Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon, and welcome to Victoria.
My name is Craig Henschel. Thanks for asking me here this afternoon.
In 2004 I had the honour and privilege of serving for 11 months on the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform with 159 other randomly selected voters. Diana Byford and other assembly members are also here. She will be speaking more about the assembly process in the second session today.
I brought copies of our final report in French and English for the committee to examine, and I think you have them, as well as a small brochure that I've put together for the second referendum to try to educate voters about BC-STV.
I would like to try to give you a sense of our decision-making process and how we reached our 95% consensus for STV, the single transferable vote, in British Columbia.
One of our 50 public hearings was held in Valemount, a beautiful remote rural town of 1,000 people on the eastern edge of British Columbia. One gentleman there told us that he'd been voting in Valemount for 20 or 30 years and that he had never voted for an MLA who had won. He wanted someone he actually voted for to represent him in Victoria. I came away from that encounter understanding that exclusion.
The feeling of being excluded is a major failing of our electoral systems. Shouldn't we all have a say over the laws and policies that affect us? Isn't that what democracy is all about, citizens having a say over their own lives?
We also understood from other speakers that in rural areas, having someone local representing the area's voters was critical. To represent voters faithfully, the MLA or MP has to be able to see the world through local eyes, with local information and local understanding, and take this perspective into their party caucuses, legislative committees, and ultimately into the legislature when voting on the laws and policies that will affect those voters. Assembly members had heard similar frustrations from voters all over the province.
We looked at the results from several elections and found that an average of about 50% of voters didn't actually vote for their MLA. This came as a big surprise to us. We also noticed that MLAs were often elected by vastly different numbers of voters. MLAs who won with a 30% plurality might be representing half the number of voters of an MLA who won with a 60% plurality. Each MLA gets one full vote in the legislature, so this just wasn't fair. Some voters had twice the legislative power of other voters.
When half the voters don't have representation and the half who do have different amounts, it shouldn't be a surprise that election results often don't match voters' desires. If we could solve the problems of exclusion and unequal representation, we could solve the problem of disproportionality.
The single transferable vote solves this problem directly. STV uses multiple MPs in a district to represent multiple points of view. This greatly reduces the amount of voter exclusion, while at the same time keeping MPs as local as possible. STV is a preferential ballot, so that strategic voting isn't necessary and so that the voter can give the counting system a clear portrait of their desires. STV also uses a fair counting system that elects each MP in a district with about the same number of votes.
By dealing with exclusion and fairness right from the start, band-aid solutions like compensatory, non-local, party-list MPs are not required.
The flaw with first-past-the-post local representation is that only 50% of voters actually get local representation. The other 50% of voters aren't represented at all. The flaw with MMP local representation is that the district sizes have to be increased by 50% to 100%, which gives the MP less time with each constituent. The single transferable vote actually improves local representation by giving it to more voters and keeping the same voter-to-MP ratio, so MPs can spend the same amount of time with constituents as they do now.
We also wanted more choice. We absolutely didn't want political parties deciding who our MPs would be. Most of the assembly really liked multi-member districts. Multi-member districts are fantastic. The law commission rejected STV out of hand because it had multi-member districts, and I think that was a huge error. Multi-member districts are fantastic, and in my written brief to you, I go over the different details about them.
I am sure you've heard that women's representation improves with proportional systems, but it is critical to understand the electoral mechanism that makes this possible, and the key is multi-member districts. Academic studies have shown that in single member districts, where a party puts forward a single candidate, it tends to put forward a male of the dominant cultural group. In jurisdictions where parties put forward multiple candidates, they tend to diversify their slates with more gender balance and more diversity.
STV has a far greater potential for increasing women's representation than MMP does, with its single member districts. This was very important to the assembly, which greatly benefited from being gender balanced itself.
It is a really good idea in your deliberations and your process of making decisions to take specific designs of electoral systems for a spin. Try them out. Poke the tires. This is especially the case with MMP, because there are so many variations: open lists, closed lists, hybrid lists, voter-ordered lists, regions or no regions. If you are not looking at specific systems, it is very difficult to compare them and understand what is going on.
When the assembly designed the best MMP system for British Columbia and compared it to the best STV system for British Columbia, STV was favoured 80% over MMP at 20%. When we compared STV to first past the post, STV was favoured by 93% of assembly members over first past the post at 7%. This consensus was achieved not because the assembly members were practised negotiators, but because STV is so much better than any of the alternatives. The assembly then reached a 95% consensus to recommend that the single transferable vote be adopted for British Columbia.
As I understand it, the B.C. Citizens' Assembly has been the most extensive voter-based examination of electoral systems in history. If you choose to recommend STV to the minister, it will be accompanied by significant voter legitimacy. Is it possible that the B.C. Citizens' Assembly got it right? I think we did.
Thank you.