Orders of the Day

Hon. M. Farnworth: I call continued second reading debate on Bill 40, the electoral referendum act.

[2:30 p.m.]

[L. Reid in the chair.]

Second Reading of Bills

BILL 40 — ELECTORAL REFORM
REFERENDUM 2018 AMENDMENT ACT, 2018

(continued)

On the main motion.

M. de Jong: As we continue the discussion, now, back on the main body of work with respect to Bill 40, I thought it appropriate, and I’m grateful for the opportunity, to offer some thoughts. Someone observed the other day that I don’t speak as much as I once did in the House. The pages of Hansard are laced with my contributions over the year.

On this matter, I thought it important to offer some views, thoughts, opinions and a perspective on the import of the matter that is before the House, both in specific and general terms, and how we find ourselves at this point in time. I hope the House will allow me to offer my views, based on some experience over the years with the question of electoral reform.

I fear that one of the myths or perceptions that has arisen — I think in part advanced by members of the government and those who are advancing the notion of this referendum and the electoral reform it purports to promote — is that the official opposition, people like me, are opposed to change merely for the reason of wanting to oppose change.

I can, hopefully, dissuade people of that idea two ways. I can say unequivocally that that is not so, but perhaps more importantly on the question of electoral reform, generally or philosophically, I can point to a proud record of having facilitated and encouraged people to turn their minds to electoral reform.

We’ve talked, and people who have participated in this debate have talked, about the referenda that occurred in both 2005 and 2009. But you, Madame Speaker, are one of the people in this chamber who will recall that the question of electoral reform dates back at least to 1996.

In fact, arguably it dates back much longer than that. This province has experimented with electoral reform once before, in the early 1950s. I think it lasted for an election, and we then chose to return to the system we have in place now.

In 1996, there was an electoral result where a government was re-elected. They didn’t secure the majority of the vote; they did secure the majority of the seats. That caused a measure of consternation within the province and amongst people. It certainly caused a level of discomfort and frustration on the part of those who represented the political party that received more votes. Nonetheless, those were the rules of the day.

But it did prompt a discussion that led to a general interest and demand for an opportunity to consider the way we elect politicians to this chamber. Of course, it is well known now and well established that that formed part of a commitment the party I represent took to the electorate in 2001, and it was acted upon.

[2:35 p.m.]

In the course of my comments today, I hope it will become apparent to members and the public that my concern, both with the bill before the House and the general process being undertaken by the government, has as much and perhaps more to do with how this is being undertaken than the what, which is providing people an opportunity to express a view on how we elect politicians, representatives, to this chamber.

Following 2001, a random selection of citizens was asked to turn their mind to this and was asked to provide a recommendation. It wasn’t easy. Anyone that had an opportunity, after the fact, to speak with the citizens that volunteered for that assembly, the citizens’ assembly — non-political, non-partisan — will have learned just how difficult the task was and how much time they spent developing a recommendation to take to the people. It was well considered and well-thought-out. It was presented at the time of a provincial election, and it secured a healthy measure of support — more than 50 percent, in fact.

Of course, there was a threshold on a reported change of this importance that required in excess of 60 percent, and there was a geographic component to that. But we shouldn’t underestimate the fact that with that level of support, there was a fair degree of pressure on the government of the day, the government that I was a member of, to provide people with a second opportunity to express their views.

They did, in the election of 2009. Again the question that was put to the population, as it was in 2005, was a straightforward one, and more information was provided in that regard. As people began to turn their mind to this, they began to ask more questions about how a new electoral system would operate.

I have heard occasionally but not often enough this admission from participants in this debate — and I am happy to make it: no system is perfect. No electoral system is without its benefits, nor is any electoral system without its flaws. But surely, a prerequisite to having an informed decision from the electorate, from the citizens, is that they be in possession of the facts and know the details on how the two options — and in the case before us now, four options — would operate.

What I think we gathered from the experience of the early 2000s, between 2005 and 2009, is that for all of the interest and desire to explore alternatives…. You know, I understand the appeal of slogans. By definition, they are meant to be appealing. When you say to someone, “Don’t you think every vote should count?” I defy you to find someone who would say: “No.” My entry into this chamber occurred 25 years ago, in an election where I persevered over opponents by 40-some votes. Believe me, every vote is counted. Every vote counted in that election.

When you say that to people, I don’t think most people would nod in disagreement. Or if you say to someone, “Don’t you think there should be a better way to do this?” in the abstract and in general, people will say: “Well, sure. There must be a better way to do everything.”

[2:40 p.m.]

It is when people are asked to compare on the basis of the details, when they are asked and provided an opportunity to take what is most certainly an imperfect present system and compare it to an operational alternative — not to a slogan, not to some abstract expression of a principle — that you begin to see people’s views congeal and reveal themselves in a specific way, and in a meaningful way.

Of course, that was the experience between 2005 and 2009. In the abstract, people were very drawn to the idea of experimentation with something new. When they discovered that they would no longer have a constituency or a riding, their enthusiasm disappeared. Not completely. There were still 38 percent, 40 percent of the population that were prepared to take what has now been described as the leap of faith, but that was far below what we saw previously.

As information and facts became known about what the alternative would look like and how it would operate, people’s enthusiasm for that alternative began to wane. If I have a criticism — I do, and I have several — of the process we are embarked upon now, it is that there seems to me to be a deliberate attempt, on the part of the government and of those advocating for this change, to ensure that people don’t have the maximum amount of information upon which to base an informed choice. I think that’s unfortunate.

When I say “deliberate,” I realize that is perhaps a serious accusation. I have enough respect for the political acumen of the people that sit on the other side of the House and the government benches today to know that they, too, study history. They, too, study the phenomenon of electoral reform and how it has developed and evolved in British Columbia.

They, too, understand this basic fact that the only difference between 2005 and 2009 — where the question was the same, where the means by which the non-partisan, non-political option that was developed was the same — besides the result, which saw a dramatic drop-off in support, was that in 2009, people had far more information about how that new system would operate in their community, in their constituency and, ultimately, in the province as a whole.

This group, this government and its allies have no interest in facilitating the flow of that information. How do I know that? I know it because I have participated in meetings and debates where members of the government side — and I include the Third Party caucus — have been present to offer their argument and rationale in support of the proposed change.

I remember, at one such gathering, confessing to the audience my amazement that in a forum where people are being asked, where we’re proponents and detractors, I suppose — on the negative side of the question, or proponents for the system we presently have — the spokespeople for the proportional representation options, remarkably, refused to talk about the options.

It is a conversation that takes place entirely in the abstract and entirely guided by slogans. As I say, slogans are great, but surely, when people are being asked to make a decision of this importance, the people promoting that choice should be in a position, and should be willing, to discuss in detail the virtues of the options before them. I know that there has been some speculation about: why are members of the government unwilling to delve into the details?

