For better or worse, referendums give power to people
British Columbia leads Canada in giving voters a first- hand voice on matters
First in a four- part series
When the new version of the old PST kicks in Monday morning, it will mark the first time in Canada that tax policy has been decided by a direct vote of the people.
It will no doubt be celebrated as a triumph by anti- HST crusaders and many direct democracy advocates. Yet it also will be seen as a worrisome milestone by those who fear the potential for capriciousness in a not- very- engaged electorate. And it leaves questions hanging for those who see merit in arguments both for and against putting more power in the hands of the people, and who wonder how far and how fast British Columbia will follow this path.
B. C. trails many U. S. states and a few other countries in implementing the tools of direct democracy. However, despite deep populist roots in the Prairie provinces, B. C. has moved to the head of the pack among Canadian jurisdictions when it comes to giving voters a direct voice — no matter how infrequently they can use it — in shaping public policy.
Legislation that allowed citizens to force the 2011 referendum on the HST is just one of several mechanisms adopted over 20- plus years to chip away at the power of elected governments to do whatever they want, at least until the next election.
The journey down this road began in 1991 in the dying days of the Social Credit party.
It was what Simon Fraser University political scientist David Laycock calls a Hail Mary pass: Rita Johnston, the short- lived premier who took over the reins of government in April of that year when scandal forced Bill Vander Zalm from office, was facing an election in October that she was widely expected to lose.
Under the Referendum Act passed in 1990, only the government could put a question on a provincial election ballot. But, in a bid to mollify unhappy voters, Johnston used this power in October 1991 to ask if people wanted the right to put their own questions on the ballot and to recall MLAs for poor performance.
Johnston lost her seat, and her government was trounced. But the recall and initiative provision won 80.9- per- cent support.
It then fell to the new premier, Mike Harcourt, and his NDP colleagues to implement the direction given by the electorate and to write the nittygritty rules.
Those rules were tough — deliberately so, says David Mitchell, a political historian who was then the Liberal opposition’s House leader and is now president and CEO of the Ottawa- based Public Policy Forum.
“The NDP got stuck with this,” he said as he looked back on that era during a recent interview. “No one can ever tell me they liked it.”
The rules
The recall legislation the NDP came up with requires petitioners to sign up 40 per cent of the voters who were registered in the riding for the last election, and who still are. It has been tried 24 times, and only once has it succeeded — sort of.
Enough signatures were collected in 1998 to initiate Elections B. C. action against Paul Reitsma, then the Liberal MLA for Parksville- Qualicum, who had been accused of writing phoney letters to local newspapers to praise his own performance. But the recall law was never fully tested because Reitsma resigned before any action was taken.
As for referendums, getting a question on the ballot requires a proponent to collect signatures from 10 per cent of the electorate — a huge number. If it sounds daunting, it’s only the beginning.
B. C.’ s rules also require the support of 10 per cent of the electorate in all 75 ridings — and each person who signs has to endorse the correct petition. This makes signature- collecting difficult pretty much everywhere, and almost impossible in busy hubs like a SkyTrain station where people from many ridings converge.
As well, the proponent has just 90 days to sign people up, and can use only volunteer canvassers.
So it’s no surprise that the HST question was the first and only in the law’s 20- plus- year history to make it to the ballot.
“The initiative idea is a powerful one that merits attention,” says Antony Hodgson, the president of Fair Voting BC. “But the rules make it practically unworkable in B. C.”
Even the HST referendum — the product of an unprecedented combination of frustration, organization and resolve — would likely not have passed if a final barrier had been left in place.
“The initiative law requires 50 per cent of registered or eligible voters,” Hodgson said. “So if you had 49.9- per- cent turnout and 100 per cent were in favour of the question, the question loses.”
Given that HST votes were cast by just over half of the eligible electorate, and that “only” 55 per cent of those who sent their ballots in on time voted to scrap the unpopular tax, the outcome fell far below this very high bar set by the NDP back when the law was enacted.
What saved the day for HST foes and cooked the government’s goose was, ironically, the personal intervention of former premier Gordon Campbell — the man anti- HST campaigners loved to vilify and who was ultimately squeezed out of office because of the issue — and of his successor, Christy Clark.
While Campbell was still in office, he decreed the vote would be held not under the onerous terms of the Recall and Initiative Act, but rather under the Referendum Act, which requires only a simple majority of votes cast. Clark, who took over before the balloting in 2011, followed through on Campbell’s promise.
Other experiences
This was by no means Campbell’s first dabbling with direct democracy and related mechanisms — from fixed election dates to attempts to introduce proportional representation. His keen interest in such things went back at least to 1996, when he was struck by the unfairness of his Liberals losing by six seats to the NDP despite winning more of the popular vote.
