PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION:
Back to the Future?

Dave Barrett and his wife Shirley celebrate Barrett's re-election to the legislature, June 1976. Ross Kenward/Vancouver Province

The Green Party of British Columbia hopes to move electoral reform to the top of the provincial political agenda. The Green Party has served notice that it intends to start collecting signatures on a petition calling for the introduction of a system of proportional representation in BC. If successful, the campaign for signatures will require the provincial government under the Recall and Initiative Act to consider changing the way in which Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) are elected.

What Is Proportional Representation?

At the moment, elections in BC (and everywhere else in Canada) take place using the First Past the Post system, also known as the plurality system. When an election takes place, each voter casts a single vote and the winning candidate is the one gaining the largest number of votes. As a result, in constituencies where more than two candidates stand for election, the winner may gain less than a majority (50%) of the votes. In other words, he or she may be elected by a minority of the voters.

Often, the First Past the Post system results in governments that are elected to a majority of seats in the legislature with less than a majority of the popular vote. Sometimes it even results in a government that received fewer votes than the opposition, but won more seats. That was the case in BC in the 1996 election, when the NDP formed a majority government with 39 seats after winning 39.5% of the popular vote, less than the 41.8% won by the Liberal Party, which only won 33 seats.

Many people believe that election results should correspond more closely to the number of votes cast. In other words, whatever percentage of the popular vote a political party receives, be it 4% or 54%, it should receive a corresponding percentage of the seats. This is the basic principle of proportional representation. There are different ways of achieving it.

Types of Proportional Representation

There are three basic types of proportional representation. One is the Party List system in which political parties present lists of candidates and voters select their preferred list. After the votes are counted, seats in the legislature are allocated in proportion to the overall vote gained by each party. Winning candidates are those at the top of the lists. Several countries in Europe use this system.

The Green Party is proposing a modified Party List, or mixed system. According to this system, each constituency (there would be 34) would elect an MLA using First Past the Post. An additional 34 candidates would be chosen from lists submitted by the parties. Once the constituency winners became known, each party would receive an additional number of seats to bring its representation up to the level of its popular vote.

As a result, if a party did not elect any MLAs in the constituencies, but achieved a certain percentage of the popular vote, it would have a number of seats in the legislature that reflected that vote. For example, using the results from the May 2001 election, the current legislature, which now looks like this:

Liberals 77
New Democrats 2

would look like this:

Liberals 43
New Democrats 16
Greens 9

A third system is the Single Transferable Vote. Here, voters are given the opportunity to rank candidates in order of preference, marking a 1, 2, 3 and so on next to the names on the ballot. Candidates who receive more than 50% of the votes are elected, but if no candidate receives 50%, then second and third preferences might be calculated into the tally to find a winner.

The History of Proportional Representation in British Columbia

The Green Party is not the only provincial party in favour of some sort of proportional representation. The New Democratic Party membership endorsed it at its 2001 party convention, and the Liberals have promised a Citizens' Assembly to recommend electoral reforms.

Nor is this the first time that proportional representation would be used in a provincial election. An amendment to the Elections Act in 1951 provided for the introduction of a single transferable vote system. At the time, the Liberal and Conservative parties endorsed the change because they believed it was a way of keeping the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (the forerunner of the NDP) out of power. It was assumed that Liberal and Conservative voters would vote for each other as their second choice.

The transferable vote was used for the first time in the 1952 election, with unexpected results. On election day, only 5 candidates were elected outright--that is, with a majority of the popular vote in their constituencies. If the new system had not been in use, the CCF would have formed a minority government with 21 of 48 seats. But when secondary choices were factored in, the brand new Social Credit League turned out to have achieved a narrow victory, taking 19 seats: one more than the CCF and 6 short of a majority. Basically, Social Credit won because it was the second choice of the most voters.

In 1953 voters returned to the polls and once again used the Single Transferable Ballot. This time they elected a majority Social Credit government, led by W.A.C. Bennett. The transferable ballot had served its purpose: it had denied power to the CCF. One of the first things the Bennett government did after being elected in 1953 was to return to the First Past the Post system. The 1953 election was the last time any type of proportional representation was used in provincial politics.

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