No one asked for this but here it is anyways.....
Today I had a conversation with a friend of mine about the failure of the proportional representation referendum. It went a little something like this:
"What is that?" they said.
"You mean Proportional Representation?"
"Yea". I tried to explain it without falling down some Alice in Wonderland social studies rabbit hole.
"It's when the percentage of votes a party gets matches the percentage of seats they get in the legislature"
"We don't have this now?" they said.
"No, not at all."
"And that's supposed to be better?" they said.
"Well, I think so, yea. It forces the parties to work together more and it better reflects the will of the voters. A lot of Europe has used it for ages"
We chatted a bit more about how deal making between political parties works in proportional representation systems before moving to on to more interesting topics.
I have a lot of respect for this friend, so I don't fault them at all for not knowing more about the PR referendum. I think the fact they weren't more aware is an example of the failure of those in favour of PR to have articulated a message that made the case for support. The conversation was a reflection on a failure in political marketing. They, along with 59% of the eligible public, did not care enough to vote in the referendum. So with this story, I give you in no particular order, some observations about the 2018 BC Proportional Representation Referendum:
1) The BC NDP government is going to catch shit from all sides about this for a week or two, but it probably doesn't matter at all.
There are a lot of people criticizing the way the ballot question was set up for various reasons. Andrew Wilkinson, Bill Tieleman, and others who opposed PR, repeatedly claimed that the question was set up to favour PR winning. Now that PR has been defeated, many are saying the ballot question doomed PR from the start by over complicating things. Some have pointed out that a choice between Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) and the current First Past the Post (FPTP) system would have been simpler and given PR a better shot at success. Inevitably, there will be criticism about the cost of the referendum ($14.5 million for what ended up being much ado about nothing). And there are already crack-pot conspiracy theories alleging that the government secretly wanted this referendum to fail, in order to trigger an election in the hopes of securing a majority (this seems pretty unlikely to me. The BC NDP waited 16 long years to return to government and they need all the time they can get to raise funds for the next campaign). People on the internet say all kinds of things. The point is, this is the kind of situation where everyone is unhappy, even the winners ("why did we have to do this in the first place?" they ask, not without good reason). But none of this really matters anyway because.....
2) BC voters just don't really care about this stuff.
In fairness, Pro-PR advocates had an uphill battle from the start. The issue of Proportional Representation is just too esoteric to market to the electorate. The fact that so few people really understood the issue to begin with forced those in favour of PR to educate the voter before encouraging them how to vote, which rarely works out well. To succeed in political persuasion canvassing, you have to connect with something your target already cares about and then relate that back to your cause, instead of trying to convince them to care about something they currently do not.
Electoral reform is very much "inside baseball", which is to say it's something that you are unlikely to get excited about without already being passionate about politics. I don't mean to condescend the public; on the contrary, I know voters are smart enough to distrust the options presented to them come voting time. But they are far more concerned with issues that have a material impact on their lives, such as the cost of car insurance or dental care or housing. Ultimately, the Pro-PR campaign failed to articulate how a PR system would make a difference in the lives of the people of BC today. (How will PR make my rent go down? How will it improve my life directly? I don't know if these arguments were ever really made). They forgot to "Connect to Impact" as they say in marketing-speak.
It's always difficult to discover that most people do not care about the thing you care about passionately. Advocates of PR today are forced to confront the reality most people do not have a reason to engage in a comparative analysis about the nuances of various proportional systems of election. Like, I love following politics, and even I think this is a total snooze fest. This is the sort of thing you find third or fourth year poli-sci students arguing about while getting drunk before going home to sleep in their mothers basement.
Sigh. Why oh why did I take poli-sci. I digress.
3) Some of Andrew Wilkinson's comments about the PR referendum over the last month have been seriously inconsistent.
I know, I know, no one really expects a politician to be anything other than self serving, let alone consistent in their public statements. But Mr A Wilky does seem to be having some difficulty keeping his recipe cards in order.
On December 7th, the Globe & Mail quoted him as saying:
“If less than a quarter of the public chooses to change to proportional representation, and then a fraction of them choose one of the NDP-selected systems, I think there’s going to be a real problem,” Wilkinson said.
Seems like he's got a real problem with there being only around a quarter of the eligible electorate deciding which voting system the entire province is going to use.
Then, today, the Vancouver Sun quoted him as saying:
“Today we saw the power of democracy as millions of British Columbians sent a clear message to the NDP and Greens that their self-serving referendum was not going to be tolerated,” Wilkinson said.
For the record, Elections BC received 1,403,358 ballots (which obviously isn't millions). In the 2017 BC Provincial Election, there were 3,246,647 total registered voters (which is millions, just to be clear). Elections BC received 845,235 ballots voting to keep the First Past the Post (FPTP) system in the 2018 referendum.
845,235 is about 26% of the eligible electorate at 2017's numbers.
Phew! More than a quarter! The "power of democracy" indeed. Wilkinson is spinning so fast he'll make you dizzy trying to keep up. I guess it's fine that only about a quarter of the eligible electorate made such an important decision?
(As an unrelated aside, maybe this was what Jordan Peterson meant when he recently tweeted "No one will do well if we corrupt the very idea of number." Something is clearly corrupted with Wilky's thinking)
4) So does this mean we're having a Provincial Election soon?
Who the hell knows. But seeing as how this is a blog on the internet, why not engage in some wild speculation?
There does seem to be a lot of activity over on the Greens FB page calling on them to take drastic actions, but my guess is that cooler heads prevail. This result, practically speaking, doesn't change anything for Horgan and Weaver. I'll confess I haven't bothered to find out what the latest fundraising numbers are, but my suspicion is that neither organization is financially where they'd like to be before going to the polls again.
Further, people do not enjoy having elections. They don't like all the phone calls, or the solicitations or the people knocking at their door. Most find the signs obnoxious and begrudingly accept the whole process as a necessary pain in the ass. The next federal election is scheduled for October 2019, meaning if we go to the polls provincially in 2019, there will be two elections that year. If we are forced to have an early provincial election, the narrative about why we are having it and whose fault it is for inflicting it on the public will be very important. I think as disappointed as Weaver and the Greens are right now, they cannot risk being seen to bring down the government because of the failure of the PR referendum. In all likelihood, it's business as usual.
5) This will be the last time we talk about this in a serious way for some time to come.
This is the third time we've been through this in recent memory, and it's failed each time. It will be very difficult for any political leader to justify revisiting this issue in a serious way for probably at least a decade.
As Carole James said, "I think electoral reform is finished".
EDIT: Since publishing this first yesterday, my friend Shawn Vulliez argued compellingly that the end of PR does not have to mean the end of Electoral Reform, as the issue of improving our democracy to ensure it functions as needed for the era it is in is much broader than just PR.
This is a really good point. There are a number of other things than can be done to improve voter efficacy, at least one of which the new government has already implemented by passing campaign finance reform.
I think the big take away, however, is that the public can't really be educated about this stuff during an electoral campaign. As Kim Campbell famously said, "an election is no time to discuss serious issues". Another well known quote that applies here is Ronald Reagan's "If you're explaining, you're losing". Those who wish to revive the dream of a better functioning democracy must find a way to connect this desire to something meaningful in average voters lives. It cannot be taken for granted that people will support electoral reform simply in and of itself -- they need good clear reasons for doing so.
I am not sure myself what those are, but I feel like there is a pretty good chance they exist. I hope that the next effort at electoral reform does not forget the lessons learned from this one.
Okay those are my thoughts about this. Thanks for reading!