British Columbians have just under a month to weigh in on whether to change how we elect our MLAs.
The PR referendum campaign has already had a few nasty moments, and Melanie Mark, the NDP’s Minister of Advanced Education and Skills Training, was at the centre of the first “gotcha.”
When Mark, MLA for Vancouver-Mount Pleasant, was out door knocking to drum up support for the Yes side last week, she was caught on camera admitting she didn’t have all the details of the three possible PR systems.
We sympathize. The details of the three PR options, dual member proportional (DMP), mixed member proportional (MMP) and rural-urban proportional, take some time to learn and committing them all to memory is no easy task.
We also think Mark was asked the wrong question.
Mark, our MLA Nicholas Simons, and other current MLAs who step into the ring to campaign for either Yes or No should, of course, be telling us whether they support PR and whether they think one option is better than the others. They should also be pushed to explain where they stand on the host of questions that will be up to the legislature to decide if the referendum vote favours changing the electoral system.
Those known unknowns are not insignificant, and for some undecided voters they could be the difference between voting yes or no, or just giving up and running their mail-in ballot package through a shredder.
A committee of MLAs who are currently in office will be asked to decide two key aspects of a DMP system, nine different parts of an MMP system and nine elements of rural-urban PR.
For example, under all three options, they will decide how many seats, up to a maximum of 95, will be in a PR-based legislature.
If the province moves to an MMP system, they will also have to decide the ratio of those seats decided by traditional first-past-the-post and PR (up to a maximum of 40 per cent PR).
They’ll also be the ones deciding if “list” candidates under rural-urban and MMP are on a closed list, where the order of candidates is set by the parties, or open, where the voters can choose specific candidates. For DMP the legislature will choose whether to use so-called “reserve seat allocation” and for what percentage of seats.
We recommend a thorough read of the government’s “How We Vote” report for more details about the parts of proportional representation that MLAs will get to determine after we decide if PR should go forward. And we’d encourage the NDP, Greens and Liberals to take clear, public positions to eliminate some of the known unknowns of PR.