[2:45 p.m.]

Why are members of the Third Party unwilling to provide a detailed description and synopsis of how these options would work? There are two schools of thought. One is that very few people, including members of the government, people that are immersed in political life and public affairs…. They are unable to describe, in any kind of a meaningful way, what dual-member proportional representation or mixed-member or rural-urban pro-rep are. They’re simply incapable. I think, in some cases, that’s true, because they are incredibly complicated.

But I think there is a more insidious reason. I think it is a purposeful, strategic decision, because the proponents of this shift understand that as people become more familiar with some of these questions — and more familiar with all of the variables and the decisions that have not been made and would not be made until after a positive result in the referendum — their enthusiasm, as it did in 2009, will drop off dramatically.

I was at a debate and discussion, and I waited in vain for the Third Party member for Cowichan Valley…. I thought: “Well, here on this ballot that people are now receiving is an option to elect people by something called rural-urban pro-rep.” That member and the members opposite are enthusiastic advocates for this as one of the options. I waited in vain for her to explain it to the assembled people. Well, what is that? How does it work?

I waited for her to explain to people that we would actually have two very separate and different electoral systems in British Columbia. I waited in vain for her to describe in detail for the people that, while there were certainly, arguably — she thought — virtues to the change in general terms, it would mean that there would be less constituency-level elected representatives.

There was no indication of how the distinction would be drawn between rural and urban. People were left completely in the dark. It’s not as if the member who was advancing the cause for proportional representation provided a perfunctory description. She didn’t mention the word. This has been repeated over and over in a campaign built around slogans and not facts and information.

Imagine 29 different areas. People want to know, in Surrey, whether they will have 11 — I think it’s 11 — locally elected MLAs. If you’re someone who believes that this is a change worth pursuing, then have the courage to stand up and say to the people of Surrey: “Under any one of the options being advanced here, you will not select 11 MLAs locally. It is not possible.” Presumably, you would go on to explain that there are other virtues to the system you’re advancing that would compensate for that.

The advocates of this change do not want people to know the full story. I dare say they don’t want people to know the rationale for why we’re having this conversation in the first place.

[2:50 p.m.]

Unlike nine and 14 years ago, when the motivation derived from the work of a non-partisan, unbiased citizens’ assembly generating an option that was put to the people in unbiased and non-partisan terms, everything about this exercise we are engaged in today derives from a partisan exercise to secure and cling to power. There is no way that I can think of to camouflage the fact that, but for a political deal between two political parties, we would not be having this discussion today. It was the cost of grabbing power, the objective of grabbing power and clinging to power. That strikes me as the worst of all possible reasons for advancing a change, a fundamental change, to one of the fundamental pillars of our democratic process.

I repeat: the issue here is not whether people should have the right, from time to time, to express a clear opinion on how they wish to elect their politicians. We’ve demonstrated — I’ve demonstrated — that we are wholeheartedly in favour of that. But their involvement in that exercise should not be manipulated in the way that it is through this exercise. How else, as I have heard other speakers comment, do you explain the introduction of this legislation at this time?

The members on the government side, just a moment ago, were talking about this being the fulfilment of some long-held desire and pledge. Well, how is it that in the middle of when ballots are being mailed to people, we find ourselves embroiled in a debate about the actual exercise? Well, that suggests to me that there is a desire to manipulate, as opposed to inform.

I have heard all kinds of examples, some of them quite colourful, about what is happening through this exercise and what the citizens are being subjected to. But it really does remind me of…. Members will say: “Well, when was the last time you went to a car lot?” I do not wish to disparage car dealers. Let me….

Interjection.

M. de Jong: They may be. I remember my last visit to a car lot some 28 years ago.

You go to the car lot, and the salesperson says to you: “Well, here’s a car.” You say: “What kind of engine has it got?” The dealer says: “Don’t worry. You don’t need to know that. It’s better than the one you’ve got.” “Well, what kind of transmission has it got?” “You don’t need to know that either. But I guarantee it’s better than the one you’ve got. Trust me. Trust me.” “Well, what does it cost? What does the car cost?” “Don’t worry. It’s a better deal than the one you’ve got.”

That reluctance, that hesitancy — and those are the polite terms — the refusal to share with people the factual basis, the implications of this change and how these other systems would operate and what it would mean for their representation locally…. Hey, I’ve been on both sides of this in the election I referred to, Madame Speaker. In 1996 — you’ll appreciate this — the party that I was running with actually pledged to reduce the number of MLAs. Kind of great in the abstract, until you actually asked someone whether they wanted to lose their MLA.

People may not have great affection for their politicians, but try taking one away. Yet that is what this will do. It will reduce….

[2:55 p.m.]

It must necessarily reduce the ability…. The member from the Kootenays, who I have some affection for, says that it won’t. Except it will, in terms of their ability, the imposition of party lists, the imposition of a leader’s ability to determine those lists.

We can go through…. None of these questions has been settled yet — 29 different variables that the government and proponents of this change and the Green Party refuse to answer first.

“We didn’t have time.” Now, I don’t know who the “we” refers to in that sentence, but I’ve heard that. “We didn’t have time.” Well, actually, British Columbia had all kinds of time. Two political parties apparently didn’t have time. That, again, is a terrible basis upon which to manipulate a particular process like this and manipulate a particular result.

The ability, the desire, the advisability from time to time of consulting with people about the question of electoral reform is not one you will get any quarrel from me on. Now, I haven’t spoken at all — nor will I, given the amount of time — about the virtues of proportional representation versus what we’ve got. Many other people, particularly in the Official Opposition, have spoken eloquently about how this province has been served by this electoral system.

I think people need to be very suspicious of going to the democratic car lot and being told by the salespeople: “You don’t need to know. You don’t need to know who’s going to create the lists. You don’t need to know what will happen to your constituency. You don’t need to know how many constituencies there will be.” That is something that every single British Columbian should be worried about, because it goes to the heart of what is driving this attempt at reform in the first place.

We will continue to speak out about not just the substance of what is being promoted, but equally importantly, the manner in which it is being promoted and the manner in which important and vital information has been withheld from British Columbians.

I have a prediction. I’ve long ago given up on consulting or reading polls or relying upon them, so I say this without any regard for what apparently are public opinion surveys that show a split between supporters and opponents of what is being advanced here.

I believe this: despite the efforts of the government, despite the efforts of the Premier, despite the efforts of the Third Party, people are going to begin to learn more about these three options. Not one, as was promised, but three — two of which, I’m advised, don’t exist anywhere else in the world so can’t even be pointed to as an example.

I believe people are going to learn more about these options. I believe that despite the efforts of the government to withhold information from them, they will obtain that information, and they will inform themselves as to the negative implications of making that change and what it will mean for democracy in B.C. and local representation right around the province.

