Members of the Yukon Citizens Assembly:
It is difficult to overstate the significance of your assignment. You have been given the assignment to dream big dreams about the promise of democracy, a legislature that mirrors the political diversity of Yukon where cooperation is the norm, not the exception.
I ardently support the Irish Single Transferable Vote (STV). What distinguishes STV from all other systems is this: it places voters in the driver’s seat.
Current system
Voting systems rest on presuppositions about what it is that needs to be represented in the legislature. Our current system represents geographic areas, ridings, postal codes. But many of the big public questions are not restricted to a geographic are. Issues such as health care, education, trade and business, climate change, affordable housing, transportation, etc. are not merely local. They demand all of Yukon work together. The current system is 200 years out of touch with the times. It assumes public policy issues are local. They are not.
Proportional representation
PR assumes that what needs representing is political parties, partisan differences. Representing political principles, platforms, programs is an improvement over what we have. And it may perfectly suit European countries, but how well does that fit with Yukon’s political culture? Canadians have always been more practical than ideological. We are not fond of political parties, in fact, if we could, we would do without them. Partisanship may suit Italians, but not us, we’re Canadian. Why highlight our divisions? Proportional representation, unmodified, cannot be sold anywhere in Canada. It is too foreign to our culture.
Single Transferable Vote
The genius of STV is that it makes no assumptions about representation, no assumptions about what is most important to voters. It leaves those decisions to the voters themselves.
STV gives more choice to voters than any other system. People can choose to support a party, they can choose to spread their support among several parties, they can choose to not support any party. They can choose to support their geographic area through a local candidate, an independent, or support a particular project, they can vote for any diversity, they can vote exclusively for diversity.
STV aims to empower people. JS Mill, the great 19th century political theorist, who was an early and ardent supporter of STV, called STV personal representation. Mill understood that proportional representation is about parties, but STV is about persons. It places voters and their wishes in the driver’s seat.
In the current system you have one vote, that vote must express your choice of local candidate, your choice of political party, your choice of premier and your choice of public policies. Giving an X to one candidate is to express total, complete agreement with that candidate, that party, that platform, that premier. That is completely unrealistic. That is not how people feel, ever. In contrast, STV allows voters to rank candidates, parties, leaders, platforms. It registers voter preferences across a wide assortment of politically significant questions.
STV does not aim to be proportional. Any proportionality is a happy, incidental by-product. Its aim is to give voice to voters and let them decide. That is the essence of democracy.
Also this, some will urge you to adopt Mixed Member Proportional (MMP). It is said to combine the best of both. It also combines the worst of both. MMP aims to represents both geography and political party. Why select a system that makes the choice of what should be represented for you? Particularly, when it is possible to give people the opportunity to make such choices for themselves?
Single Transferable Vote will …
provide local representation
yield near-proportional results
waste fewer votes
meet both rural and urban needs
increase voter choice
eliminate safe seats
Single Transferable Vote, more than any other system, has potential for:
effective local representation
less party discipline
less polarization in Yukon politics
fewer wild lurches in public policies
enabling the legislative assembly to hold government accountable
giving MLAs a legislative role
electing independents
cleaning up the nomination process
Because it addresses a broad range of governance problems, the 2005, BC Citizens Assembly, after meeting for a year almost unanimously recommended STV. In the subsequent referendum STV enjoyed fifty-eight percent support overall and majority support in all but two constituencies. Yet it failed because political interests had decreed the referendum would require sixty percent support.
A referendum is appropriate, but it should be a confirmation referendum after a test-run of two elections. That will give Yukon voters a clear, unambiguous understanding of what the referendum is about. New Zealand did it that way, so should the Yukon.
Nick Loenen, former Richmond, BC City Councillor and MLA has written extensively on electoral reform including his 1997 Citizenship and Democracy, a case for Proportional Representation. Nick can be reached at nloenen76@gmail.com
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