated them does not enter them on a list in preferential order (as happens under some other forms of proportional voting systems). Independent candidates may also run.

Voting is straightforward: voters rank candidates in preferential order, e.g. 1, 2, 3 etc. The counting for STV is more complicated, and will be done by computer, with a paper back-up. The first requirement is to determine how many votes are needed to win one of the seats. This “Droop Quota” is determined based on the following formula:

Number of valid ballots cast
Quota = —————————————— + 1
Number of MLAs in riding + 1

For example, if 1,000 valid ballots were cast, and five seats were up for grabs, then the Quota would be 1,000 divided by (5 + 1) = 6, which equals 166.6. Adding one, this yields a rounded 168 votes needed to win a seat.

We begin by counting first preferences on all ballots. If no candidate has reached the quota of 168 votes then the candidate with the fewest number of votes is eliminated and the second place choices from those ballots are distributed to the named candidates.

Let us assume that Candidate A now has received 200 votes, and is thus elected with 32 more votes than necessary. These 32 surplus votes are then redistributed to other candidates in proportion to Candidate A’s total votes. Because a portion of each vote has already been used to elect a candidate, only the “unused portion” is transferred, based on a formula to ensure a fair redistribution. For example:

Candidate’s surplus votes 32
Transfer Value = ——————————— = —— = 0.16
Candidate’s total votes 200

In this manner the count continues. The surpluses of each elected candidate are redistributed at the appropriate transfer value. When there are no surpluses from elected candidates to distribute, the candidate with the least number of votes is dropped and those votes are distributed at full value. This process continues until all seats are filled.

For a by-election the preferential ballot remains, but the election will probably be for one seat in a particular riding and therefore the quota would simply be 50% +1 for election. If more than one seat is to be filled, the ballot will be handled as in a regular STV election.

Putting aside the math, the outcome of this process is that STV will produce a Legislative Assembly that reflects the popular vote.

If there are three or more parties running, STV will often not produce a majority government immediately. This means that the leadership of the party with the greatest number of seats will have to negotiate with other parties in order to have a majority with which to run the government, or possibly to form a coalition. Sometimes, to make a coalition work, a small party has to be brought into the government, a development that would give them more clout than their voter support warrants because they can threaten to pull out of the coalition, possibly leading to the fall of the government.

Political parties originally started as a vehicle to aggregate interests. Individual politicians found that working on their own was very ineffective and so those with common interests came together to form parties. One of the roles of parties ever since has been to bring together people with common interests and to express those interests in the elected legislative body.

With STV there has been little discussion around the party choice of candidates. The Voting Districts are very large and so parties would have to develop methods of getting groups together to choose candidates. Party control weakens because voters can preferentially vote for a member of any party on the ballot. One of the consequences is that this may limit a party’s ability to aggregate interests, which could mean that the government does not really know what the electorate’s main issues are. With STV voters can vote preferentially for the candidate of any party and this could encourage party members to campaign against each other.

No electoral system is perfect, and a different electoral system is not necessarily a panacea for the widespread political alienation being experienced by people living in liberal democracies, whatever their electoral system. Citizens tell pollsters that they feel powerless politically. A change in voting procedures will still leave them “mere” voters, able to elect representatives from candidates put forward by parties, but unable to have much control over the policies a party or government will adopt.

Ross Johnson, PhD, is a CCPA member and a retired political scientist from Langara College.