We, on the opposition side, certainly intend to do our part to facilitate that flow of information. We, in the opposition, certainly intend to do our part to make sure people have the material and information they need. Though I will say this. It is difficult to overcome the obstacles that have been placed in the path of those who want to make an informed choice. But we will do our best. We will continue to speak for informed decision-making on the part of the citizens.

[3:00 p.m.]

This, in my view, does not qualify — this process that has been unleashed. For that reason, I will be voting with my colleagues strongly against the provisions of this bill.

P. Milobar: It gives me great pleasure to rise to speak to Bill 40. Admittedly, I wish it was on a different topic than this. Just to let you know, Madame Speaker, I will be our designated speaker for second reading on this bill.

As I rise to speak to Bill 40…. From the previous speaker, we heard a lot of the concerns. It strikes me that we’re speaking to Bill 40, a piece of legislation that directly affects people’s decision-making process, in the middle of a referendum, while they’re receiving ballots in the mail. It leads one to consider that either this has been complete, ham-fisted incompetence on the part of the Attorney General, or it’s been a deliberate attempt to try to sway voters at the eleventh hour, as the government started to see support start to erode for this bill and this PR referendum.

Now, I’m still new to this House — relatively new. I’ve heard nothing but glowing about how bright the Attorney General is. So one would have to conclude that maybe it’s the former option as to what is going on and why we’re dealing with Bill 40 today in the middle of a referendum, as people are trying to make up their minds how to vote, as they’re receiving their ballots. We are standing in the Legislature debating legislation that fundamentally changes some people’s decision-making nature. I have a problem with that.

I have a problem with that because we dealt with this bill, the broader bill around proportional representation, back in the spring session. Back then it was a mad rush to get the bill brought forward and dealt with.

Why was this not dealt with back in the spring? Certainly, the government was talking about enabling a second vote, two elections past, if PR passes and goes forward. They were talking about it then. Why was it not part of the legislation? Why was it not enshrined in legislation back then? Well, because it was just a loose commitment that was made, and as the pressure starts to mount, as people start to realize there is no information and there are no guarantees, we see this last-minute ditch to circumvent democracy in a pitch to try to tell people that the new systems would actually be better for democracy.

There’s a big problem with that, and the timelines just don’t add up. I hazard to say that if the members of government and the Third Party were on the opposition benches right now and were watching this debacle of a process unfold, well, the term “lighting your hair on fire” would be an understatement, I would suggest, for the members opposite, because there is nothing about this whole process that makes any sense and that can stand any scrutiny whatsoever.

When you look at the Elections B.C. documents on what this could mean for us, even Elections B.C. has had to use very loose language to give the voters an impression of what might happen. But they can’t actually tell you in their document what will happen. In fact, on this specific bill, in Elections B.C.’s own handout, although it actually references that the government has promised a second referendum two elections after, which Bill 40 speaks to, there is no legislation in place. That is why the precursory language Elections B.C. has to use is: “If a proportional representation voting system is adopted, government has said that after the referendum,” and then it goes on to list some bullet points.

I have a little bit of time today, so I’ll get into those bullet points over the next little short time that we have together here. The interesting piece is that the last bullet point in this particular section says: “Another referendum will be held after two general elections to see if B.C. wants to keep the new voting system or go back to using first-past-the-post.”

[3:05 p.m.]

Now, again, Elections B.C.’s hands are tied pretty hard trying to create this document, trying to be impartial, unlike the Attorney General has been, trying to give people some information. But to the average person who’s not deeply ingrained into the nuances of how legislation works and things work in this chamber, the fact that half a page up it says, “government has said,” but then further down it’s worded as if it’s already happened in legislation…. It really is quite disturbing that that information was hanging out there and developed. It would have to have been getting developed months before this bill came before the House.

The very bill we’re debating is already mentioned in Elections B.C. and would give the average layperson out there the impression the government had already dealt with this in the spring when we were dealing with the legislation — but no. Again, either total ham-fisted incompetence or an attempt to try to inject the government back into the referendum by using the full weight of the provincial government behind them, while we are being told that we can’t do something as simple as a $5 boost on Facebook to try to inform our constituents around this issue.

Make no mistake about it. We can see exactly where this goes. If Bill 40 passes, there will undoubtedly be the avalanche of government news releases and statements being issued out to the broader media, using the resources of the government of B.C.’s communications department to convey what the government has just passed into law. A bill that they’re passing into law, that they’ve given everybody the impression, including Elections B.C., was already there.

If it was simply a promise, why do we need this bill? You’re probably asking yourself. I know I certainly am. Because this bill cannot bind future legislatures to its action. It simply cannot. And the government full well knows that. You know how I know that the government knows that? Because the very piece of legislation this bill would amend right now was amended to make the other rules for this very referendum.

The referendum act was amended by this government in the spring to create the rules that we’re running this current referendum under. So for anyone to think that this piece of legislation has to be acted on by a future legislature, let alone two elections down the road…. That’s disingenuous at best.

It would have actually been, I guess, more forthcoming to people if the government had just left it as a promise, a vague promise. Now, we know they’ve walked away from most of their promises when it comes to this, but they could have left it as a vague promise. At least then we wouldn’t be standing in this House debating, using up massive amounts of government resources for the government to be able to promote their position and try to allay the fears of people that what they’re voting for is ultimately a massive train wreck.

When we start to look at the systems, there is no information. What we’re being asked to do is vote for first-past-the-post or an ideal. That’s your first question on the ballot. Would you like to see the current first-past-the-post system, or would you like to see the ideal of proportional representation? You’re not matching system to system and saying, “Which do you prefer?” to the public. No. You’re matching an ideal with an actual, tangible system. Not exactly a level playing field.

Then we move to the second question. There you’re voting for three different titles, and that’s it. You’re not voting for any structure behind any of those three systems. You’re not voting for anything that’s concrete. Why did the government not bring forward that legislation that would have actually put, in concrete terms, what it would mean with those three systems? Instead, what they brought forward, as a late piece of legislation, is Bill 40, which is a blatant way to try to sway people in the middle of an election.

[3:10 p.m.]

We have three systems to choose from. Ranked ballot. You get to choose your preference. Unlike yesterday, when we were hearing the Premier continually say that our leadership race was done under proportional representation…. It wasn’t done that way. It was done the exact same way the second question on the ballot is being done. It’s being done in a way where you rank your preferences, and you move forward.

We don’t have a leader that suddenly gets to be leader on Sundays and someone else gets to be leader on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That’s not what we have. That’s not what our end goal was. That’s not what our end target was.

For the Premier and others to say that our system of electing a leader was proportional representation is just flat out wrong. But given how many over-the-top statements we’ve been hearing from the members opposite, it’s not surprising. Again, either it’s intentionally trying to make people have a different opinion of what’s happening, or it’s just pure incompetence of not understanding what these systems are — yet you’re championing these systems at the same time.

