Nick Loenen: BC STV Gets Positive Response in the Shuswap

Here's the second in our series of "Tales from the Trail".  Nick Loenen has been travelling all around BC talking about how BC STV works. Here's a story that comes from the Shuswap Valley.

I have been privileged to make many presentation explaining how STV works and what its likely affects will be on BC politics and government. Often the best contributions come not from me but from the audience and sometimes in unexpected ways.

Recently in a small town along Highway #1 in the Shuswap about twenty people spent 20 minutes listening politely to my presentation and then started to pepper me with questions about the large ridings and the prospect of filling in a ballot with upwards of a dozen candidates. Try as I might, more objections kept streaming in until I felt a little discouraged. Was I getting through at all?

Next was a very pleasant lady with a wide smile, she wanted to make a comment and tell a story. She was a recent arrival from New Zealand and related with great enthusiasm how that country’s switch to a proportional voting system in 1996 had transformed politics and the experience of voting. Politics was more consensual and far less adversarial. There was less partisanship and a greater effort to work toward meeting common objectives. But her most passionate comments were reserved for the act of voting.

Voting, she said had become fun, no more strategic figuring out what your neighbours might do, you just vote for who you think is best without fear of losing your vote. No one in her family, she said, would ever go back to the old dark days of first-past-the-post.

As if that wasn’t enough, the next gentleman told a similar story. He was an Irish-Canadian, full of praise for STV, and re-assured all present that any worries about complexity, or difficulty understanding how it works are unfounded. He considered first-past-the-post incomprehensible. How he asked, is it possible that most votes help elect no one and that the majority have an MLA they did not vote for?

Clearly, these personal testimonials did more to swing the audience than anything I had said. From then on the tone of the meeting switched completely to positive. What a great experience and so unexpected!