As we await the final count for one of the most interesting provincial elections ever, pause for a moment to consider what Vancouver Island’s seat count would look like under a slightly different electoral system.
With the talk of a minority government, there is renewed interest in different ways of picking our representatives. After every election, we hear that 60 per cent of the voters did not get the party they wanted.
If this is a big concern, let’s get serious about the options.
So here’s a starting point. Rather than the strict first-past-the-post system we use today, which sees the person with the most votes in each of the 14 ridings being selected as the MLA for that district, let’s try electoral reform, of sorts.
Let’s consider the Island as one large riding with 14 members.
This is not an entirely new idea. Until the 1980s, the province had dual-member ridings in Vancouver and Victoria. Today’s Victoria-Swan Lake and Victoria-Beacon Hill are direct descendants of the old Victoria riding, which elected two MLAs instead of one.
The idea will also sound familiar to those who remember the debates and referendums in 2005 and 2009, when British Columbians twice rejected the single-transferable vote system of electing MLAs. That system would have seen several ridings grouped into one large one, but electing the same number of MLAs as the individual ridings would have had in total.
Using the numbers from the initial count last week — a count subject to recount and the addition of absentee ballots — a total of 363,025 votes were cast on Vancouver Island. Those ballots picked 14 MLAs: Ten New Democrats, three Greens and one B.C. Liberal.
Put all of those votes into one pot and things change dramatically.
The New Democrats had 149,418 votes, or 41.15 per cent of the total. The Greens had 101,115 votes, or 27.85 per cent. The Liberals had 104,918 votes, or 28.90 per cent.
Crunch the numbers a bit more, and the New Democrat vote would translate into six MLAs, not 10. The Greens would have had four MLAs, not three. And the Liberals would have had four MLAs, not one.
So the big winner on the Island would have been the Liberals. The NDP would have had to give up four seats, three to the Liberals and one to the Greens.
Across the province, the Liberals collected 40.86 per cent of the votes, the NDP 39.85 and the Greens 16.74. Smaller parties and independents had 2.55 per cent.
Divided among the parties and rounding off the numbers, that would have meant 36 seats for the Liberals, 35 for the NDP and 15 for the Greens. There would be one seat, or maybe two — as we said, we rounded things off — for the independents and smaller parties to fight over.
We are not suggesting that we pick MLAs based on one massive riding with 87 members; we envision many ridings. Vancouver Island, for example, could be split into two ridings, with seven MLAs each. The purpose of this exercise is simply to take a peek at what might be.
And of course, a direct comparison using the numbers from the election just past would not be accurate, because people were casting their ballots based on the system we had, rather than this theoretical one.
Still, it gives us a sense of what a re-engineered legislative assembly might look like, and might help move the conversation along.
This theoretical system would tend to produce minority governments. We might find out soon if we like that idea.