When you go to the confidence and supply agreement — the confidence and supply agreement that actually enables the government to be in power right now — interestingly enough, their number one bullet was proportional representation. That’s the number one priority between the NDP and the Green Party in this document. The number one thing they want to work on.

The interesting thing is…. If you want to talk about broken promises, it’s all right here in this document. First off…. And they agreed to this. Both sides agreed to this as a way to govern. “A referendum on proportional representation will take place in the fall of 2018, concurrent with the next municipal election.” Well, it didn’t take long for the Attorney General to walk away from that.

It’s interesting, for a government that has no problem shovelling money off the back of a truck, suddenly the single biggest concern when it came to how we were going to use our democracy and choose our democracy moving forward was the cost. That was the excuse for not going to some form of a general election, which municipal government elections…. Although they’re not technically a general election, given that every municipal council and every school district in B.C. has an election on the same day, one could argue that’s a very close second.

That promise — out the window and gone. I don’t know what the point was of even putting it in, if less than a week later, they decided to walk away from this type of a commitment. How much faith should the public have with the negotiation document, moving forward, for any government, if this is how little credibility they put into their own words in ink in such a short time frame?

“The form of proportional representation approved in the referendum will be enacted for the next provincial election.” Of course, that goes on a little bit later on to make sure that the Greens toe the line with the NDP. That’s only if they actually run out the House and make it all the way to 2021. They don’t want the public to realize that. They bury that one a little bit further down the road because, although they like to say they’re all about open and transparent government, their actions certainly don’t demonstrate that.

“The parties agree that they will work together in good faith to consult British Columbians to determine the form of proportional representation that will be put to a referendum.” The “form” of proportional representation — not the forms. Either there’s a spelling error in this document, either someone forgot the “s” or it’s another broken promise by the same two parties that are saying: “Oh, just take a leap of faith. Don’t worry about it. Trust us. What could go wrong?”

Well, plenty could go wrong. If it is so untrustworthy of a coalition that the public can’t even count on them to stand behind their own words…. Yes, I use “words” in a plural sense because there’s more than one on this paper, so if they meant to pluralize forms, they really need to get somebody that can proofread a little bit better. Believe me, I’m not that person. My grammar skills are lacking at best.

[3:15 p.m.]

“The parties agree to both campaign actively in support of the agreed-upon form” — again, singular, so I don’t think it was a spelling mistake after all — “of proportional representation.” Well, we certainly saw that last night in all its glory. We haven’t seen a TV debate at all, but we sure saw the power of the government wanting to make sure that they were living up to that clause.

That’s part of the problem. We have three systems now on a ballot. If the government was truly interested in making this even remotely a fair fight….

I’ll get into the vote thresholds that have been changed and amended within this same piece of legislation. When people say: “Oh, don’t worry. Once it’s in legislation, it can’t change….” Yes, it can, because we’ve seen this government change this legislation already.

The three forms. If they really wanted to have a fair fight on this, why not have one simple question? Why not have one preferential ranked system — second question? Instead of having three systems, why not add a fourth? Why not add first-past-the-post and ask people to rank in order what they feel would be the best system of democracy in British Columbia, one through four, and have them pick that? Instead, what we have in the first question — and hopefully the member can follow me on this because it seems to be confusing — compares first-past-the-post with the ideal of proportional representation, not on the system of proportional representation.

There are all sorts of people out there — and this is why they’re not putting all four together — that might think rural-urban is the best system ever. But if they had to be asked for a second option, it would be first-past-the-post because they don’t like mixed-member or they don’t like dual-member. But they’re not being asked to make that direct comparison of those three systems with first-past-the-post. No, it’s an ideal of proportional representation versus first-past-the-post. Then we start to compare systems together.

Again, if it wasn’t trying to be so rigged and so blatant, you would almost think this was all made up, but it’s not. We’re living it in real time. So let’s go back to the Voter’s Guide, the guide that says: “If a proportional representation voting system is adopted, the government has said that after the referendum, a legislative committee will determine how some aspects of the new system will work.”

Whenever we point this out, the members opposite and the people within the pro-PR side of Fair Vote scream and yell that we’re fearmongering. “Oh, we’re fearmongering. That’s not true. That’s not true. There’s no way that can be true.” Well, it says it right here. “A legislative committee will determine how some aspects of the new system will work.” Yeah, like 29 aspects of how this will work. So no, this isn’t fearmongering. This is actual black and white, right from Elections B.C.

An independent Electoral Boundaries Commission will determine the number and boundaries of the electoral districts and regions represented in the Legislature. That sounds pretty good. That sounds pretty fair, actually. And that’s actually what is expected — that the Electoral Boundaries Commission will do this from time to time. They do regularly.

The total number of MLAs in the Legislature will be between 87 and 95. Currently there are 87. Now, why is that important? Because the bullet point right before said that it would be an independent Electoral Boundaries Commission, and they would determine the number. The independent Electoral Boundaries Commission will determine the number and boundaries of the electoral districts and regions represented in the Legislature, yet here’s the government directing the independent Electoral Boundaries Commission that they can’t go over the number 95. That’s the magic number.

It’s not really independent. It sounds kind of like going to the BCUC and telling them that you’re going to freeze hydro rates and then finding out you can’t actually do that. Again, totally misleading to the people about what the overall intentions are.

[3:20 p.m.]

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t tell people that an independent Electoral Boundaries Commission will determine the number and size of ridings and then turn around in literally the next sentence and say: “But by the way, we’re capping that. We’re telling you, independent Electoral Boundaries Commission, that you’re not really that independent. We’re telling you that even if you want to have 99 ridings, if you want to have 105 ridings, you’re not allowed to.”

You’re not independent. You are now being directed by the government on how many ridings, maximum, you’re allowed. In fact, you’re also saying there’s the minimum number. You’re saying: “No, you can’t go below what we currently have either.” Well, how’s that letting them be independent? I highly doubt they would shrink the number of ridings. But how is that letting them be independent? It’s not.

Again, it’s another little carrot to try to confuse the voter, to try to make everyone think that it’s sunshine and roses all the time. Well, even unicorns give off methane, and people need to understand that.

Those are some of the problems within the actual “How to Vote,” because it doesn’t actually have a whole lot. Now, when they go into that, starting to describe…. Again, these are Elections B.C.’s words. These are their words put out there, with the contradictions, with the assumptions that this piece of legislation we’re debating in Bill 40 today was already passed. So there was an oopsie. But maybe it wasn’t really an oopsie. Maybe it was a preplanned attempt to try to inject themselves into the middle of a referendum while people are sitting at home with ballots. Not really sure.

It says, right from the Elections B.C. site, as they’re describing the systems, how they describe prop rep. Again, when we say this, we get told we’re fearmongering. These are the actual words from the Elections B.C. “How to Vote” document — all the information that you need to know. “Tends to elect candidates from large and small parties and result in multi-party or coalition governments.”

