Electoral reform, and why you should care

A couple of years ago ( during the last BC Election ) a majority of voters ( but not quite enough ) voted in favor of an electoral reform package called STV or Single Transferal Vote. STV came close enough to being voted in that we're going to get another crack at it next year n the 2009 Provincial election. STV seems like a somewhat complicated proposal at first read, but I am convinced that it is a much better system than the 'first past the post' system we have now.

Sad to say, the current depressing state of the Canadian federal election would be much less of a problem if we voted according to STV rules. BC voter preferences are a good example of why this is the case. In many ridings, most voters prefer a party other than the ruling Conservative party. If voter preferences were counted in order of preference, I would expect most voters would select the Liberals or the NDP in one of the two preference slots on an STV ballot. So instead of the Conservative party having the majority of the seats in BC, they would have far fewer, in fact roughly the same amount as the percentage of voters who voted for them.

The last time Canadians gave a single party 50% or more of the vote was in 1984, in Mulroney's first term 'landslide victory' over John Turner. Harper's Conservatives have never polled anywhere near this mark except in Alberta. In a proportional representation system such as BC STV, the Conservatives would be forced to appeal to most Canadians in order to achieve a majority mandate, something they have never really tried to do.

Likewise given current polling the most likely parties to form a government would be the NDP and the Liberals, but they could only get a majority by making a deal with the Greens or (less likely) the Bloc. This is exactly the kind of Government I want: a coalition of similar interests that need to compromise in order to share power. I don't really trust any of the mainstream parties to manage a mandate on their own without the kind of corruption we've seen with the Liberals in the past.