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Will the BC NDP's Platform Support Electoral Reform / Fair Voting / Proportional Representation?
February 21, 2013 - 1:29pm
It will be revealing to see whether the BC NDP includes electoral reform in its election platform. The party's policies made by its members at convention, otherwise known as its "membership platform", already supports electoral reform. If the NDP doesn't include fair voting in its election platform, it will signal that as the possibility of forming a government becomes very real it is preparing to go against the wishes of its membership in order to maintain the current status quo.
I think Dix has already said it will be.
It won't be. The BC NDP's election platform has no mention of electoral reform so our unfair and divisive single-member plurality system is here to stay in BC for the foreseeable future.
BC NDP Election Platform - Good Government
The best way to increase public engagement and voter participation would be through the establishment of fair voting.
Fair voting is the best way to create a political system where "politics is about people coming together to solve common problems, collectively and democratically."
Our current winner take all single-member plurality system perpetuates divisive negative politics.
Unfortunate, although that may be one of the issues that the all party committee (including those not in the legislature) looks at. Public pressure for PR may increase significantly with a huge majority in seats and a plurality of votes.
Great thread and great question, JKR. If PR is every going to happen in this country it has to come from a principled NDP government. BC will loom large in Federal politics if it elects an NDP government, since no other major province has a party aligned with the Official Opposition.
My feeling is though, that BC leans to the right and it may not be in their long-term interests. Is that true?
If there is PR then the NDP will likely never win a majority again. However it is unlikely any other party would either. On the positive side it might allow for a home grown BC party similar to QS to develop with a very left and green platform. Who knows it might even convince the younger cohorts of voters to come out and vote.
This is a comment from rabble's facebook page:
Yes indeed 42% of the population voted against it in the first referendum so they overruled the 58% who wanted a change from FPTP. The second time around saw a coalition of NDP and Liberal operatives using support from big business and the MSM defeat it handily. Neither of the two main party's leadership wanted any change since they both hoped to be the next government under the phoney majority system. And of course our business elite and their MSM don't want a change either since the system usually delivers majorities to the right.
Frankly I was shocked that the ridiculous, overly-complicated, Rube-Goldbergian "BC-STV" contraption got as much as 58% of the vote in the first go-round. Obviously a significant segment of the population was so in favour of electoral reform in 2005 that they were prepared to vote for a system that nobody understood and that could not be properly explained in less than 30 minutes or by anyone other than someone with a degree in mathematics.
BCers were more interested in electoral reform in 2005 because we had just come off two very distorted election results: 1996, where the NDP got a majority despite the fact that they trailed the Liberals pretty significantly in the popular vote, and 2001, where the 40-plus percent of the electorate who voted other than Liberal were rewarded with a measly 2 seats. By 2009, the NDP had regained its usual levels of support and the 2005 and 2009 election results were less 'distorted' as a result, which I would argue was what really cooled the ardour for electoral reform among the public (as opposed to a sinister alliance of NDP and Liberal backroomers, the media and 'big business').
I have always felt that the critical mistake the electoral reform advocates made was in not pushing for a two-stage referendum (as was done in New Zealand), with the first question being "do you want to change the system from FPTP?" and if that question cleared the appropriate threshold, then to ask "which of these alternatives do you prefer?"
I guess it just proves the Irish and Australians are way smarter than us dumb Canadians.
The only way a socialist party is going to be fairly represented in the legislature is if we switch to a fair voting system. It's no coincidence that social democracy has flourished in countries with fair voting. In these countries, socialists are fairly represented in legislatures and more importantly socialist ideas are able to get a hearing and gain political legitimacy.
Plurality voting produces a political system dominated by centrist parties, centrist politicians and plagued with vote splitting, strategic voting, and undemocratic political mergers. If the NDP continues to support plurality voting in provinces where they feel confident they can win phony majorities they should accept that they are supporting centrist politics, vote splitting, strategic voting and undemocratic mergers in all political jurisdictions in Canada even where these factors of plurality voting go against the NDP's interests and ideology.
The referendum was set up to fail. In the aftermath of the 1996 election the BC Liberals promised to look at electoral reform as a way to highlight the fact that the NDP's majority was not only a phony majority but much worse, a "wrong winner." The BC Liberals spent almost 5 years after the 1996 election telling everyone that the NDP came in 2nd place and were an illegitimate government. By the time 2001 rolled around the BC Liberals were easily able to neutralize the BC Reform Party and consolodate the right of centre vote using the threat of another "wrong winner" election result. During this period the BC Liberals supported electoral reform to highlight the illegitimacy of the NDP government and to consoldate the right wing vote behind the BC Liberal banner. Having promised that they would look into electoral reform, the BC Liberals fulfilled their promise by establishing the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform, The idiotic 77-2 election result in 2001 made it almost impossible for the BC Liberal government to renege on their promise so instead they set up a 60% requirement that made electoral reform difficult to pass. The corporate elite in BC made sure that the electoral reform process was rigged against reform because plurality voting gives them clout with all the major parties. Even when an unpopular right-wing government loses power occasionally, the corporate elite here feels confident that they'll be able to consolodate the right-wing vote by the time the next election comes around and in the meantime the plurality system will pressure the NDP to remain moderate.