When we point that out, we’re fearmongering that there’s going to be smaller parties controlling the coalition, even though it’s actually happening in real time right in front of our eyes, where you see a party with three seats controlling what’s happening in this House and propping up the government and walking away from all sorts of promises they’ve made even about proportional representation.

The one thing you would think they would actually live up to is their commitments around proportional representation and how the vote would unfold, but that just went totally out the window — not even with an updated addendum, explaining to people: “Well, you know what? We’ve changed our agreement.” We’ve got a $1 million secretariat. You’d think they could have figured out a way to pay for the editing of the document to update it. But no, they didn’t do that. But we’re the fearmongers out of all of this.

Then you look and you see…. Oh, look at that. Districts under first-past-the-post…. Again, from Elections B.C.’s own document: “Districts are smaller than in proportional systems.” Under first-past-the-post, under our current system, electoral districts are smaller than under proportional systems. Directly from the Elections B.C. document.

You don’t get to have it both ways. You don’t get to wrap yourself in this independent body of Elections B.C. and say, “Oh, well, their document — see, it’s all right there,” and then whenever we point out what’s actually in their document, we’re fearmongering. You either accept their document as accurate, or you don’t. But if it’s accurate, we’re not fearmongering. If it’s accurate, we’re pointing out the facts, as spelled out by Elections B.C.

The pro–prop rep people don’t want you to hear any of that. No. What they would prefer is that you blindly go in and…. What is it called? Oh, that’s right: a leap of faith. Just take a great leap of faith with two parties that can’t even live up to basic promises about how the question would be structured in the referendum. Take a leap of faith with two parties that have gerrymandered as much as they possibly could in this process to the point we’re now debating legislation as it directly affects people’s decision-making abilities in the middle of the election.

This isn’t even like just pre-writ period. This is the equivalent, and maybe they’ll wind up doing this…. Because when the House dissolves for an election in the writ period, we’re no longer MLAs, but the cabinet still exists. I would fully expect this current crew will probably call a cabinet meeting mid-election and offer everybody a chicken in every pot or something like that, just to try to make sure that everyone understands that they’re listening to them. They’ll call a cabinet meeting and add to the kitty so that people mid-election will find out and maybe sway their vote a little bit.

[3:25 p.m.]

That’s what this is the equivalent of. This is trying to interfere in the middle of an election period by introducing new information, by introducing new legislation that should have been taken care of. And if it hadn’t been, they should have remained silent on it, not trying to pretend that they’re still being neutral in the Attorney General’s office by bringing this forward. It should have been: “No, we’ll wait until after.”

That’s why it was so disappointing the hoist motion didn’t move forward yesterday, as well, because that would have given a six-month delay in something that isn’t supposed to be triggered for 3½ years anyway. What difference did the hoist motion make to let it delay for six months? Oh, because they wouldn’t be able to stand up and say that they passed legislation, which they know can get repealed anyway, in the middle of an election.

Let’s look at the three systems. Dual-member proportional. Sounds wonderful in name. What does it mean? What does dual-member proportional mean? Oh, strangely enough, dual-member proportional is not currently in use anywhere in the world, so there’s no actual relevant example you can point to and at least get an idea of where they may be headed with this.

No. Dual-member proportional is one of those lovely ideals that has 29 things that, after you take your leap of faith, the government will pat you on the head and tell you what’s good for you. What we’ve seen so far is that the only thing they seem concerned about is figuring out what’s good for them and their Green partners.

Mixed-member. Mixed-member is in use in parts of the world, and mixed-member routinely gets rejected when we’ve had independent citizens’ assemblies look at systems. But at least it’s in use. At least the Attorney General put one system of the three in the referendum that actually is in use somewhere in the world.

Again, we’re left to guess. We’re left to guess what the size of our riding will be. We’re left to guess how many MLAs you will have. We’re left to guess whether or not there will be geographic restrictions on how those appointed MLAs come in and out of ridings. We’re left to guess all of those.

What we hear from people who are pro-PR is: “Don’t worry. Then I’ll have someone representing me in my area that represents my views.” Well, there is no guarantee, in my area, if you voted Green, that you’re getting appointed a Green MLA when they start to balance out where all the MLAs have to represent. There’s no guarantee, if you voted for the NDP, that you’re getting an NDP MLA There’s no guarantee you’re getting another B.C. Liberal MLA. Just that there’ll be a balancing pool.

That’s all that there will be: a balancing pool. But we don’t know where they will live, because they can’t tell you that. Again, not fearmongering, just facts out of the Elections B.C. handbook, plain and simple, right there in black and white — can’t tell you; doesn’t exist.

Let’s go to rural-urban, speaking of something that doesn’t exist. Rural-urban doesn’t exist anywhere. In fact, it’s my understanding that rural-urban was actually designed by the organization that’s now the pro-PR champion. Isn’t that convenient?

Talk about a nice, wide separation between the Attorney General and organizations that are trying to promote PR. What a wonderful thing that Fair Vote was able to design a system that doesn’t exist anywhere in the world and have the Attorney General include it in our referendum. Aren’t we special? Aren’t we so privileged that this has happened?

Let’s look into the rural-urban a little bit. With rural-urban, if you’re in the rural, you would elect your members by a mixed-member, which is also, strangely enough, the second option on the ballot. Mixed-member, I would point out, was rejected by the all-citizens’ assembly twice as an option for British Columbia. So the rural people, under rural-urban, will get to be governed under a system that has actually been rejected twice by a citizens’ assembly in this province.

But it can’t be all bad, because urban has a different voting system. Let’s take a look at that system. Well, the urban people will vote under single transferable vote. Now, does that sound familiar to you?

[3:30 p.m.]

It should, because single transferable vote was actually what the citizens’ assembly twice came up with as the most workable proportional representation system for British Columbia, but the only way it shows up on this ballot is blended into this rural-urban monstrosity which has just been a theoretically composed system. It’s never actually been used anywhere. It hasn’t been attempted to be used anywhere.

Single transferable vote has been rejected by the voters of this province twice — not once but twice. The much-vaunted rural-urban option consists of two systems that have been soundly rejected by the populace of the province.

Now, I recognize that everyone likes to think that where they live is urban or rural. Depending on what your belief system is, you might not even want to be thought of as in an urban area. You might take great pride, and I understand why, in the rural lifestyle — a wonderful lifestyle.

[R. Chouhan in the chair.]

I come from Kamloops. Most people in Kamloops would consider Kamloops to be a very urban city. Most people would consider Nanaimo to be a very urban city. They would consider Prince George a very urban city. Especially if they live in, say, Barriere, just outside of my community, they would consider Kamloops to be urban. Kamloops would consider Barriere to have a much more rural lifestyle — larger lots, single-family homes, acreages.

