Dosanjh: say no to ‘proportional’
VANCOUVER — Former British Columbia premier Ujjal Dosanjh is urging voters to say No to a referendum on proportional representation because he believes it would usher in extremist parties such as those in some European countries, but others say that’s a scare tactic used to oversimplify a complex issue.
Dosanjh said Germany, the Netherlands and Hungary require very low percentages of people to vote in candidates with racist views, and that has changed those political landscapes in a negative way.
The former New Democrat premier told a news conference Thursday that the party he once led is proposing a complicated proportional representation system requiring only a five per cent threshold to guard against extremist parties in the legislature.
Proportional representation is a system in which the number of seats held by a party largely matches the percentage of votes its candidates receive. That compares with the first-past-the-post model in which a candidate with the most votes in a district wins and then represents the riding.
Premier John Horgan has said the agreement with the Green Party allowing the New Democrats to form government last year is an example of electoral reform, in that proportional representation would allow parties to form coalitions to work together on various issues.
However, Dosanjh said the current first-past-the-post model has proven to be simple and stable and that a mail-in ballot this fall asking voters to rank three system models would be confusing and unfair.
“The B.C. government proposal does not provide voters with any geographic riding, boundaries or any details on how the three proportional representation systems would work in B.C.,” he said. “And two of those systems do not exist anywhere else in the world.”
The ballot would require a 50-per-cent-plus-one margin of support in a province where two other attempts to change to proportional representation, in 2005 and 2009, have failed.
Other provinces, including Prince Edward Island and Ontario, have also tried unsuccessfully to switch from the firstpast-the-post system.
The three proportional representation models on the ballot include a mixed-member proportional system, which is used mostly in European countries, as well as two other systems that haven’t been tried, called dual-member proportional and rural-urban proportional representation.