The BC legislative buildings in Victoria. British Columbians may soon be asked to consider changing the way we elect members to the legislature. Roy Luckow photo

Over the past few years there has been a growing feeling among the general public that our system of electing governments in Canada may be fundamentally flawed. The number of voters who participate in elections is declining, and more and more people seem alienated from the process, feeling that their votes do not count for anything. The issue was crystalized by the most recent provincial election, in May 2001, when Liberal Party candidates received 58 percent of the vote yet ended up with 77 of the 79 seats in the legislature. While a significant minority of the electorate did not vote for a Liberal, their preferences are almost totally absent from the legislature.

Recognizing the growing discontent about the electoral system, the new government of Premier Gordon Campbell decided to convene an assembly of ordinary British Columbians to consider if changes should be made to the electoral system and if so, what these changes might be. In the fall of 2002, Premier Campbell asked former Liberal Party leader and political commentator Gordon Gibson to come up with a proposal for how such an assembly might work. Based on Gibson's report, in April 2003 the government created the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform, chaired by Jack Blaney, a former president of Simon Fraser University.

What is the Citizens' Assembly?

When it convenes for the first time, in Vancouver in January 2004, the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform will consist of 158 members, a man and a woman from each of the province's 79 electoral districts. These individuals have been chosen more or less randomly. They are not experts; they have no special knowledge about electoral systems. They are ordinary citizens who have agreed to study the situation, to listen and to learn, and then perhaps to propose changes to the way we elect our politicians. They are also making history. For the first time in Canada, non-elected, "non-experts" are being asked to make fundamental changes to political institutions.

For example, the assembly will consider the present "first-past-the-post" system in which the candidate with the most votes wins an election, even if the candidate has less than a majority. Critics argue that this system is undemocratic because it denies a voice to all the voters, in many cases the majority of the voters, who did not support the winning candidate. More often than not, the government that is elected is opposed by more than half of the electorate. The most notorious case in recent BC political history was the 1996 provincial election when the NDP won a majority of the seats while winning fewer votes province-wide than the Liberals. In the 2001 election, almost 200,000 people voted for a Green Party candidate. Yet that party did not win a single seat. The argument goes that somehow those 200,000 voters should be represented in the legislature. Is there a workable system of proportional representation that would allocate legislative seats according to the proportion of votes each party received in an election?

This is just one of the questions that the Citizens' Assembly will be considering. The Assembly will hold public meetings around the province during May and June, 2004. By the end of the year it will come up with recommended changes which will then be put to voters in a referendum during the next provincial election, scheduled for May 2005. If they were approved, changes would be implemented in time for the subsequent election in 2009.