What? A Blog Post?! About B.C. Elections? Never Mind...

Well, this is my first post of 2009. I expect that you are less interested than the death penalty or the future of my blog than B.C. politics. I'm writing those later so that they appear first.

The provincial elections were on May 12, 2009. I left on April 30, and voting in advance was less of a priority than moving to Mississauga. I'd hoped to vote in support of the electoral system I previously discussed, Single Transferable Vote. I don't want to rehash the details of the system, but I find the politics interesting, and maybe more broadly applicable.

Essentially, STV promises a more proportional and local system to elect politicians. Electoral reform was a campaign promise of the governing party, the Liberals, and the particular system was chosen by a Citizen's Assembly which I believe was chosen to be geographically representative. The vote has failed in two referenda, and I doubt it will be proposed again in 2013.

What puzzles me is why the Liberals promised to reform the electoral system to being with. They haven't always been in power, but they are the dominant party in BC, so they have the most to gain from an unrepresentative system. I have a couple of ideas. One is that districts would have been combined, leading to less representation of rural areas, which tend to favour the opposing party, the NDP. The other is that the Liberals would still dominate under STV, but election results would fluctuate less. If the Liberals feel they can build coalitions more easily than the NDP, they might not lose much power under STV. Finally, they might have just wanted to take this idea away from the NDP, and make it their issue.

Hey! If you skipped over the previous paragraphs that were all blah blah BC blah blah elections, you might as well read this paragraph. What struck me, and led me to write this post, is that I had never considered the Liberals' ulterior motives for reforming the system. But politics is all about spinning ulterior motives into common principles. That doesn't make STV a worse system than FPTP, but it's important not to be deluded.

I hope you enjoy that I am writing again. Now that I work and have free evenings, I have time to think and write, so I expect new posts will appear.