As for STV - STV is a very good system but it's too complicated to easily sell in a referendum where very few people have the motivation to learn about complicated electoral systems. STV with 5 or more seat constituencies is probably the best electoral system around. The only electoral system I'm confident could beat our plurality voting system in a referendum is the 2 round plurality system used in France where a second round of voting between the top two finishers occurs when no candidate gets a majority in the first round. All other electoral systems are probably too complicated to pass a referendum that can be rigged by the powers that be. This is one of the reasons a referendum shouldn't be used to determine the electoral system used as fundamental democratic rights should be established and maintained whether the majority agrees with it or not.
That is not the story of STV that I read. The version I know said that the Campbell Liberals were angered over an NDP phony majority in the last half of the 1990's. But once they were able to realize their own phony majorities in the 2000's, all bets and support for STV were off by 2007 or so. And the BC NDP never wanted STV in the first place and still favour, I think, MMP with open lists.
I think we need ProRep on a national level for it to make an impact with voters as well as the economy. Installing STV in BC or even MMP in Ontario won't do much to counter the neoliberalorama wafting out of Ottawa like the smell of dead rats under the floorboards since the 1980's. We need fundamental change nation-wide. They've been running the country into the ground for so long that we will need at least as many years in power as the CCF had in Saskatchewan in order to reverse all of that which was broken so badly over the course of the last three and half decades. The NDP can only enter provincial government so many times with their hands tied by do-nothings in Ottawa and expect to do anything meaningful. We need federal power and lots of it. It's time to close the democracy gap/canyon/divide in Ottawa.
Fidel are you reading tea leaves to determine what the BC NDP favour? The BC NDP have never supported any specific type of PR in any election platform. Bill Tielman and David Schreck were the main driving forces and public faces behind the No side in the second referendum and they had tons of cash from Howe Street to run their disinformation campaign. The MSM were as biased as they always are and they also sided with the NO side. That is what I based my analysis on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Tieleman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Schreck
I dunno if your totally accurate here Krop, I recall Gordon Gibson getting front stage MSM coverage to tell fairy tales about STV.... many other prominent people pushed for it including the soon to be turfed Christy Clark that had no clue (surprise) what she was talking about on her radio show but still recklessly misled listeners into believing that STV was the elixer to all our political woes.
STV is far preferable to the FPTP system we have now. If it had been enacted in 2005 for the 2009 election in recognition of the 58% support we would have been spared the phoney Liberal majority in 2009. My grandchildren will be paying for that mistake until they are my age. BC Rail, BC Hydro and a slew of P3 deals (we are soon going to find out how much the true costs are) would have avoided. The NDP in 2005 was on the rebound and very hopeful that they would benefit from FPTP in 2009 so it had no incentive to push for any kind of PR.
I prefer MMP without party lists and with a 5% threshold but STV with 5 or 7 seat ridings would have been far superior to what we still have. The thresholds are higher under STV than I want but we would have had at least three if not four parties in the current Legislature and Gordo and his Howe street buddies would have had some restraints placed on the looting of the public purse.
It says here that Carole James favours MMP.
And I know for sure that the reason the NDP did not openly campaign for MMP here in Ontario was that the Liberals made it a condition that no party would campaign for or against during the election campaign. But Howard Hampton endorsed the citizen assembly's choice for MMP anyway.
Similarly I think that at the time the conditions for a referendum in BC were being laid out, the BC NDP had only a few MLA's. Like it was in Ontario, the BC Liberal Governments of the day laid out all of the conditions for not just the referendum but also the two supermajority barriers to pro-rep and namely the requirements for two-third support for electoral reform in addition to a requirement that at least two-thirds of all ridings vote for reform. They were much the same conditions for the referendum here in Liberal Ontario except that our Liberals didn't allocate nearly the same resources toward a public education campaign and far too late to help voters understand pro-rep leading up to the referendum. I remember asking people if they were going to support pro-rep/MMP here, and many did not understand what it is including my nextdoor neighbor at the time.
I guess then the good news is that the NDP is about to form a majority government and will be able to do something about it.
Your circuitous citing of Con federal backbencher Scott Reid on what anti-STV Carol James "presumably" wants instead of STV is hardly convincing of anything. It is certainly a comically long way from the BCNDP seriously campaigning for ANY change from FPTP.
Obfuscation aside, no party that thinks it might win a phoney majority in the foreseeable future will ever take serious steps to organize for a more democratic voting system.
Democracy, as usual, is expendable to all who salivate for power.
The BC NDP has supported PR in general (and I believe MMP) in policy if not in platform.
