“Perceptions,” by Gerry Warner

Op-Ed Commentary

You’d think they were asking you to re-write the Magna Carta!

That was my first reaction when I received the ballot in B.C.’s so-called “2018 Referendum on Electoral Reform,” which in my mind should really be called “The Ballot of the Disgruntled Left and Greenies to do an End Run Around the Traditional Voting System in B.C. for More than a Century.”

The ballot was so heavy I strained my fingers picking it up. And when I ripped it open out fell five pages of instructions – one of them double-sided – not to mention numerous diagrams, pictograms, graphics and bullet points to instruct the poor, dumb, feeble-minded voters how to indicate their political preferences. Does that not prove that the back-room political operatives and strategists, not to mention ideologues, really don’t trust the lumpen proletariat to make a political decision of their own?

You’re damn right they don’t trust the electorate! Even Moses only needed one tablet to bring us the 10 Commandments inscribed in stone. The Magna Carta and its 63 clauses appear on one closely-written page. Go to the British Museum in London and see it for yourself.

But here in political La La Land in B.C. we need an onerous, multi-page document to explain how to do something we’ve been doing every four years or so before anyone reading this was born.

There’s obviously an agenda at work here. Follow Alice down the rabbit hole and you’ll find a group of losers that want to be winners. Since B.C. became a province in 1871, the left has only won four elections in provincial history, really three because the current government is a coalition with a NDP premier. It’s been frustrating losing most of the time and that’s why two previous attempts have been made to change B.C.’s voting system too. Both of those failed.

Given that, don’t you think it’s time to acknowledge the obvious? British Columbians don’t love their first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system, but they prefer it to any other. That’s why they defeated the other attempts to change it. It’s not rocket science. It’s simple fact.

And that’s why I’m sure this third attempt to change how we vote in the province is going to go down to defeat and this time I believe the margin of victory for FPTP will be even greater than the last referendum in 2009, which saw FPTP get 60.91% of the vote against 39.09% for the Single Transferable Ballot system.

Making me even more certain is the fact that most voters including yours truly and the media talking heads attempting to advise us only truly understand one of the four voting systems we’re being asked to choose from.

And that of course is First Past The Post.

Maybe I’m a whole lot dumber than the rest of you, but I’m confused by every attempt I’ve heard or read to explain the Dual Member Proportional, Mixed Member Proportional and Rural -Urban Proportional systems. Apparently, they may involve increasing the size of the current boundaries which are already too large, They may also involve the drawing up of lists by party apparatchiks in order to ensure proportionality (horrors!) and all of them are so complicated it may take days for the results of the election to be known. How crazy is that?

No, this poor, dumb voter is going to stick to the devil he knows rather than the devil he doesn’t. And even though I’m unashamed to say I’ve almost always voted left in the past, I’m not with them this time. And let me remind the NDP and the Greens why. In the 1996 election, former NDP premier Glen Clark won with 39.5% of the popular vote, which was a smaller total than the 41.8% won by the Liberals. In other words, strange things can happen in any voting system.

And finally think of this. If FPTP was in place instead of the Electoral College system, Hillary Clinton would be president of the US today and not Donald Trump. Can you think of a better reason to vote for First Past the Post? I can’t.

– Gerry Warner is a mostly retired journalist, who’s made up his mind on how he’s voting in the referendum.

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