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 us humans as the most useless species in the world, unfit for using such complicated devices as cling wrap or bottle openers without accidently decapitating unsuspecting passersby. Arggh!
I’m bringing this up because it seems to me that one of the main arguments used by the “No” side of the electoral reform debate going on now in British Columbia 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 proportional representation, we’ll go into the ballot box, 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 slightly wilted rhododendron. Grrrr. Voting is hard!
A quick search produces a number of examples of this line of thinking.
In an op-ed that appeared in our paper, the CEO of the B.C. 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, though? Is it really that confusing? Sure, at first glance when you open up the referendum ballot you are greeted with something that many people in the social media age don’t encounter all too often: an actual piece of paper filled with words. Static, non-emoji words, with not a single LOL in sight.
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 B.C. referendum page and easily find a video that neatly explains the questions being asked. There are also a lot of follow-up videos and info pages to further explain the choices, as well as translations into 14 different languages. It’s all right there! It’s not that hard!
That’s why the insinuation that this is all far too complicated for us is so irksome. Dozens of countries around the world use proportional representation in national elections. Are we saying that Norwegians, Faroe Islanders, Burkina Fasoans and Luxembourgers are smart enough to sort through proportional representation questions, but we aren’t?
Burkina Faso? Burkina Not So!
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.
It’s a shame that the debate has disintegrated into a partisan issue with the Liberals backing the “No” side – the side that just so happens to routinely hand them majority governments with nowhere near 50 per cent of the popular vote – and the NDP taking up the “Yes” side. The “Yes” men aren’t bathing themselves in glory either. NDP Leader John Horgan’s proclamation that “pro rep is lit” made me want to grab a stick of dynamite and take back the true meaning of “lit.”
What really should happen here is the removal of all the scare tactics and use of the word “lit” 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 proportional representation, which is less likely to produce a majority, the path the province takes is more likely to be a compromise negotiated between parties.
I’d personally like to give proportional representation a try, employing a fair system in which the number of seats a party gets correlates to the percentage of the votes they receive. It’d also be nice to see the Green Party able to set down a few roots in the legislature to offer periodic reminders that humanity is marching itself into a toaster oven and turning the dial to Broil.
That being said, I can also see the value in the FPTP assurance of knowing exactly who your representative is, even if you didn’t vote for that person. But neither system is scary, and neither is really all that complex.
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!
Andy Prest is the sports editor for the North Shore News and writes a biweekly humour/lifestyle column. He can be reached via email at [email protected].
