Headline history: Fight goes on for proportional representation

Headline history: Fight goes on for proportional representation Published 9:30 am Friday, July 17, 2026 The traditional first-past-the-post voting system almost ended in B.C. a little over two decades ago, but was stopped short of the 60 per cent needed.

Headline history: Fight goes on for proportional representation Published 9:30 am Friday, July 17, 2026 The traditional first-past-the-post voting system almost ended in B.C. a little over two decades ago, but was stopped short of the 60 per cent needed. A guest column in the April 5, 2005, edition of the Nanaimo News Bulletin was written by the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform, which encouraged people to vote for a form of proportional representation in a provincial referendum on the issue in May of that year.

If the referendum was successful, proportional representation would have replaced the traditional first-past-the-post voting system in which the candidate who gets the most votes wins. In that referendum, the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform, an independent, non-partisan group of citizens who were tasked with studying and suggesting improvements to how a government’s voting system works, recommended a single-transferable voting system to replace the current system in B.C. STV refers to a ranked electoral system where voters rank their preferred candidates on a ballot, and their vote may be transferred according to alternative preferences if their preferred candidate is eliminated or elected with surplus votes, so that their vote is used to elect someone they prefer over others in the running within a multi-member electoral district.

In the guest column, the Citizens’ Assembly said that, under such a voting system, the voters would emerge as winners. “They would be offered greater choice over how, and to whom, they assign their support during provincial elections,” the column said. The 2005 referendum resulted in 57.7 percent in favour of a STV system, but it needed 60 per cent to succeed, so the initiative failed.

British Columbia held a second referendum on electoral reform in 2009, which also failed with 60.9 percent voting against the reform, and 39.09 percent of voters supporting the change. A third, and also unsuccessful referendum, was held on the issue in B.C. in 2018 that resulted in 61.3 per cent of voters preferring to maintain the first-past-the-post voting system rather than switching to proportional representation, which was supported by 38.7 per cent of voters. But the idea has not gone away as a poll conducted by EKOS Politics last year shows there is still strong support in the province to switch to proportional representation because many people don’t see their political views represented in the current system.