Big referendum details are ‘hard-wired’
Voters will be asked for input on a lot of aspects about how next year’s referendum on changing the voting system should be conducted.
They can go to a new website unveiled this week to weigh in ballot design, whether referendum campaigns should be publicly funded, how many MLAs there should be and how governments should be formed.
But they won’t be asked how they feel about a couple of fundamental aspects of the referendum, because those decisions have already been made. And they were made by politicians, which is the key failing of the NDP and Greens’ crash program to rejig how B.C. votes.
Voters have twice rejected, under the rules of the day, the option of changing the voting system. But for all its failings, the single most attractive feature of the alternative that was offered was that it was devised by 161 randomly selected people. The citizens’ assembly, as it was known, had no agenda going in to the exercise, no party lines to toe and no obvious selfinterest in the process.
The latest effort fails those tests right out of the gate. The referendum concept was devised by a government that’s already made up its mind and is going to campaign for a change to proportional representation. The government is backed by a Green caucus that didn’t even want a referendum, initially preferring to make the change unilaterally.
And there’s enough self-interest in both camps to raise suspicions. The NDP has won just three elections in 57 years under the current system. (Their present hold on power results from a parliamentary deal, not a win.) And the Greens stand to at least quadruple their seats if the votes are counted in a different manner.
The single nod to the obvious need for some degree of impartiality is that Attorney General David Eby says he’s going to recuse himself from internal discussions in order to appear as a neutral arbiter of the process. He’s all in favour of change, though, and introduced his bill as a measure to “modernize democracy.”
Who doesn’t want stuff “modernized”?
The most fundamental issue on which voters will be left out is how the referendum results will be counted. All the mailedin ballots will be counted as one batch, and 50 per cent plus one will win the day. In a province with profound regional differences, where more than half the population clusters in one dense area on the south coast, that’s a recipe for unfairness.
One small example: There are just under 900,000 registered voters in Vancouver, Burnaby and Surrey, compared to about 194,000 in northern B.C. So if every single voter in the North voted unanimously in the referendum, they’d still be outvoted by just over 20 per cent of Vancouver, Burnaby and Surrey residents opting the other way. That leaves a big part of B.C. out in the cold on a fundamental change to how B.C. works.
But Eby said the counting method and the 50 per cent-plus-one approval threshold (which is also debatable) are “hard-wired.” They aren’t part of the consultation, he said. He also reminded people they’re lucky to have any say at all.
“There’s no obligation on government to do this. In fact, there is no legal obligation on government to hold a vote at all. The Constitution Act could be amended without this process.”
Four academics will be guiding the process. Vancouver Sun colleague Vaughn Palmer noted this week three have advocated proportional representation in the past, one favours the status quo.
There’s also a larger panel that will review any conclusions from the online consultation, to guard against lobby groups stacking the input one way or the other.
The status quo first-past-the-post system has some obvious failings. And B.C.’s ridings are getting steadily more unbalanced, with huge population disparities. Taking another serious look at some alternatives is worthwhile, although it always seem to get fantastically complicated in a hurry.
But there would be a lot more confidence in this process if there were some neutral body overseeing it, rather than a minority government in which both partners have a vested interest and have already made up their minds.
In the meantime, write in as much as you want about ballot designs. Just don’t bother raising bigger issues about the process. Those are hard-wired.
Les Leyne covers the B.C. Legislature for the Victoria Times Colonist. To contact the writer: lleyne@timescolonist.com