With a provincial referendum on electoral reform pending this year, The Chief caught up with political science expert and Quest University professor Doug Munroe to get his take on proportional representation. What is it and why should we care about it are just two of the questions posed to him.
What follows is an edited version of that conversation.
Q: Why do we have so much trouble wrapping our brains around proportional representation?
A: Electoral reform is a difficult topic to get fired up about, except right after an election when roughly half of the voters are disappointed about the outcome, and then they are going to have the conversation. The other half of the voters are thrilled about the outcome and feel that there is no problem.
Q: Part of the problem is it is a bit tricky to understand what proportional representation is, exactly. Can you give us a simple explanation?
A: Very simply, if I have a certain number of hats to hand out for who is going to be in charge and we all write down on a piece of paper who we think should be in charge, proportional representation is any system that hands out the hats so that the people who are in charge really closely line up with what everyone wrote down. You can do that in a ton of ways, and the details are really important, but in any proportional system, that is what they are trying to get.
With any system, there are trade-offs. If you want a system that is really easy to understand and produces really stable governments, with very clear accountability, you can get that, but you trade off against the proportionality of votes earned, versus seats won and you can be encouraging a system that encourages regional parties, like in Canada.
If you don’t care quite as much about simple to explain and you care more about the proportionality of seats to votes, you might go for something a little more complicated.
Q: When our MP Pamela Goldsmith-Jones was in town recently she said the feds weren’t going to move on electoral reform nationally because the government had found that Canadians aren’t really interested in it. Can you reflect on what would have happened in the last election if we’d had proportional representation?
A: A lot of this type of analysis is done — what would it have been like if we had calculated the score using different rules — but that is really misleading. It is like saying I can observe a basketball game and then afterward try to figure out who won, based on the rules of soccer.
Under a different system, people will vote differently, parties will campaign differently.
We do generally know how different electoral systems tend to work. We do know our current system, first past the post, over-rewards winners and tends to punish losers.
It tends to create an incentive to concentrate your votes in space — it doesn’t matter how many votes, it matters where they are. As soon as you have the most votes in a riding, any extra votes you have are just unnecessary.
That is why you see these disparities. In the 2015 election, the federal Conservative Party got 5.6 million votes to the Liberals 6.9 million. It is roughly a 7.5 per cent difference regarding the overall vote share. The difference was the vote was spread out enough and concentrated enough that it turned into a large number of seats for the Liberals.
Q: What do your students think about electoral reform?
A: Roughly half of my students wouldn’t be eligible to vote in B.C. — we have 30-something countries represented at Quest.
That said, in the class I had working with the District of Squamish to try and increase youth voter turnout, what really struck the students is that it isn’t rocket science and it isn’t expensive to increase turnout.
There are lots of little things we can do to increase it, but changing the voting system is not one of them.
Q: Where is proportional representation being done right and in a way we could copy, in your view?
A: There are lots of choices. The question is where are they doing it in ways that get results we think we would like.
I happen to like the New Zealand system, personally. You get a little of both worlds, but the price you pay for that is that it is complicated.
It is a story very similar to ours in New Zealand. They had a first past the post system and then amended it in the 1990s so that when a voter goes to vote, she has two ballots.
She votes for her representative for her riding. The person with the most votes wins. For the second ballot, there’s a list of the parties. The voter ticks off the party she likes. What they do is they hand out all the seats based on the first ballot, and then they look at the overall proportion of the vote that each party got, and then they hand out other seats — about 12 — that they distribute to people of various parties, who don’t represent any particular region. They adjust the result a little bit so that in the end, every riding is represented by a person from a party who is accountable to the voter, but all the parties have more or less allocation of the seats. You don’t have to vote for the party of the person you supported on the first ballot. I could vote for Jordan Sturdy, for example in Squamish’s riding, but then I could cast my second ballot for the Greens if I wanted. That is fine. It all just comes out in the wash.
Q: Put to a referendum in B.C. this fall, is it your feeling that people will support a move to proportional representation this time?
A: The people of B.C., generally speaking, have not been very enthusiastic about this. In 2005, you actually had a majority of people in favour, but there was a very demanding two-level threshold that didn’t get met.
In 2009, we saw only 39 per cent of people voting in favour. In a referendum, that is not enough.
I suspect once the referendum is finally revealed, and the choice is actually on the table, we are going to see some fairly intense campaigning around this, and I would suspect that the most well-resourced campaigners are going to be campaigning against it. I don’t think the parties want to campaign against it, because it would look self-serving.
However, I would suspect the informal networks that support parties will come out and support a no vote on this. Plus you are up against the fact that a lot of people don’t really care.
The turn-out rate is likely to be low. It is supposed to be timed with the municipal elections (this October), but those don’t have high turn-out rates either.
To learn more about voting systems and the B.C. referendum, go to engage.gov.bc.ca/howwevote/