I think that’s a fair assessment around the province. I think people self-identify with what type of community they live in. Unfortunately, because there is absolutely no information, no one knows what the legal definition is, under proportional representation, between rural and urban.

Again, coming from Kamloops, we always just call it Vancouver. “Where are you going?” “I’m going to Vancouver. I’m going to the coast. I’m going to the Lower Mainland.” That’s what you say. I’m sure Kelowna says the same thing. You don’t worry about boundaries. You don’t say: “Well, I’m specifically going to Richmond, then I’m going to go across the bridge into Vancouver for an hour, then I’m going to head east and go over to Burnaby, and then I’m going to move over to Coquitlam.” You just say you’re going to Vancouver for the weekend, to visit family or go to a concert.

That’s wonderful, but that doesn’t help you in legal definitions. Is Chilliwack rural or urban? Chilliwack’s population is not that far off from Kamloops these days. Or Prince George? Where is the dividing line? Abbotsford has seen great growth over the last little while. Is Abbotsford rural or urban? No one can tell us.

The interesting thing is that if you ask people in Vancouver, their perception is probably that Chilliwack and Abbotsford would still be considered somewhat rural. I don’t think many people living in Abbotsford would consider themselves rural these days. We don’t know, and that’s the problem.

We’re being asked to vote on three names. You’re not being asked to vote on three systems that have been defined as to how they’re going to operate within this province. You don’t know where your ridings are going to be. You don’t know if everything north of Kamloops, up to the Yukon border and from the Pacific Ocean over to the Alberta border, becomes one riding. You don’t know if it becomes two ridings.

We see it with health authorities, where you have competing interests of similar-sized cities within that same health authority. Can you only imagine, if it’s not split up right, taking into account those types of scenarios? Because we don’t know, the only way the Premier can answer that question — and he said it very clearly at UBCM — is: let’s take a leap of faith. That’s his new out, his answer, because he can’t actually answer with any detail whether somebody lives in a rural area or an urban area.

I would suggest that most people in Surrey, Vancouver and, probably, the capital regional district can safely assume that they’re considered urban, but where does the boundary lie? Where does the boundary lie, even on Vancouver Island? Does it just encompass all the way up to Nanaimo and cut off there — go up the Malahat from Victoria and cut off north of Nanaimo and call it a day, and everyone else north from there is considered rural? Or does it cut off just outside of Victoria and the capital regional district area, and everything else on the Island is considered rural?

[3:35 p.m.]

Where and how does Nanaimo fit into this whole scheme of rural-urban? How does Kamloops? How does Kelowna? Kelowna, I would guess, would be considered urban. Its population is a little bit larger than ours. However, a lot of what draws Kelowna’s strength as a regional base is that they have relatively larger communities — Vernon, Penticton — about 45 minutes either side of them.

Well, is Vernon going to be considered rural or urban? Is Penticton rural or urban? What about Salmon Arm? Salmon Arm is 30,000 or 35,000 people. The people who live right inside Salmon Arm probably think they’re urban. They probably want to be considered urban.

I know that economic development officers and people that market areas would want to know what they’re marketing. I can tell you, for a certain industry, especially if you’re going after high-tech jobs, especially if you’re trying to get the people that want to work at home or be innovators and entrepreneurs, it’s a lot easier to advertise yourself as an urban centre than as a rural centre, because rural comes with other challenges. It comes with lack of Internet access or high-speed Internet, or cell service is spotty at times.

That’s what goes into people’s minds. It doesn’t mean it happens everywhere in a rural area, but that’s the public perception. And perception is king, which is why the perception around introducing Bill 40 in the middle of a referendum, while people are receiving their ballots, is horrible. Again, it’s either total incompetence by the Attorney General, or it’s something much worse than that. If it’s total incompetence, it’s a little scary that he’s the Attorney General.

Now, we have heard in this House many times, from the government and the members of the Third Party propping them up, that Ontario is a perfect example of what’s wrong with democracy — a perfect example because of what happened in Ontario in 2018. It’s very interesting when you want to start looking at election results. It struck me the other day as I was hearing this. I thought I would actually look into it and try to get some facts. Again, because they’re facts, I might get accused of fearmongering, I guess. Nonetheless, we’ll give it a try.

Ontario. Let’s see if this argument is strictly an ideology-driven argument because the members of this current government are unhappy that the will of the people in Ontario chose to go in a different direction for four years, eight years. Who knows? It’s their choice. They live in Ontario. They get their free will and their free vote.

Ontario election results, 2018: 76 of the 124 seats went to the governing party. That works out to 61.29 percent of the seats in the House, and they received 40.5 percent of the vote. It’s not dissimilar to what we’ve seen in results in this chamber over the years, both when the NDP were in power by actually winning and when the B.C. Liberals or Socreds — or any other party name you care to come up with — were governing.

Then I thought: “Well, it can’t just be that they’re trying to put this big right-wing conspiracy theory of unfairness out there.” I thought: “Well, let’s look at what happened next door.” There’s another NDP government in Canada that’s right next door to us. It’s been in existence since 2015. I’m thinking: “Well, that must have been a much, much better result in terms of aligning with the ideals of PR, because certainly, the government has never once mentioned the worry about the election results in Alberta.”

Let’s look at those for 2015, the most recent election in Alberta. Ironically enough, Alberta has 87 seats — that number sounds familiar, because that’s how many seats we have in this House — and 54 went to the governing NDP in Alberta. The NDP in Alberta won the majority of seats and didn’t need to cut a third-party deal to try to be able to govern. They won. Congratulations to them.

I assumed that it would be closer to PR. They won 62.06 percent of the seats. Contrast that to Ontario, which was 61.29. So they actually won more of a percentage of seats than in Ontario. However, in Alberta, strangely enough, they had 40.57 percent of the vote, almost identical to what happened in Ontario.

[3:40 p.m.]

Yet we never hear, from the other side, the crying: “How bad it is for the electorate in Alberta. How horrible the democratic process has been, because of what happened in Alberta. I can’t believe people in Alberta have to live with such tyranny, that 40 percent of the vote got 62 percent of the seats.” We never hear that. We never hear that from the other side. They seem to say it a lot about Ontario, with the exact same numbers, literally almost rounding-error numbers. But NDP math has always been a little bit different, so that’s okay. I can understand that, I guess.

Let’s look at another thing we keep hearing. We keep hearing: “Oh, you know this would make things much better. People would work across party lines. People would work together. People would have to work together.” Well, there’s nothing stopping the Premier and the House Leader from working with us, nothing whatsoever. Unless I’m unaware of some piece of legislation that says we can’t work together, there’s nothing stopping that from happening right now. We don’t need to change the voting system to have that actually happen.

In fact, when the B.C. Liberals were in government, I seem to recall — now I wasn’t here but just observing from afar — the occasional private member’s bill that would get brought forward, and the government, the B.C. Liberal government, would call it for a vote. In fact, there was one that the Green Party brought forward just before the election, and it got brought forward for a vote.

