British Columbia voters did a service to the rest of Canada when they killed the idea of proportional representation. In a referendum held simultaneously with the recent provincial election, a proposal for a complicated preferential-ballot system was rejected in a majority of ridings, and supported by only 39 per cent of the province's voters - far from the required threshold of 60 per cent.
Four years ago, the proposal had barely missed the 60-per-cent threshold by one percentage point, and the proponents of PR were hoping that if the voters were more informed, they would warm to the idea. The opposite happened, despite a $1-million “public education campaign” where both camps had an equal amount of money. The more informed the voters, the more they disliked it. With the proposal for reform killed twice in B.C. and once in Ontario, it is expected PR, a cherished cause of many political science profs, will be put to rest in the rest of Canada.
Perhaps the formula, called STV for “single transferable vote,” was too confusing. Perhaps the voters felt they just didn't need to change a system that, by and large, works rather well despite its flaws. Most likely, the sight of what's happening in Ottawa, where three successive minority governments have led the Commons into a mess of partisan bickering, gave them reason to pause.
Indeed, any kind of PR system inevitably leads to minority governments. The extreme case is seen in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, whose deputies are appointed according to the popular vote received by each party. They are not connected to a riding and are chosen from a list established by the party's hierarchy. This “pure” PR system, a creation of the idealist pioneers who didn't realize the perverse effects of their search for perfect democracy, gives disproportionate power to tiny religious parties, forces the major parties to build fragile coalitions, and is one of the major factors behind Israel's uncompromising policies on the West Bank.
Of course, no proponent of PR in their right mind would push for a system modelled on Israel's. All the models that have been suggested in Canada, including STV, are various mixtures of PR and the existing first past-the-post system.
In Quebec, the traditional system has sometimes led to severe disparities. In 1973, for instance, the Parti Québécois received 30 per cent of the vote but ended up with only six MNAs. In 1998, the Action Démocratique du Québec had just one MNA with 12 per cent of the vote, and the PQ formed the government even though it had received 28,000 fewer votes than the Liberal Party. Depending on their electoral experiences, both the péquistes and the Liberals toyed with the idea of PR at one time or another, but dropped it as soon as they got luckier at the polls.
Proportional representation “looks” more democratic because it would greatly diminish the disparities between the popular vote and the representation in the house, but at too big a cost.
The first byproduct of PR is a string of minority governments that engender instability and endless negotiations between parties. Secondly, PR creates second-class representatives, who are beholden to the party's bureaucracy rather than to the voters. Thirdly, it encourages the formation of small, single-interest parties, which would be content to elect three or four vocal representatives without feeling the need to influence the major parties, which are the only ones who can really act on a problem.
Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, to name just one of the activists whose only hope to get elected is through a PR system, would be more effective if she were a cabinet minister than the head of a tiny party that will never get much more than 4 per cent of the national vote.
Would women or gay rights or the environment been better served if their proponents had marginalized themselves in tiny political parties instead of entering the political mainstream and joining the major parties to push for their ideas? Certainly not.
