National Post (National Edition)
Electoral reform follies end in B.C.
All right then, British Columbia: what was the point of all that? The results of the province’s referendum on election reform were announced yesterday, dispelling fears that the Christmas deadline for the announcement might be missed. This was the third such referendum of the century, the earlier ones taking place in 2005 and 2009. When the general election of May 2017 led to a hung B.C. legislature, the province’s Green Party made a referendum on proportional representation (PR) one of the conditions for a supply and confidence agreement with another party. The incumbent Liberals gambled on a throne speech containing a promise for a referendum on voting reform, but the speech was defeated anyhow. With a mixture of fanfare and solemnity, the Green sand the New Democrats cut a deal to make John Horgan premier.
Their written contract specified a referendum offering B.C. voters a binary choice between some form of PR, chosen jointly by the partners, and the existing “firstpast-the-post” (FPTP) system. The deal specified that the New Democrats would “campaign actively in support” of the mutually chosen PR system. This was rather woolly language, but the details did not turn out to matter much.
Design of the referendum ballot was entrusted to Attorney General David Eby, who worked independently from either caucus. As the clock ticked toward the fall deadline for the referendum specified in the statute, the Green and NDP caucuses threw out their earlier bargain and begged Eby to try a new plan: let voters choose between PR and the status quo without specifying any details of the new system, and give the design process to a selected brain trust only if there was a Yes vote on generic reform. The commitment to campaign jointly on a specific system had evaporated.
Because things always have to be screwy and complicated in British Columbia, Eby chose neither to go back to the original plan nor to follow the new recommendation. Instead he created a two-part ballot. Voters would be asked to choose FPTP or PR in a binary vote, and then, in a second ballot question, were asked to rank choices from among three different PR systems. The “BCSTV” electoral system offered in the 2005 and 2009 referendums, which might at least have been somewhat familiar to voters even though it had been technically rejected twice, was discarded. Blech! Feh! Instead Eby gave voters a choice of three hybrid monstrosities designed with the intention of pleasing everyone. These bespoke systems had few or no exact real-world analogs, and they traded off some pure partisan proportionality for the purpose of preserving a strong regional element in assembly representation. (But why the balancing act, if party proportionality is an ultimate moral imperative?) The argument that our superiors in other countries adore PR was all but abandoned when newly invented forms of somewhat-PR were put on the ballot.
Moreover, the systems were incompetently explained in the official materials voters were supposed to depend upon. I don’t even like the concept of PR much, but I found myself helping to explain Eby’s rat’s nest of options to frustrated B.C. voters who do like it. Early reports of voter turnout from Elections B.C. suggested weeks ago that voters in ethnic ridings were staying home, and if the alternative systems were described as torturously in Punjabi or Cantonese as they were in English, it is no wonder. Thursday’s results confirmed that the Yesto-PR side underperformed especially horribly in Surrey, relative to the Green and NDP vote totals from 2017.
But no one place is to blame for PR’s latest humiliation. As you will probably have heard by now, the provincewide total on the main ballot question was 61 per cent for staying with FPTP versus 39 percent for changing the system. Change was rejected by the voters even more firmly than in 2009. The right-wing parties got their anti-PR voters out, and the Green Party got its pro-PR voters out, but the New Democrats, who campaigned “actively” for PR while signalling uncertainty or bad faith with every move, did not propel their people to the polls consistently.
The cause of election reform has been set back, we are told, by a “decade” or a “generation.” But B.C. keeps going back to guzzle from this tainted well, so who knows what those words, or any words, might mean west of the Rockies.
And, indeed, the strategic implications of the referendum loss for the NDP are not so clear. A minor party that supports a larger partner in a coalition or a confidence agreement, as the Greens are doing now, is often squeezed to death in the next election. The survival of FPTP may make this strategically easier — especially if the public now feels that the referendum imposed upon it by the Greens was a nuisance, inflicted solely for the Greens’ own partisan advantage.
The whole referendum business was, after all, supposed to be an example of the transparent, respectful, careful legislating that results when parties are obliged to co-operate to form a government. We are assured that PR would make this sort of co-operation a nearly permanent condition: that is one of its central justifications. So if you thought the process looked suspiciously like a midnight kerosene fire in a hog barn, you are bound not to vote Green at the next election. Which might be just around the corner.