Proportional Representation for Inclusive Communities: A Community Forum

For years, dating back to when I took Canadian Politics at UBC in my 2nd year, I have been interested in electoral systems. First Past the Post (FPTP) always seemed antiquated to me and I always wondered why Canadians hadn't embraced something more democratic. 

I was really disappointed when the Trudeau government  pulled the plug on electoral reform after campaigning on changing the system. I'll be honest, I wasn't sure that the BCNDP would follow through on their election promises to move to a proportional representative model. I was really happy to hear Attorney General Eby announce the 2 questions and the subsequent referendum moving forward. 

This past Saturday my MLA George Heyman hosted a community forum on PR at the Beaumont Studios. I'll be honest - I had just returned from a week in Ottawa and wasn't feeling all that great, so I almost bailed. I'm so glad I didn't. 

The room was packed - and I was pleased to see that the crowd was at diverse in ages ( we could work on the other aspects of diversity for sure, but it was still nice to see a lot of people sub 45 in the room). There were 2 sitting City Councillors - Adrianne Carr and ANdrea Reimer as well as MLA Anne Kang to join in on the conversation. 

Our panel consisted of:

• Sonia Furstenau - MLA Cowichan Valley (Green Party)
• Lindsay Poaps - Leadnow
• Jason McLaren - FairVote BC

Minister Heyman emceed the event and started off by saying that what side of the political spectrum you're on, something is wrong with the current electoral system. The government, through CASA (Confidence and Supply Agreement) committed to consulting with British Columbians through a myriad of ways before announcing the process to how and what we will vote on. 

First round of consultations ended on February 28, 2018. This consisted of 91,000 questionnaires filled out. 180,000 website visits, 46 written submissions from organizations and a number of written submissions from individuals. The resulted as follows:

- Attorney General managed the process and therefore recused himself from caucus/cabinet discussion and debate.

- THe lens needed to include proportionality based on the urban/rural and the local/appointed ratios.

- The question(s) on the ballot needed to be simple.

- Curb the fear that the Legislative Assembly would grow to an exorbitant number.

- If the answer is yes to change the electoral system, there would be a mechanism to revisit the question to either change back to FPTP or to alter the PR system, after 2 election cycles (no country who's changed to PR has ever reverted to FPTP)

Many countries around the world employ Proportional Representation - many countries in the European Union, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Australia, Namibia, Paraguay, Ireland, South Africa and more. 

Sonia Furstenau - MLA Cowichan Valley

MLA Furstenau was keen on giving the rare perspective of someone from inside the legislature who's from the 3rd party in a minority government and it was really interesting. She did claim that she is proud to have good working relationships with both the Minister of Environment (George) and the Opposition's Critic, Mary Polak. 

Power: She recounted an experience at a high school where she was on a panel with both and NDP and BC Liberal MLA to talk about government. Someone asked the question to the BC Liberal about "what is your job as the opposition?" and he answered the typical arrogant BC Liberal way by saying "our job is to get back in power." She schooled him and told him that his job is to hold government to account.

She went on to talk about power and how the FPTP system gives absolute power based on the decision of a small group. When you have a majority government, no matter how you get there (keep in mind that only one time has the majority government in BC had over 50% of the popular vote, ONE TIME, ONCE..). This does not make for good governance. In a list of countries with perceived corruption all countries have PR, and only Canada #10 and the UK #16 make the list who have FPTP systems. "When one government has absolute power, this provides capacity to shield your decision-making - in PR, the decision-making is shared.

Question Period and Decorum: Question Period was the first time she got shouted down. As recently as May 31st, there were kids from a local school who came to the leg to watch the emergency debate on voter referendum and when she checked in with them after, they were shaken up. They witnessed behaviour in that debate that would get them suspended if they pulled the same low level of decorum at school. I HATE the heckling in the legislature and in parliament. It's a pretty terrible reflection of our institutions of democracy.

Committees: She was appointed to the committee for children and youth issues - something that she is very passionate about. When 2 of the NDP MLAs couldn't attend the meeting and there was a vote on the table - the BC Liberals took the opportunity to vote against the motion just to kill it. I also learned about "green banana" motions - a term I'd never heard before.

So what would PR do? It would force elected representatives to actually work together. It can happen - she restated her great working relationship with Environment Minister Heyman as well as Mary Polak, the Critic. There are common goals and pathways to solutions especially when we move away from populist, disrespectful politics that are eroding our democracy. If we don't move to a form of PR we are in danger of losing what is most important to democracy - the engagement of citizens. 

I was so impressed by her  - her eloquence, her passion and her unique insight. 

Lindsay Poaps - LeadNow

Next up was Lindsay Poaps from LeadNow. She was very matter of fact and said that PR isn't a magic wand to change democracy, but a step in the right direction to deal with chronic issues with representation (whether it's geographical, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc) and the opportunity to recalibrate the power structure.

She covered the history of LeadNow and drilled down to specific issues with our current system. 

• "Safe seats" - hard to get the attention of local representatives because they don't have to really worry much about getting elected. It can be hard to organize in those constituencies because the citizenry feels locked out of the process because the outcome is often a "done deal."
• Parties whipping the vote - with PR, representatives would be more empowered to represent their communities without facing backlash in their internal caucuses.
• Strategic voting - one of the lightning rods of the labour movement. With PR you get to vote for the candidate you want, not the one you hate the least. The danger of strategic voting is that the negative stuff that is associated with those kind of strategic votes further perpetuates the cynicism that underpins our society's views of voting and politics in general.

Jason McLaren - Fair Vote BC

Jason pretty much spent his time looking at statistics and the reality of who has/had power in various governments over the years. We talked about "false majorities" - in BC, in our entire history as a province, we have only had ONE true majority where the popular vote and the elected seats were the same. ONE. And that was in 2001 when the Campbell Government decimated the NDP and then proceeded to gut public services for the next 16 years. 

I enjoyed part where he asked the room, "who here has ever strategically voted?" People put their hands up. And then he asked "who liked it?" Lots of chuckles. Heh. 

At the end of the day FPTP locks regions out of power and PR capitalizes on the common goals/principles that exist across the province.

After Jason was done, we moved into Q&A - which was...well...interesting. The Q&A covered specific questions around the rules and the strategy of the "yes" side of the campaign. We also talked about voter turnout, education about the types of PR, the reinforcement that FPTP truly gives unfettered power to "strong stable governments" elected on false majority and that the fear of fringe parties getting elected under PR is unfounded since we see them elected in ON and the USA. 

After Q&A we went into small group discussions about what we thought of PR and the upcoming referendum. We were a diverse group - diverse in age, background, location, socioeconomic to name a few. I really enjoyed our discussion - I took the notes and hopefully captured our discussion.

Overall, I was pretty impressed that 100+ people showed up on a beautiful Saturday afternoon to discuss electoral reform with a bunch of strangers.