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Canvassers seek support for proportional representation

On May 13, the leader of the Green Party of British Columbia officially launched a 90-day campaign to challenge the B.C. government to change the current electoral system in favour of proportional representation.

On May 13, the leader of the Green Party of British Columbia officially launched a 90-day campaign to challenge the B.C. government to change the current electoral system in favour of proportional representation.

The campaign stems from the May 2001 provincial election where the Liberal Party candidates won 77 of 79 seats in the Legislature with 58 per cent of the popular vote. By comparison, the NDP won two seats with 22 per cent of the vote and the Green Party was shut out completely with a party record of 12.5 per cent.

In the previous election, the NDP itself was the beneficiary of the system, winning 52 seats with just 39.5 per cent of the vote.

"If the mixed proportional representation initiative is successful, we will no longer have parties becoming government with less than 50 per cent of the vote or parties capturing almost all the seats in our Legislature with only 58 per cent of the vote," said Green Party leader Adriane Carr after party members voted unanimously in favour of the independent campaign, which is called Free Your Vote.

Carr, acting as a private citizen, plans to use the Recall and Initiative Act to force the government to hold a referendum on pro-rep. By Aug. 12, they will need to collect signed petitions from 10 per cent of registered voters in each of the 79 provincial ridings, or roughly 225,000 signatures.

In recent months, the Carr has registered more than 2,500 canvassers around the province through Elections B.C., which will be administering the petitions.

Whistler currently has four registered canvassers, but local Free Your Vote petition organizer Stephane Perron is confident that he will be able to find more.

"I don’t know how much local support there is, but I’ve had people come up to me in the street who had seen my letter in the paper (May 3, Pique Newsmagazine) and they seem very interested," says Perron.

"I do know the Green Party did really well here, we had 33 per cent of the vote in Whistler, and I like to think that the 33 per cent of Whistler who does not have a voice or representation would support this."

The Green Party pro-rep campaign got a boost recently when a poll found that 75 per cent of British Columbians favour electoral reform for the province. However, the Free Your Vote campaign isn’t counting on winning the battle the first time around.

"I don’t think anybody is really thinking this will go through this time," Perron says. "We more just want to get people thinking about it, and saying ‘Jeez, there’s a lot of different ways we could do this,’ or ‘Hey, look at all the other countries that are already doing it, maybe it’s worth looking at’."

More than 30 countries around the world are already using some form of proportional representation, including Australia, New Zealand, Austria, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, Italy, South Africa, Japan, and South Korea.

The system being proposed by Carr would see the size of the Legislature reduced to 68 seats.

Thirty-four of those seats would be elected by voters in 34 provincial ridings, which would have the same boundaries as federal ridings. The other 34 seats would be given to parties based on each political party’s share of the popular vote. The same 50-50 ratio of elected and proportionally-awarded seats would be kept if the federal government readjusted the number of federal Members of Parliament from B.C., based on the results of the 2001 Census.

A party would have to receive five per cent of the popular vote or elect one candidate in a riding to have a seat in the Legislature.

During elections, voters would cast two ballots – one for a constituency MLA to represent their electoral district, and one for a political party. The votes could go towards different parties.

The pro-rep seats would go to candidates on ranked party lists that would be submitted to Elections B.C. prior to an election, and would be available at voting stations.

If a directly elected MLA resigned there would be a by-election. If a party seat become vacant, the party would fill it with the next name on its list.

If Elections B.C. receives enough petitions in favour of a referendum, they will set the wheels in motion for a referendum by referring the verified results and the draft bill, officially titled "Initiative to Establish a Proportional Representation Electoral System," to the Select Standing Committee on Legislative Initiatives.

At that time, the Liberal government can either introduce the initiative into the Legislature as a bill, or hold a referendum.

Nobody had registered to oppose the initiative by the cut-off date of May 15, although the political support from other parties has been lukewarm.

The NDP has suggested similar electoral reforms themselves in the past, but have since publicly stated that they would not support Carr’s initiative, at least partially on the grounds that they didn’t think it would succeed.

The Liberal Party has been quiet on the issue so far, but not on the topic of electoral reform. In their New Era election platform, the Liberals proposed a Citizen’s Assembly on Electoral Reform to assess "all possible models for electing the MLAs, including preferential ballots, proportional representation, and our current electoral system."

If a direct proportional system had been in place for the 1996 provincial election the Liberal Party would have formed a minority government.

The Whistler group of canvassers won’t be going door-to-door looking for support, but will be setting up tables at public events and looking for partnerships with merchants.

"We’re just one small part of the riding," Perron says. "Other canvassers will be in West Vancouver and Squamish.

"I think we’ll be able to find 10 per cent in this riding, but I don’t think we’ll have as much success in the North where there are only a few canvassers in each riding," he says. "But with all that’s happening up there with mills closing and the treaty referendum I’m curious to see what happens."

For more information on the Whistler initiative, you can contact Stephane Perron at 604-938-0945 during business hours.

Free Your Vote can be found at 1-866-776-7379, or www.freeyourvote.bc.ca.