B.C.'s three major political parties will remain neutral about a proposed new way of electing local representatives to form government.
Candidates in the Powell River-Sunshine Coast riding, Adriane Carr, B.C. Green Party leader, Maureen Clayton, B.C. Liberal Party, and Nicholas Simons, New Democratic Party, all said their parties will not take a position on the referendum question being posed to voters as part of the May 17 election.
The Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform, made up of 160 randomly-selected British Columbians, has recommended the BC-STV system, a variation of proportional representation by the single transferable vote system.
Peak Publishing Ltd. sponsored a public forum in Powell River about BC-STV on April 19, the day B.C.'s election officially began.
Diana Byford, an assembly member from North Saanich, explained how the system was chosen and why. Julian West, a mathematics teacher from Malaspina University College in Nanaimo, detailed the system's technicalities.
Byford said STV was chosen because it provides proportionality, local representation and voter choice.
Byford pointed out the assembly has received some criticism for not stating what ridings would look like if the system was adopted, but that is the responsibility of the Boundary Commission.
Ridings would have from two to seven MLAs, because proportionality can't be achieved by choosing representatives one at a time, West said.
"If you make decisions one by one, any minority votes that are made within a single-member riding are just lost."
About 130 people attended the event, which included time for questions and answers. Some of the questions were about how the Powell River-Sunshine Coast riding would be redrawn, what advantage STV has over other proportional systems, what would happen if an MLA died and what happens to people's votes in the counting.
In BC-STV, voters mark their ballots by ranking candidates in the order of their preference.
If no candidate has the minimum number of votes to be elected, the candidate with the fewest is eliminated. All of the eliminated candidate's votes are then redistributed to the second preference candidates as marked on each ballot.
If a candidate has more votes than needed to win a seat, the votes are redistributed, but not at full value. The portion of each vote used to give the elected candidate a quota stays with the candidate, and the unused portion is transferred.
For example, Byford explained, imagine a vote is worth $1, but the candidate with surplus votes needs only 90 cents. The remaining 10 cents on everyone's ballot who had that candidate as their first preference moves on to the second choice.
Carr said within the Green Party, there was a range of opinions about BC-STV.
"I, as leader, am representing the neutrality of the party overall," she said.
Because Green Party candidates have freedom of choice, she said, many will come out in favour of STV, "because it is the system that gives us right now the chance to improve upon the system we've had in the past."
Clayton said, while the B.C. Liberal Party does not have a position, in her opinion the future is about collaborative government.
"I think that in the past, when parties got elected with less than 50 per cent, we did not get a true mandate," she said. "For me, personally, I will be looking to a system that will change that."
Simons said he has found it difficult to accept that voters have a choice between a bad system that is currently in place and a system that hasn't been properly defined, including the lack of electoral boundaries.
"The government will set up the electoral boundaries," he said. "There are land mines of vested interests all over the place and I think we are having to be concerned about that as citizens."
