A Fresh Opportunity to Get Elections Right

Twenty years ago, fresh in the minds of B.C. voters were several elections that had resulted in controversial or problematic outcomes.

Over the four elections from 1983 to 1996, the BC NDP had steadily lost public support, dropping from 45 per cent in 1983 to 43 per cent in 1986, 41 per cent in 1991, and finally ending up with 39 per cent in 1996. Ironically, due to the vagaries of our current first-past-the-post, or FPTP, voting system, the NDP lost the first two elections but won majorities in the latter two.

The 1991 win under Mike Harcourt was a landslide — despite winning only 41 per cent of the vote, the NDP took almost 70 per cent of the seats (51 of 75), largely due to vote splitting between the scandal-laden Socreds and the emerging BC Liberal Party under Gordon Wilson.

The 1996 election was particularly controversial for producing a “wrong winner” — despite sliding further to 39 per cent, three points behind the 42 per cent won by the BC Liberal Party under Gordon Campbell, Glen Clark’s NDP won 39 of the 75 seats to the Liberals’ 33, eking out a majority government. While NDP supporters cheered, Campbell argued that the result did not accurately reflect the will of the voters, and in response he promised to, if elected, institute a citizens’ assembly to consider changing our voting system.

As it turned out, the Liberals swept the 2001 election, winning 58 per cent of the vote and taking 77 of 79 seats. The NDP slumped to 22 per cent of the vote and won just two seats, losing official party status, while the Greens, despite hitting a high of 12 per cent, won no seats at all. And while Liberal supporters no doubt celebrated this outcome, many critics argued that not having an official opposition was terrible for political accountability and amounted to being an elected dictatorship.

Revisiting a groundbreaking approach

At this point, it would have been easy for Premier Campbell to have turned his back on his campaign promise, but, to the surprise of many (likely including some of his own caucus members), he kept his word and tasked former BC Liberal Party leader Gordon Gibson with establishing a Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform.

Gibson designed a groundbreaking (and since-widely lauded) public deliberation process in which a representative group of ordinary citizens was recruited — one man and one woman from each riding in B.C., plus two Indigenous representatives — to spend nearly a year learning from experts, consulting with the public and deliberating with one another to identify deficiencies in our current electoral system, evaluate alternatives and make a recommendation to the people of B.C.

In December 2004, the assembly delivered its verdict: our current FPTP voting system “does not promise or provide fair election results. There is no logical or systematic relationship between a party’s total share of the votes cast and its seats in the legislature.” The 2001 election result was “obviously unfair” and “weakens the opposition so greatly that the legislature cannot hold Government to account. The very principle of responsible government, the heart of our constitution, is thrown into question.”

To correct these problems, the assembly recommended a system called the single transferable vote, customized for B.C. This BC-STV system would merge small clusters of existing ridings into electoral districts with between two and seven seats in each, and enable voters to rank individual candidates in order of preference, within and across parties. Using a run-off approach in which candidates with the fewest votes are sequentially eliminated, STV would elect a set of MLAs who would collectively reflect the political preferences of the voters in each district.

The end result would be a legislature whose members would much more closely match voter preferences in each region of the province, ending regional sweeps and ensuring that the overall seat counts by party would more closely match each party’s vote share. This would largely prevent “false majority” governments (governments where the winning party wins a majority of seats without securing a majority of the popular vote) and “wrong winner” elections.

In addition, STV would have made our voting system more open to political competition by lowering the threshold for smaller political parties to secure representation in the legislature. Had STV been in place in the most recent B.C. election, for example, it is highly likely that BC United would have competed in the fall election rather than withdrawing over concerns about vote splitting with the emerging Conservative Party of BC, and that a number of BC United MLAs would have been elected.

Most voters wanted BC-STV

After the Citizens’ Assembly issued its report, the Liberal government put its recommendation to the public in a referendum held in conjunction with the provincial election on May 17, 2005 — 20 years ago this past Saturday — and neither the Liberals nor the NDP took an official position on the question during the campaign.

In the end, voters strongly endorsed the assembly’s recommendation, voting nearly 58 per cent in favour. However, the government had earlier decided (quite controversially) that it would not feel bound by the result unless support reached 60 per cent, so they took no action on changing the voting system when they were re-elected (with a diminished margin of 46 per cent of the vote).

In the two decades since that first referendum, the public has been increasingly aware of the problems caused by our voting system, and there has been ongoing public debate about how to address them. Two further referendums were held (in 2009 and 2018), neither of which resulted in approval of electoral reforms for various complex reasons.

A study published last year by political scientists at the University of Toronto and Princeton University concluded that partisan interests played the decisive role, rather than any principled concerns related to democratic ideals. This self-interest dynamic was also clearly at play in the Justin Trudeau government’s renunciation of its oft-repeated promise in 2015 to fix similar problems at the federal level. And since the original problems identified by the Citizens’ Assembly have not yet been addressed, we are left with unfinished business.

A new chance for electoral reform

It is therefore fitting that on this 20th anniversary of the original referendum on electoral reform in B.C, we once again have an opportunity, in the broader context of the full-scale assault on core democratic institutions in our neighbour to the south, to renew our own commitment to democratic principles and ideals here at home.

Ironically, the very reason we have such an opportunity is because the result of our most recent election last fall delivered what has historically been a rare outcome in B.C. — a near-minority government — which has forced the NDP and the Green Party to work with one another rather than allowing the NDP to govern unilaterally.

Although the NDP technically won a majority of 50.5 per cent of the seats on 45 per cent of the vote, the Speaker normally comes from the governing party and does not vote except to break ties, so the government does not command a working majority in the legislature and therefore has negotiated a Co-operation and Responsible Government Accord with the BC Green Party to enable it to govern more easily. As part of that accord, the NDP agreed to form a Special Committee on Democratic and Electoral Reform.

The special committee has just this week announced plans to consult with British Columbians over the summer and is scheduled to deliver a report to the legislature by Nov. 26.

The committee itself is composed of members from all three parties currently in the legislature, so we call on these members to put aside their partisan self-interest and work with one another to finally deliver meaningful change in our electoral system. They should seek to ensure that all voters across B.C., regardless of their political views, will be fairly represented in future and have an ongoing and reliable voice in our legislature through electing MLAs that they most support.