Dear Editor: Elections are about choosing representatives. As the eminent Swiss publicist Ernest Naville is reputed to have said in 1865, “The right of decision belongs to the majority, but the right of representation belongs to all.”
This is not the way the Burnaby city elections work. The results of the 2011 election, for example, showed that it was obvious that people largely voted according to party slate. About 17,000 voters voted for each of the BCA candidates, about 8,000 voters voted for each of the TEAM candidates, and about 4,000 voters voted for each of the Green party candidates.
A proper representation would then have been five BCA, two TEAM and one Green.
The actual result was that all eight positions went to BCA candidates, thus denying about 40 per cent of the voters a representative.
Something similar has happened in each of the last three elections.
The fault of course lies in the election system imposed on us by the provincial government. For years our group tried to get this changed, and so has the City of Vancouver, but to no avail. The defects of this system are the same as for the first-past-the-post that we use for electing members to the provincial and federal governments.
With a new provincial government there is hope that we can effect change. Candidates running in the October Burnaby election can do us all a service by promising to lobby the provincial government for a proportional voting system for the city.
David Huntley, Citizens for Voter Equality, Burnaby
