You know that style of infomercial where some hapless fool completely fails to accomplish an everyday task that no normal person would ever struggle with?
Someone is cooking a turkey but they can’t find anywhere to put down the meat thermometer so they end up resting it on the side of the counter, but then it flips off the side of the counter and they try to catch it and they burn their hand and now the thermometer is flying across the room.
Look out, Grandpa! Oh no! Meat thermometer in the eyeball!
Those commercials are hilarious and a little sad because they portray humans as the most useless species.
I’m bringing this up because one of the main arguments used by the No side of the B.C. electoral reform debate is basically one of those infomercials running on a loop.
We can’t have proportional representation — it’s too confusing!
Ranked ballots? Transferrable votes? We’re not smart enough for that!
If we try PR, we’ll go into the voting booth, get flustered while looking at the list of candidates, mark our Xs all wrong, bite the pencil in half and get lead poisoning and drop dead.
Then they’ll revive us in the ambulance but we’ll discover to our horror that the MLA we voted in is a talking hedgehog and our new premier is a wilted rhododendron. Voting is hard!
In an op-ed that appeared in this paper, the CEO of the BC Chamber of Commerce argued that with the referendum question, “voters have basically been handed a ballot written in code.”
Point No. 1 on the website for No side reasons that “the system for calculating winners is so complex that a confusing algorithm chooses MLAs for us.” Wow, this all sounds impossible!
But is it? Is it really that confusing? Sure, when you open the referendum ballot, you are greeted with something that many people in the social media age don’t encounter all too often: a piece of paper filled with words — non-emoji words, with not a single LOL.
But then you read those words and string them together into sentences and then paragraphs, and at the end of a few minutes you understand what is going on. It’s really not that hard.
And for those who do struggle to understand what they are reading, you can go online to the Elections BC referendum page and easily find a video that neatly explains the questions being asked.
That’s why the insinuation that this is all far too complicated for us is so irksome. Dozens of countries use PR in national elections. Are we saying that Faroe Islanders, Burkina Fasoans and Luxembourgers are smart enough to sort through PR questions but we aren’t?
We’re plenty smart. And it seems that the insinuation that we’re not smart enough is disingenuous scaremongering rather than actual concern about the process.
What should happen here is the removal of all the scare tactics to get to the basic question: What kind of democracy do voters want? There is no perfect system, so we all have to decide which one — flaws and all — we want the most.
With the current first-past-the-post system, which tends to elect majorities, the major decisions are made within political party conventions and then presented to voters. With PR, which is less likely to produce a majority, the path the province takes is more likely to be a compromise negotiated between parties.
So for all of you out there with that referendum ballot still sitting in your to-do box — and you surely outnumber the keeners who have already sent in their ballots — know that you are smart enough to puzzle this one out. I believe in you!
Grab your black pen, fill in your circles and pop that ballot into the weird privacy paper thingy and then the envelope and then the other envelope and then a mailbox. It’s really not that hard.
And then you can celebrate with a nice glass of B.C. wine. Grab the bottle opener — and don’t forget the safety glasses!
aprest@nsnews.com • @Sports_Andy
