Fair Vote

Tonight I went to a presentation from Fair Vote Canada on proportional representation. It featured a talk from Professor Wayne Broughton, followed by a Q&A with representatives from three local political parties. Norah Bowman, Kelowna / Lake Country Candidate from the NDP; Wes Forgione, Outreach Director from the Liberals; and Robert Mellalieu, Financial Agent for the Greens.

No representative from the Conservatives. But that’s not really a shock.

So, I voted for the STV when it was proposed in 2005 and 2009. But I didn’t really think it was explained well, and I was mostly just voting against the current First Past the Post (FPTP) system rather than for a particular alternative. So I knew going in that I had half-baked and uninformed opinions, and I hoped I might learn a little.

The basic problem with the present system is that it gives enormous power to parties that have only marginal pluralities rather than majorities. Only a handful governments in Canadian history have had majority support, the last was 30 years ago. It’s much more common for a party to eke out a plurality of 40% to 45%, which FPTP translates into a majority of Parliament.

The most egregious examples of this are the 2005 Liberals, 2011 Conservatives, and 2015 Alberta NDP, which got their majorities with less than 40% of the popular vote.

Another problem, albeit less common, is that when the seats aren’t well distributed it can sometimes enable a party to form a majority of seats when it lacks even a plurality of votes… when one of their opponents has more popular support. At the provincial level this happened in BC in 1996, in Quebec in 1998, and in New Brunswick in 2006.

Wayne described several different systems of proportional representation, with examples of countries where they are used. Single Transferable Vote, the system from the BC referendum, seemed needlessly complex, enough so that I can’t really describe it here. So perhaps that deserved to fail. It’s sole advantage seems to be that it could keep the current districts.

Mixed-member proportional looked a fair bit more favourable. This is where there are fewer, larger districts, with multiple representatives from each. For example, a district with 5 representatives. A party with a slim majority in that district might get 3 seats, with 2 going to their rival. Or perhaps a party with the plurality would get 2 seats, and each of their rivals might get 1 seat. It’s a system that gets increasingly proportional as district size increases, offset by the decrease in local representation… so a balance has to be found somehow.

Once the lecture was done the party representatives came out for an extended Q&A session. It will probably not shock you to hear that I liked the NDP and Green reps the most. The Green and Liberal reps had the disadvantage of not being the candidate, but the Green rep held things up OK well the Liberal rep wasn’t willing to commit to anything on his candidate’s behalf. He made it through the whole Q&A without saying anything substantive at all.

There were a few standout questions. At the start someone asked why the STV referendum failed… it turns out that the bar was too high. It needed 60% support, and only got 58%. I’d known that already… but I hadn’t realized that the 60% threshold was chosen by the sitting government, specifically to be an unattainable goal. Knowing that it’s amazing how close it came.

Someone asked about the timeline for the change. All parties were planning to address the issue if victorious in this year’s election. None could commit to succeeding, of course.

Several people asked about issues of voter apathy… all representatives offered some platitudes about increasing youth engagement and political awareness, Norah offered some specifics about having student clubs and the like. All seemed to distrust the Australian model of mandatory voting, except for the Liberal rep who didn’t seem to have ever heard of such a thing.

The Q&A was derailed several times by people trying to deliver polemics rather than asking questions. Luckily the microphones were positioned so that they had to at least try to face the speakers. A few spent their whole talks addressing the audience, and we couldn’t really hear them.

I’ve never seen these sorts of non-questioning questioners dealt with effectively, but I think maybe the award show model could work. Start playing them off at 10 second, if they hit 20 seconds send someone up to wrestle the microphone out of their hands.

All in all, a decent evening. Very informative. Didn’t really change my mind at all about anything. Hopefully that means that, rather than just being set in my ways, I actually had better opinions going in than I gave myself credit for.