Now, I say that because we keep hearing about this nirvana of PR — that all of a sudden we’ll start every day by singing kumbaya, and we’ll have s’mores at the end of every day, and everyone will go home happy and have a nice cup of hot cocoa, and the world will be wonderful under PR in this chamber.

That’s not actually stopping it from happening right now. The only thing stopping it from happening right now is that the Premier refuses to allow it to happen. The Premier refuses to allow private members’ bills to come forward. Right now, if we go into the orders of the day, you will see, in black and white, 20. There are 20 outstanding private members’ bills sitting there.

Not one of them will be called for debate in this House. They’re all stuck at second reading, which, for the people at home, since I have a little bit of time, I’ll explain. When it’s stuck in second reading, the government gets to decide what bills we debate.

Right now we’re debating Bill 40. As we saw earlier, last week, the government needed to change the order to get a piece of legislation through, as is their right. They’re totally within their rights to do that, so that’s what they did. They put Bill 40 on hold while we were debating it, this bill, and they brought in a different bill that we started to debate.

They’re totally within their rights to do that. Every government does it. I don’t take issue with that. I’m just trying to give a little background to the people listening at home, because they don’t necessarily follow, day in, day out, the intricacies of how this place works.

When a bill goes to second reading…. Almost all private members’ bills get the courtesy of second reading. The reason they get that courtesy is because no debate has actually happened on them yet. A member stands up, introduces the bill and explains roughly what the bill is. It gets first reading. It gets second reading, and it gets put on hold.

Whether or not we debate at second reading, which is what we’re doing now…. And although we call it a debate, I would suggest, to the average person at home…. They view this as speeches. It’s not the same as a television debate. It is speeches, where we’re providing our opinions, but people don’t stand up and point-counterpoint back and forth on the fly, not like a television debate would be.

At any rate, you have a private member’s bill. It gets taken to second reading. But whether or not it gets debated is 100 percent in the purview of the government. So although the opposition and members of the Third Party have brought forward 20 private members’ bills that are sitting right now on second reading, not one of them has been called for debate. The government could pick any one of those to call for debate. But the government chooses not to. What the government wants people to think is that if you vote for PR, that will change.

[3:45 p.m.]

Well, we already have a minority government that’s held up by a coalition, and it hasn’t changed. So you’re telling me the only way they’re going to change their ways is if the voting system changes?

Well, all the voting system change will do is result in a minority coalition government that will operate under the same rules of the House that they currently do, which says that they get to decide whether or not to call a bill for debate. It’s a totally misleading way to try to frame up to people that somehow PR changes how this House operates versus how it currently operates.

The only change that’s needed to operate this House differently is for the leadership within government to actually change how they operate and allow private members’ bills to be debated. They might not all get passed. They might get defeated. I think people on opposition sides of the House would fully expect that.

Given that we know, by way of memos, that there’s no way government members are going to dissent with each other, we know they’re voting as a block. We have free votes on our side of the House. I’m not so sure they do, based on some paperwork, on the other side. The Greens say that they have free votes, yet they seem to vote pretty much in unison every single time. So they’re very similar in their thinking.

Again, right from Elections B.C.: “result in multiparty or coalition governments.” That’s what PR does. That’s what we have right now. Yet you’re being told the only way government will actually change and work differently is if they have a multiparty coalition government. We have a multiparty coalition government.

They refuse to call private members’ bills for debate. They even refuse to call private members’ bills of their own minority partner in this endeavour. I wouldn’t want to own a business with them if I didn’t have 51 percent of the shares. That’s for sure. Because the government would sure tell you how things are going to be, because they won’t even call a junior member’s bill for debate.

There is just so much wrong with Bill 40 being interjected into the middle of a vote.

Now, we talked about past referendums. We talked about why information is so vitally important for people, because I have every faith in the electorate. We saw it play out in municipal elections. We see it play out time and time again. The electorate pays more attention when it’s time to pay attention than we give them credit for, and they’re starting to pay attention. Unfortunately, there is no information for them to grab on to, and I think that’s why you’re seeing the government start to panic. That’s why you’re seeing the government try to introduce Bill 40.

In 2005, after the non-partisan citizens’ assembly of, I believe, about 160 people came up with a definitive form of proportional representation to vote for versus first-past-the-post, that was defeated. In 2009, when a very similar assembly was set up, it was handily defeated.

Why I say information is very important is that there was critical, new information added in 2009. People saw riding maps. People saw what would happen to the area they live in and how they would be treated under the system. And in 2009, as people gained more information, they said no in much more significant numbers than the first time.

Why is that significant? Because the promise by the Greens and the NDP says that they will put together an agreed-upon form of proportional representation — not a mixture of three other systems, not a mixture where two of the three systems have never been tried anywhere else in the world, not a system where one of the three has been invented by the very people the government then gave authorization for a half a million dollars to go out and spend and promote their own system that they invented.

That’s not what’s in the confidence and supply agreement. They can’t even live up to their own confidence and supply agreement, and they expect people to take a leap of faith. They say: “Oh, don’t worry about it. Afterwards, we’ll operate so much better.” Well, the rules of this House aren’t changing in this referendum.

[3:50 p.m.]

If the rules in this House aren’t changing and we have a current coalition minority government — which, in Elections B.C.’s own words, tends to be elected under proportional representation — and we have zero of the 20 private members’ bills that have been brought forward up for debate, I don’t quite understand what’s going to change. Nothing will change, except for a rigged referendum meant to do nothing more than serve the political interests of the Green Party.

If you took the percentage of votes from the last election and looked at what happened in this House, the B.C. Liberals would have 36 seats. The NDP would have 36 seats. Without electing one more member, the Green Party would have 15. The Green Party would be self-appointing 12 more people without receiving one more vote in the last election, without winning one more riding in the last election. Our parties would both drop down to 36 seats each. The only party in this House that would benefit under the results of the last election in a PR system would be the Green Party, the same party that is propping up the government.

Let’s look at what other jurisdictions in Canada…. There is all this great talk about all these other countries all around the world. Let’s look at how some other provinces are dealing with a referendum on electoral reform. Because there is a willingness for people to at least have the discussion.

Let’s see here. This is from engageyukon.ca.

“We want to improve democracy in Yukon, and we need your help. Here is the process we’re using to start the conversation about electoral reform in Yukon.

“Fall 2018. We are here. You share your priorities for electoral reform with the government of Yukon.

“Spring 2019. The government of Yukon will create an independent commission on electoral reform and suggest they use your priorities to guide their work.

“Spring to fall 2019. Based on the priorities of Yukoners, the independent commission will create recommendations for what the government of Yukon should do next. They might do research or more public engagement to make the best possible recommendations. You might be asked for your input again here, depending on how the commission decides to do its work.”

Not the Attorney General, no; the independent citizens’ com­mission.

