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“.

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.