Double Blind

From the perspective of a British Columbian, by far the most important political event that will occur in our lifetime will be the result of the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform referendum on May 17, 2005. The question will ask whether the voter supports changing our current voting system to one using a Single Transferrable Vote (STV). In order to pass, 60% of the province has to vote in favour of it and at least 48 of 79 ridings have to support it by larger than a 50% margin.

There is absolutely no reason to vote no (against the referendum) unless if you are an MLA in a so-called ‘safe’ riding. The STV system proposed in BC (called BC-STV) has a huge advantage over the present system in that during election time, individuals are elected instead of individuals that represent parties. This erodes the power of political parties, which in turn will provide better people to political office. Candidates can no longer ‘coast’ to office, since there is a good chance that a member from the opposite party will be able to garner enough votes to get elected before you.

This referendum is a once in a lifetime opportunity to shape how a government is formed in this province. We should accept it, otherwise there will never be a chance to do it again due to the fact that the present system is designed to entrench politicians in the system. The voting system should be one where you have to positively affirm your candidate each time he/she runs for office, opposed to the present system where candidates tend to get turfed only if the public is sufficiently angry. Our present system is effectively like negative-option billing.

You’ll hear a lot of trash from the establishment in the coming months because STV forces candidates to earn your vote, instead of candidates taking them for granted. You’ll hear “STV is too complicated” and “The results will form too many minority governments causing paralysis” and other arguments, but rest assured that the only reason why they’re arguing against it would be to strip the voter of having the power to vote their preferred candidate in, not just yet-another-nomination from the top two parties in the province.

I will be very blunt about this issue in future posts: Vote YES to BC-STV. Doing so makes your preferred candidate accountable to you.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 2nd, 2005 and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.