The claim
that Proportional Representation (PR) is the “suffrage question of the 21st
century” seems to assume that all PR systems are worthy public policy and that
one should vote for PR regardless of any possible flaws in the package as
presented by the BC NDP.[1] As
former BC NDP Leader and Federal Liberal Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh pointed
out on the CBC Vancouver’s The Early Edition the other day there is no minimum threshold
required for the current referendum to pass.
In previous referenda it was held at 60 percent, an onerous but
responsible level. But now we could change the constitution, as Dosanjh put it,
with 19 percent of the vote.
PR is also thought
of as a kind of guarantee that your vote will be represented in the legislature
– but by unelected representatives, at least in part, which in turn defeats the
purpose of having a vote, as there is no direct check on these members, save
for party hierarchy. A number of
Canadians complain that our members of the Senate are appointed. Now the appointees could come to the
Legislative Assembly.
Permit me a
return to the origins of liberal democracy in England, to the time of the
Glorious Revolution, when both John Locke - a pivotal political philosopher and
author of Two Treatises of Government
- and Sir Isaac Newton flourished in the late seventeenth century. It’s no accident that Newton’s Third Law of
Motion made it into Locke’s liberal political thinking: “For each and every
action is an equal and opposite reaction”.
And it’s no accident that the two nations Locke’s thought influenced
most – revolutionary England and revolutionary USA – are still most resistant
to PR.
The object
of political liberalism is to prevent abuses of power by means of opposing parties,
binary or otherwise, which compete for legislative power, not as enemies, but
in regular electoral exercises of popular opinion which functions as a check on
authority. First-past-the-post (FPTP) makes
the case that each party – not the voter - should be given a chance to govern
in the legislature, assuming they have popular momentum behind them. As Ujjal
Dosanjh points out, PR coming only one year after the BC NDP mandate might be a
bit premature: leader John Horgan could sweep the next election.
Finally,
the idea that PR is the “suffrage question of the 21st century” is naïve. Yes, the Canadian Charter of Rights and
Freedoms guarantees adults the right to vote, but it’s no reason to make the
vote proportional in the legislature. PR
is not a right. Some Canadians may be
obsessed with Michael Ignatieff’s dated “Rights Revolution”, but as I look
around the world today I see the diminishment of liberal democracy and the rise
of demagoguery – and countries with PR are far from immune. PR is no panacea. I would rather protect my democracy with
Newton’s Third Law, which I understand, than with the BC NDP’s blank slate PR
which only offers public convolution.
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