Dear Editor:
The public agreement put forward by the B.C. NDP and the B.C. Green Party to govern B.C. has some excellent proposals. For me, the most important ones are the commitment to party finance reform and most especially, the plan to hold a referendum on electoral reform in 2018.
The problem with our current voting system (first past the post) is that it has no mechanism to make sure the seats in the legislature match the vote for each party. As a result they never do, and we often end up with majority governments that are not supported by a majority of voters. That’s what happened in 2013 when the B.C. Liberals won a majority based on 44 per cent of the vote.
Proportional systems result in legislatures that are better reflections of how we vote. A 40 per cent vote for a particular party should result in 40 per cent of the seats going to that party. A majority government should represent a majority of voters, and with proportional representation, that’s how it works. What that means is a government elected under a proportional system is more likely to make policy decisions that better reflect majority opinion.
If the election last month had been held proportionally, the Liberals and NDP would each have received around 40 per cent of the 87 seats in the legislature and the Greens would have received 17 per cent. That translates to 35 or 36 seats each for the Liberals and NDP and 15 seats for the Greens. With those numbers, we would not be faced with the current impasse we have in Victoria. Instead we would likely have a stable NDP/Green majority representing 57 per cent of the electorate.
We need a proportional voting system!
Iain Macanulty, Burnaby
