On Dec. 10, Hugo Rifkind, a British columnist for The Times, published a Twitter thread about Brexit that went viral.
People seemed to find the submarine-made-of-cheese analogy he deployed to encapsulate Theresa May’s plight quite enlightening: It’s as insane and futile to build a submarine out of cheese as it is for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. Everyone knows it, but onwards they go with the project. Because politics.
Here in B.C. we’ve faced our own democratic stink up – the electoral reform referendum.
The referendum’s result – 61 per cent in favour of the current first-past-the-post-system – was announced Dec. 20. It was so decisive that deputy premier Carole James admitted the debate on electoral reform “is finished.”
(Though perhaps not everywhere. Almost 54 per cent of voters in the Powell River-Sunshine Coast electoral district voted for proportional representation, as did 15 other districts).
The electoral reform referendum wasn’t as existentially critical as Brexit, but it did throw B.C. into a state of minor agitation, and so, with a few adjustments, Rifkind’s Twitter analogy could prove just as enlightening for us, too.
And so. The following is an abridged and B.C. bespoke version of Rifkind’s analogy.
The thing is, the best way to understand Premier John Horgan’s predicament is to recognize that 61.3 per cent of B.C. voted against his claim that prop rep is lit.
Now, John Horgan initially had no opinion about whether prop rep is lit; however, in order to become premier, he had to pretend that he thought prop rep was lit and could totally work.
“If you were woke you would know prop rep is lit,” he told Liberal leader Andrew Wilkinson during the debate, madly.
Before then, he actually got Attorney-General David Eby to make a ballot. It was a deeply lame ballot. Of course it was. It was rushed, and it had two questions and two options for voting systems that no democracy has ever actually tried before.
So then, having actually made a ballot, Horgan had to put up with supporters of his own party insisting not only is prop rep not lit, but the whole endeavour to get woke is a political ruse.
Still, he had to spend 14 months trying to convince us prop rep is lit while the province struggled with a housing affordability crisis, an overdose epidemic and pipeline politics, for starters.
Only Horgan couldn’t call the ballot lame, or the whole endeavour rushed. Because he had spent the past 14 months pretending he had any inkling of what “lit” even means if only voters would just trust him and vote.
So that’s how we got here.
On balance, I think this analogy works fine, perhaps except for the waking up and getting lit parts, which need a little work. So probably best to just call the referendum what it turned out to be: a submarine made of cheese.
