B.C. has tried and failed to change its voting system. Could another referendum be on?

After several failed attempts at changing how elections work in B.C., recommendations from an all-party special committee shows B.C. could once again be about to flirt with the possibility of proportional representation.

Among the 36 recommendations from the committee is a call for B.C. to create a people’s assembly that will evaluate the current process for provincial elections — along with other alternatives — and recommend the best path forward.

It’s reignited a longstanding conversation in the province about the possibility of proportional representation, a voting system where the share of votes a party gets in an election directly results in how many seats they get in the Legislature.

The ongoing back-and-forth over potential changes to B.C.’s election system has been going on for decades.

A previous people's assembly in 2004 recommended replacing the current first-past-the-post system with single transferable voting, a form of proportional representation with ranked-choice voting.

That was put to a referendum in 2005 – with 57.7 per cent of voters in favour, falling just shy of the 60 per cent threshold to pass. 

Subsequent referendums on proportional voting in 2009 and 2018 also failed to win enough support. 

Stewart Prest, a political science lecturer at the University of British Columbia, says many people in B.C. do not see their political views represented in the current system.

As a result, he says some people are aligning themselves with more radical positions or tuning out politics entirely.

“There's a sense that many people are left out of the political process, left out of the political conversation,” he said.

“So I do think there is value of continuing to open the door to to change.”

Sarah Wiebe, an associate professor at the University of Victoria's school of public administration, says B.C. could run an election cycle with proportional voting to allow voters to get a feel for it before deciding.

However, she said it can be tricky to convince parties in power to change the voting system — unless there is a clear signal that it could lead to more trust in democracy.

Besides the recommendation to form a people's assembly, the committee of MLAs from all four B.C. political parties made recommendations on how to strengthen democracy, public education on elections, and voter turnout.