Citizen Legislature and Electorate Show British Columbia Parliament What They Want. What Will The BC Elite Do?

The citizens of British Columbia have proved, once and for all, that the average citizen (chosen as a randomly selected constitutional convention) can legislate highly complicated issues like new systems of electing representatives for Parliament...and when put up for a vote of all the citizens of their province, that the average citizen will turn out in substantial numbers to vote intelligently on it.

Thus, after a year of hearings and deliberation, the British Columbia Citizens Assembly came up with a sophisticated system of Parliamentary elections called "Single Transferable Vote" (STV) and 57.4 % of the citizens of that province voted for it in the referendum. Not only that, but the new and highly complex STV got a majority of the votes in 77 of the provinces' 79 districts.

Unfortunately, that was not quite enough to bind Parliament to adopt it...since Parliament had insisted beforehand that any new proposal needed 60% approval to bind them....as well as approval in at least 48 of the 79 districts. So, what now?

According to one of the principal designers of the Citizens Assembly process, Gordon Gibson writing in The Globe and Mail (Toronto), since STV "undermines the power of (political) parties, and escalates the power of the ordinary voter....for elites this is bad."

It was in January 2005, that 1.5 million citizens of British Columbia received a copy of the Citizens' Assembly's final report. Inside, they found a recommendation for an entirely new way of choosing elected officials in the province.

Over the course of 2004, the Assembly met numerous times, had scores of public hearings, and sifted through over 1,500 written submissions from the public. All of this was done in an effort to determine the best way to elect their government representatives.

In the end, the randomly selected (two citizens from each elected district) Citizens' Assembly, sponsored by the Parliament of British Columbia, settled on a new type of proportional electoral system called British Columbia Single Transferable Vote, or BC-STV. Under this system, voters rank candidates by number on their ballots. The system is meant to ensure that every vote counts as well as to reflect the public's support for a candidate as closely as possible.

You can learn more about the BC-STV system and the Citizens' Assembly by going to their website at http://www.citizensassembly.bc.ca .

Printer Friendly View