They won't. There have been no signals indicating that a Dix NDP is going to reopen the door on electoral reform. And with the whole theme of "one practical step at a time" no surprises, etc, I think it's a very strong certainty that BC will not see electoral reform on the table in the next 4 years.
Even with the supermajority requirement, the STV referendum in 2005 came tantalizingly close to passing. That doesn't mean the Liberals wouldn't have found ways to delay it or even prevent it even if it had passed. I've always thought a two stage refereundum process or a preferential ballot referendum on FPTP and two different PR options would have been better. I don't think 5 seat STV constituencies would work very well in the less populated parts of BC, but it would have been interesting to have at least one election under the system proposed. Banning corporate and union donations will be much easier that achieving a PR system.
I still hope that at minimum they put a non rigged referendum on the ballot for 2017. A two stage ballot with a Yes or No to electoral change in the first part and a second question with two options to choose from. I am not expecting that to happen however.
I agree that if real change is to happen in Canada has it will have to take place at the federal level as provincial governments are in straight jackets as they have to maintain relatively competitive tax rates with each other. The only province that has the fiscal capacity to unilaterally establish social democracy is Alberta. So provincial NDP governments outside of Alberta can't unilaterally establish social democratic societies. Only a federal NDP government can bring that about.
But why would a federal NDP government have to act slowly and incrementally over many mandates? What important policies have to be delayed? National child care? Cap and trade? Pharmacare? Homecare? Electoral reform? Increased and more progressive taxation? Full employment policies? Accessibility to post secondary education? Social housing? Another Kelowna Accord?
Electoral reform is one of the progressive policies that doesn't have to be established first at the federal level. It could be done immediately at the provincial level. Doing it first at the provincial level would actually make it easier to do later on at the federal level like medicare was.
If the BC NDP supports open-list MMP, why isn't it on their election platform? The election platform doesn't even mention electoral reform. So the BC NDP has no mandate to establish open-list MMP as they would have if they had put it in their election platform. Now if they decide to go ahead and establish it without a mandate they'll leave themselves open for a lot of criticism and blowback. The best they can do now is open up another process to take another look at electoral reform. Time will tell if the BC NDP supports electoral reform. Hopefully they won't wait until it's too late and support electoral reform like the Saskatchewan NDP did when they proposed it toward the end of their mandate when the Saskatchewan Party was threatening their hold on power. We know how that story has turned out. Here in BC there is already talk of uniting the right so they can resume winning phony majority governments against a divided opposition. Maybe in BC we'll end up with our own version of the Saskatchewan Party?
Citation please.
I'm curious to see what an agreed-on BC NDP "policy-but-not-in-platform" looks like.
And if major changes to the electorial system were actually SERIOUSLY considered, why isn't the intended process even mentioned in the platform?
Would be interesting to speculate what governments would look like under PR anyway though.
If there were no change in parties and the current polls led into a PR election... NDP would be near majority and require the support of at least one of Lib, Green or Con (or possibly independents) to pass legislation. No guarantee they'd always pick Green, but it'd certainly give the Greens some leverage (and with it, an obligation to actually behave as a party that can have real influence over governance).
But I think under PR, we might see a scenario where the right flank of the Liberals finally has absolutely no reason to still be there, and they flee either to Conservatives or a new party completely. That leaves the Liberals either to die out or be reborn as Liberals who have realigned with the federal party.
If there is an explicitly centrist party, we could see the NDP move back to the left. Or the NDP would stay put and act as the centrist party to which either the Greens or some other new party would apply pressure from the left (e.g. the provincial equivalent of COPE).
Do you even know the difference between policy and platform? Policy is what is passed at Convention or Provincial Council. Not all of the policy gets into platform. I don't have access to the policy manual but I do remember several resolutions on PR being passed at the BC NDP Convention and if they mentioned or alluded to a specific system, if would have been MMP. There is though the suggestion of an all Party committee (not just those in the Legislature) to look at issues related to the banning of corporate and union donations. It is a stretch to say PR is a related issue but I could easily see this committee expanding its mandate to look at Proportional Representation. There is no way it would be the first priority of an NDP government, but I too wish it was mentioned in the platform.
"Not a priority" is an understatement.
Discussion and convention resolutions aside (elusive though they apparently are), no leader nor their backroom advisors will say outright they are: "against democracy because it might harm the chance of a phoney majority"--it merely fades into the vanishing point as "not a priority", and there are "more pressing isssues".
Such is the statement of Dix when asked:
http://www2.canada.com/oceansidestar/news/story.html?id=70d9694f-23d2-4d...
And Dix's "more practical approach" is the anti-democratic status quo with its phoney majorities.
When the NDP says they have to go slow on spending for marginalized folks its all about not being able to afford it and there is some merit to that given the large hole dug by the BC Liberals in the last decade. When they want to go slow on items like PR where there is no fiscal rationale they just don't want to make the change.
Or Dix means what he says - do a referendum.
That, of course, is not what he says.
He says he would "not likely" act on it in the first term, but if this "not likely" did happen, it would be a referendum.