To the editor:
At the time of writing it is 12 days after the B.C. election and it is still not clear who will form our next government, although it seems likely that the constituency of Courtney-Comox, in which the NDP was leading by 9 votes, will switch over to the Liberals once all of the Absentee ballots are counted, since many of the Absentee ballots were cast by Armed forces personnel. One more riding is all that the Liberals would need to obtain a razor-thin majority of 44 out of 87 seats. It would be ironic if a strong Conservative candidate, Leah McCulloch, were to keep that right-wing vote split big enough to keep the NDP candidate in, and if that, in turn, were enough to put an NDP-Green coalition in power……… but then, that is how our crazy system works.
For years, the debate between Greens and New Democrats has been about whether votes for the former actually served to advance their own interests, or whether they simply split the “progressive” vote and kept the Liberals in power. The answer so far in this election seems to be: a bit of both. It does appear that disaffected Liberal voters went to the Greens rather than to the dreaded NDP, and that for the time being that fact has kept Christy Clark in power.
But it is also true that the Green shift may be strong enough to force the Liberals to ban corporate and union donations and at least temporarily delay the Kinder Morgan and Site C projects. So both sides of the vote-splitting debate on the left can plausibly claim to be correct.
As I see it, the biggest issue in this election year is electoral reform. Without it, the Liberals could bounce back with an artificial majority a year or two from now, and it would be Business as Usual in B.C. But with even a modest improvement in the proportionality of the electoral system, our politics would change forever. Parties representing a true majority of the voters would have to learn to cooperate with one another in order to make government work in a new, and different way. For one thing, we could all vote for our first preferences without worrying whether we are unintentionally electing what we most wish to avoid. For another thing, all of our votes would count more equally than they do now. And yes, Virginia, that could mean 10 or 12 Green MLAs in Victoria. If that prospect fills you with horror, remember that a more proportional system would also mean that you would be free to vote for the Conservative Party without fear of splitting the “free enterprise” vote. Some people dislike the prospect of four or five parties in the legislature negotiating our common future, calling it “chaos”. I prefer to call it democracy.
Mark Crawford
Assistant Professor, Political science at Athabasca University.