During his 10- year term as premier, Campbell tied his own government’s hands, at least to a limited extent, with both balanced budget legislation and fixed election dates. And he initiated three referendums before the one on the HST.
The first turned out to be — despite getting the results the government appeared to want — pretty much inconsequential.
This 2002 referendum asked voters to endorse eight principles for future treaty negotiations with First Nations. Some, as critics pointed out, were vague motherhood statements, some were clearly beyond provincial jurisdiction, and at least one was so ambiguous as to raise questions about what a yes- or- no vote would mean.
There were calls for a boycott, which was possibly heeded as only about a third of the mailin ballots were returned.
The result — an 80- per- cent endorsement — never appeared to have any impact on subsequent actions of the government, which went on to make significant progress on several treaty issues.
The next two government-initiated referendums, one in 2005 and another in 2009, proposed changing B. C.’ s first-past-the- post electoral system to one involving proportional representation. Both failed — the first because it fell short of the 60 per cent required for it to pass, and the second because it was opposed by the majority.
These votes — like many that experts cite as best practices from other jurisdictions — were preceded by a citizens’ assembly. This is a thorough and thoughtful deliberative process whereby randomly selected citizens are educated on and weigh the merits of potential alternatives before recommending one for the electorate to endorse.
Alternative voices
Seth Klein, director of the B. C. office of the left- leaning Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, has rare words of praise for right- leaning former premier Campbell and his role in initiating the assembly.
Klein is generally no fan of referendums. For example, he says the HST vote merely polarized the electorate by offering “two bad choices” — a flawed provincial sales tax model that most jurisdictions have wisely rejected, or a badly implemented version of a better-designed value- added tax.
By contrast, the citizens’ assembly, although too costly and cumbersome to be used on every issue, fostered genuine collaboration and deliberation on complex ideas.
“Public policy is about tradeoffs,” Klein said. “No public policy is all good or all bad. Each has costs, benefits, risks, opportunities, winners and losers. The best you can do is deliberate over those.”
A key seems to be the trust — or, rather, the lack of it — that lies at the root of every push for more direct democracy. With the citizens’ assembly, as in similar exercises in other places, a group of randomly selected and not overtly partisan citizens tends to be trusted by the electorate, whereas politicians usually aren’t.
It is the widespread suspicion of politicians that so often leads to a seemingly unlikely coalition of left- and right- leaning voters when electoral reform is at stake, says Preston Manning, who has observed the phenomenon both as leader of the federal Reform Party in the 1980s and 1990s, and now as the head of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy.
“The common element in this discussion is that the big guys — although the right and the left may argue about who the big guys are — have more power than the little guys,” Manning said in an interview, recalling how his party once won several Vancouver Island seats from the NDP on the strength of its electoral reform policies, then lost them when the issue got put on the back burner.
Former premier Vander Zalm, who stormed back into the headlines in recent years at the head of an informal leftright coalition to oppose the HST, agrees.
“The left blames corporations for controlling governments,” he said. “The right blames unions and other groups like that.
“They’re both right. We are governed by special interests.”
The answer, says Vander Zalm, is more referendums — lots of them, maybe starting with one on BC Hydro’s smart meters, a hot- button issue to many of the people who supported him on the anti- HST campaign.
Others are less sure.
How much is too much?
Klein concedes there may be occasional uses for a referendum, perhaps when a government wants to do something significant that it didn’t campaign on.
Manning sees potential to use this direct democracy tool more frequently, but would like to minimize potential divisiveness with carefully crafted questions that offer more than two starkly opposed alternatives.
Hodgson, who strongly favours a greater public voice and broad discussions in place of what he sees as chronic partisan warfare, is also wary of yes-no questions.
“I’d rather see a process where the people can empower, or force, a government to consider a piece of legislation,” he said. “But the elected representatives should do their job, which is to craft it and modify it and make it work. You don’t get that with initiatives.”
All three strongly favour the kind of citizen involvement and the education process embodied by the citizens’ assembly.
But even Gordon Gibson, a former Liberal leader and now a Fraser Institute fellow who wrote a report providing the basis for B. C.’ s assembly exercise, has reservations about how far this approach can go.
“I would never ride in an airplane designed by a citizens’ assembly,” he said. “They are not qualified to do that kind of thing.
“They’re not qualified to do budgets, either. These involve innumerable trade- offs, and they require a lot of experience. Or take the issue of aboriginal rights. This is a legal question, and a bunch of people sitting around opining on the subject aren’t going to do much good.
“On the other hand, something like electoral reform is the perfect issue for a citizens’ assembly. But these kinds of issues are, quite frankly, few and far between.”