Wilkinson warns against overhauling voting system
Liberals campaign against proportional representation in upcoming referendum
British Columbia will be plagued by small and extremist parties that play an outsize role in government if a switch is made to proportional representation, says Liberal Leader Andrew Wilkinson.
Experience elsewhere shows that countries with proportional representation struggle to form stable governments without the participation of parties that gain relatively few votes, Wilkinson said in Kelowna.
A switch to proportional representation could also stoke regional, ethnic and religious divisions that don’t currently exist in B.C., Wilkinson said.
“The reality with proportional representation is you get a variety of fringe parties that control the balance of power,” Wilkinson said Sunday before addressing a town hall meeting organized by the three Kelowna area Liberal MLAs.
“You get these arbitrary, strange coalitions where fringe parties with special interests end up controlling the show,” he said. “That leads to a lot of instability and the kind of regional, ethnic and religious parties that we don’t want and don’t need in this province.”
The NDP government plans a mail-in referendum this year to let British Columbians decide if they want to change the current first-past-the-post voting system. The specific question to be asked of voters has not yet been announced, nor has the form of proportional representation that will be offered as an alternative.
With proportional representation, the allocation of seats in the provincial legislature would more closely match the vote totals received by each party in an election.
Using the results from the May 2017 election as an example, the Liberals and NDP would both have 35 seats in the 87-seat legislature, but the Greens would increase their representation from three seats to 14.
Unsurprisingly, the Greens favour a switch to proportional representation, and one of their conditions for supporting the NDP government was a referendum on changing the voting system. The NDP and the Greens say they will campaign for a Yes vote in the referendum, while the Liberals will advocate for a No vote.
The minimum percentage of the total vote a party would need to receive to get representation in the legislature is currently unknown, but Wilkinson said five per cent is a common threshold where proportional representation exists.
“It’s pretty easy to get five per cent of the vote for a fringe party, and that’s a scary thing for a province like British Columbia,” Wilkinson said.
“British Columbia works the way it is, and that’s coming from somebody who’s in opposition right now,” Wilkinson said. “We’re quite happy to fight the next election on its merits, on the economy, under the existing system.
“Let’s not monkey with the system to keep the Green party happy,” he said.