UBC Professor Maxwell Cameron, who is the Director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, is explaining Proportional Representation (PR) this week.
One form of PR that British Columbians may chose on the ballot called Rural Urban Proportional or RUP.
He says rural areas like the Kootenays would retain Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) while city centres would move towards a Single transferable Vote under the RUP system.
For example, six ridings in Vancouver would be grouped together forming a larger riding where six MLAs are elected based off a ranking system.
“This is a system called Single Transferable Vote,” explains Cameron. “The ballot lists a number of candidates and parties can choose how many candidates they wish to run and instead of having one vote, you actually get to rank as many as you like.”
Once the top ranked MLA is chosen, that name is removed from the ballot and the next top ranked MLA is voted in, giving voice to people’s second and third choices and so on.
The STV system will not be implemented in larger and sparsely populated areas like the Kootenays if RUP gets voted in. Cameron gives the reason why the adoption of STV makes sense in densely populated areas but not rural areas.
“The reason why (STV) seems acceptable in urban areas is because of the dense concentration of people and so it doesn’t seem problematic in a place like the Lower Mainland, you would have a number of those kind of multi member ridings. But you wouldn’t necessarily want to do that in rural areas because again, these are substantial geographic areas and combining them into multi-member districts might mean that you would lose some of the kind of capacity to represent what’s specific about an individual rural riding.”
In 2002, just under 58% of British Columbians voted in favour of province-wide STV, however it was not enough for change.
This time the mix of STV in city centres and MMP in rural areas is being touted as an improvement over the 2002 STV system which failed to pass.
For more details, watch the video below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FIaGeiNikQ#action=share