VANCOUVER, British Columbia (CN) – With wildfire smoke looming over the skies of Canada’s British Columbia, the air quality in Vancouver currently rivals Los Angeles and Beijing. But the province also finds itself in another haze distorting the view of its political future, as a referendum on electoral reform looms.
This fall, B.C. voters face a choice to either keep the status quo of a first-past-the-post electoral system, long a target for critics who claim it has produced skewed results for more than half a century, or change to a system of proportional representation under either a dual-member, mixed-member, or rural-urban system. Provincial ridings, like U.S. districts, would increase in size and, ideally, if a party receives roughly 40 percent of the vote, it wins roughly 40 percent of the seats.
The province, under the year-old government of the labor-oriented New Democratic Party, is holding a mail-in referendum on the question of changing a system where "to the winner goes the spoils" and the losers wind up with political obscurity and irrelevance. Unlike in U.S. state elections, Canadians don't directly choose provincial leaders on ballots; instead, local candidates in parties vie for the most seats in legislatures in order to form government. Under the current system, parties can win a majority with around 40 percent of the popular vote. In a scenario with low voter turnout, a party can hold all of the power with support of just a third of registered voters.
The election in Canada's most populous province of Ontario this year provides a recent and stark example of the distortions of the current system frequently targeted by reformers and critics. With about 2.3 million votes, Doug Ford's Progressive Conservatives party won a large majority government – 76 seats compared to the Ontario New Democratic Party's 40 seats on about 1.9 million votes. Meanwhile, the province's Green Party received just one seat with a little over a quarter million votes and about 100,000 votes went to parties that failed to win a single seat.
Opponents to potential reform in B.C. pounced, filing a challenge in the province's Supreme Court claiming the referendum process, its outcome, and advertising spending limits are improper. One group leading the charge against proportional representation, the Independent Contractors and Business Association, has long been a thorn in the side of B.C.'s union movement as the public voice of nonunion or "open shop" construction companies.
“In the view of the ICBA, electoral systems that favor broad based and ideologically moderate parties, and which tend to produce stable majority government, create the type of political stability, economic and regulatory certainty, and government accountability that ICBA and its membership need in order to make informed, long-term business and investment decisions," the association's president, Christopher Gardner, said in a supporting affidavit. "By contrast, electoral systems that do not produce stable and moderate majority governments, and that shift the balance of power to political parties at the more 'extreme' end of the political spectrum, can – in the view of the ICBA – significantly hamper economic development and investment, and can lead to a deficit in political accountability."
The B.C. government's plan, on the other hand, has the blessing of the nonpartisan chief electoral officer and officials warn that allowing a challenge to the referendum process and results could delay implementation before the next election in 2021.