Why not ask a simple question, B.C.?
The good news about British Columbia’s pending referendum on electoral reform is, first, that it is happening, and second, that the provincial government does not actually seem to want to kill it.
That alone would set it apart from previous such exercises, whether in B.C. in 2005 and 2009, or Ontario in 2007, or P.E.I. in 2016. In those cases governments either set aside majority votes for reform (B.C. 2005, P.E.I.), or lost interest the minute the referendum was called (Ontario), or were plainly hostile to the whole idea (B.C. 2009).
Now, for the first time, the referendum will be organized by people who appear to believe in it. Both the NDP and the Green Party have been on record in support of some form of proportional representation for years. This time, for example, a simple 50 per cent plus one will suffice: there will be no repeat of the 2005 debacle, where the support of 58 per cent of the voters was held to be insufficient by a government elected by 46 per cent.
Still, if the NDP does favour electoral reform — there is always the danger that a party, no matter how fervently it supports the idea in opposition, will look with less favour, once elected, on changing the system that elected it — it has a strange way of going about it.
To be sure, naysayers and nitpickers would be ready to pounce on any referendum question, no matter how phrased. Lay out the options in detail, and it will be said the question is too complex; give only the broad strokes, and the cry goes up that the public is being sold a pig in a poke.
All the same, the process described in Attorney General David Eby’s report to cabinet is distinctly odd. For starters, the ballot will ask not one but two questions. Voters will be asked first whether they prefer that members of the provincial legislature should be elected using “the current First Past the Post voting system” or “a proportional representation system,” and second, which of three specific forms of proportional representation they prefer.
At first blush this might seem reasonable enough. The first question is at least a choice between two alternatives, rather than asking voters to vote yes or no on a particular proposal, which experts regard as a loaded question. And the second, sensibly, asks voters to rank their choices, rather than simply choose one. If it’s wrong to require a super-majority for reform, it’s right to insist that any new system should command at least majority support.
But it still puts the status quo on a different stage than the other proposals. Only if voters reject it in the first question does their choice on the second question take effect.
There’s no real justification for this, particularly in light of another of the report’s recommendations, that voters should be asked after two elections under a reformed system whether they wish to stay with it, or revert to first past the post. Not only does the double-barrelled ballot give an unwarranted advantage to the status quo, but it puts voters in the strange position of choosing between a specific system, first past the post, and a broad principle, proportional representation.
Some voters may well prefer some of the three forms of PR on the ballot over first past the post, but not the others. How are they to vote on the first question without knowing the result of the second?
It would be some improvement, at least, if the preliminary question were between “winner take all” systems, where each riding is represented by just one member — of which first past the post is but one example — and PRbased systems, where each riding is represented by two or more members. Having established which family of systems people wanted, you could then get down to specifics — in either event, not just if the answer was PR.
But that seems needlessly complicated. Why not simply ask one question: which of the following electoral systems do you prefer? Then list some alternatives, first past the post included — as just one option among several — and ask voters to rank them. That was the process used, successfully, in the P.E.I. referendum.
But then you get to the systems the government has chosen to put on the ballot. Anyone who has followed the debate knows there are two types of PR systems that have substantial support in this country:
Mixed Member Proportional (MMP), in which some members are chosen in single-member ridings, the rest in large multi-member districts (or even provincewide) based on the party’s share of the vote; and
the Single Transferable Vote (STV), familiar from previous B.C. referendums, where members are chosen in smaller multi-member districts of say three or five, using a ranked ballot.
You might perhaps also include one other system in general use elsewhere.
What, instead, are the options on the B.C. government’s proposed ballot? There’s MMP, which New Democrats tend to favour. There’s a hybrid “ruralurban” model — STV in urban areas, MMP in rural — which is fine in principle, if unknown in practice. And there’s something called “dual-member proportional,” which Wikipedia tells me was “invented in 2013 by a University of Alberta mathematics student.” Why this was included — it was also, strangely, on the P.E.I. ballot — is a bit of a mystery, except perhaps that the NDP hopes it will produce the same result as in P.E.I.: a majority for MMP.
Ah well. The current proposed ballot is at least better than an earlier suggestion from the NDP caucus, that voters should not be asked about specific proposals at all, but only “values,” from which a system would be cobbled together after the fact. But not much better.