“Fall 2019. The government of Yukon will look at the recommendations and decide how to proceed.”

Now, that is how you put together a consultation piece around electoral reform. That’s what we’ve been saying all along. This whole process is so flawed. This whole process is so fundamentally wrong that it is now requiring the government, in the middle of it, in the middle of the actual election…. You can vote. If you have received your package in the mail today, you are legally allowed to vote. And while you are legally allowed to vote, we are standing here talking about a piece of legislation, trying to amend into law, at least for the time being, what people might be able to base their decision on voting for. It is wrong.

Bill 40 is fundamentally wrong. Bill 40 should not be in the House in the middle of a referendum. It’s just not right. It goes against all forms of proper democratic process. You can’t have an election lawn sign up within 100 metres of a voting place on election day, but we can stand in the House during an election day and debate the rules around what people are going to be voting on? How can you even take that seriously? It is beyond ridiculous.

Interjection.

P. Milobar: Yeah. That’s the other wonderful thing. While people are going to cast their ballot, when you’re not allowed to have election signage up within 100 metres, people from Vote PR were allowed to hand out literature on the referendum. How does that work? Talk about….

[3:55 p.m.]

There are even laws and bylaws in place that say if you’re at an ATM machine, it’s a no-go zone for panhandling because you’re too much of an easy ask for people. We protect people at the ATM so that they can’t get panhandled. We protect people driving to the polling station so that they can’t see an election sign within 100 metres of the polling station. But it’s somehow okay for proponents of electoral reform, who are all trying to espouse fairness and wellness on this, to stand there and hand out their own election literature, harassing people as they’re trying to go in to vote. And we wonder why sometimes maybe people get a little hesitant about going to vote.

Let’s look at what the Premier said in this House.

“For four years, I sat on that side of the House offering, I’d like to think, on occasion, useful suggestions to the government, whether it be in this place or in the budget estimates that happen annually, bringing forward ideas from not just myself but from the people that I represented at that time in Malahat–Juan de Fuca, and I got zero response from the government.

“They did not receive 50 percent of the votes — far less than that, in fact — but they had 100 percent of the power and the ability to say to me, as a member of this place, that my views didn’t matter and that my constituents’ views didn’t matter because of the banner I carried one day four years ago. I think that’s wrong.”

These are the Premier’s words. Let’s take a look at those words, because words do matter in this process. The Premier says: “They did not receive 50 percent of the votes.” He’s absolutely right. Last I checked, the NDP did not receive 50 percent of the votes either. “They got 100 percent of the power.” He’s absolutely right about that too. They get to choose, based on the rules of this House, how this House operates, which rules are not changing in this referendum. The operational rules of this House are not changing. Let’s all be really clear about that. The governing party gets to decide what happens in this House.

He was complaining that he was bringing forward ideas and the government wasn’t listening. Magically, under PR, the government will — in a coalition government, which is what we actually have right now, operating under the same rules of this House that we currently operate under.

The Premier is complaining that he wasn’t listened to in opposition. Well, the Premier has the power to change that, and he doesn’t need PR. The Premier has the power to look at his House Leader and say: “Mr. House Leader, we have 20 outstanding private members’ bills stuck at second reading. We’re going to do things differently in this House, and we’re going to debate all 20 of those bills.” The Premier doesn’t need a positive vote for proportional representation to do that. The Premier could do that starting tomorrow.

Is the Premier saying that between now and 2021, when the first proportional representation election, if this referendum passes…? We’d still be operating under these same rules. He’d still be in a minority coalition government. Is he saying that he’s still willing, even though he admits that it’s a frustration for him, to shut out a full 50 percent of the members of this House from bringing forward ideas?

If it frustrated him as an opposition MLA, and he’s now the man in charge, I would encourage him to actually change that. He has the power and the authority to actually change it. But instead of that, he complains about it. He complains about it as if there’s nothing he can do, and then he endorses and allows Bill 40 to come forward to try to circumvent the electoral process of fairness in this system.

In those four years that the Premier was complaining about not being listened to — man, you’d hate to think what he needs to actually feel loved — almost $106 million worth of projects in his riding. That, apparently, is a government that doesn’t listen. That was a government that didn’t listen. Oh, wait. They did. They provided almost $54 million to Belmont Secondary. That’s a government, though, that doesn’t listen — unless you count the almost $7½ million for the extension to the Westshore Parkway. But he’s probably right. It’s a government that doesn’t listen, especially if you ignore the $7 million in capital for the Pacifica Housing Advisory Association.

[4:00 p.m.]

If you go further and want to ignore the $6.3 million in construction financing, the resurfacing projects to the tune of $6 million in the Sooke area, $5½ million in capital funding to Knox Vision Society for housing, $5 million to Leigh Road interchange, $4 million to resurface the West Coast Highway. On and on it goes.

What do we have? We have a Premier complaining that he wasn’t listened to, when I’m looking at 58 projects over four years. That’s one a month. That’s over one project a month to his riding, and he has the audacity to stand here in this House and say he wasn’t listened to. He has the audacity to stand in this House and say he needs PR so that members of the opposition can be listened to when, in fact, the rules governing this House won’t change under PR. He has the ability right now — today, tomorrow, next week — to actually listen to members of the opposition and action our private members’ bills, bring them forward, open them up to free votes in this House.

He doesn’t need PR to do that. He needs to unshackle his own back benches and his ministers. He needs to allow the Green Party to vote with their conscience. None of these are confidence matters. None of them are going to bring the government down. We don’t need PR to change this. We need the Premier and his House Leader to change how private members’ bills are handled in this House. Then his complaining about the last four years he was in would disappear.

Instead of actioning what he actually has the power to do, we get this sham of a process laid out by the Attorney General that’s built on nothing but lack of information. The funny thing is that this isn’t even necessarily misinformation, in all cases. It’s a complete lack and void of information. There’s literally nothing there when you try digging in to find what exactly these systems mean.

There’s nothing in there that will explain to you how a dual-member proportional system will work, let alone how it will work in Kamloops, how it’ll work in my riding — nothing. Mixed-member is the only system you have a bit of an idea of how it’ll work. At least that one is in operation around the world, so you do get a bit of a sense. But there’s no guarantee.

What the other side doesn’t want to admit or acknowledge is, just as we’ve seen with the confidence and supply agreement, that’s how coalition governments work. Again, Elections B.C.’s own words: “result in multiparty or coalition governments.”

Around the world, those are all held together by documents similar to the confidence and supply agreement — the confidence and supply agreement that says: “The parties agree to both campaign actively in support of the agreed-upon form of proportional representation.” The confidence and supply agreement — the two parties involved couldn’t even live up to that basic piece of it.

Now, there are other parts of this that they’ve walked away from as well. But the fact they’re even walking away from clauses of proportional representation while trying to convince you proportional representation is a good thing…. The best they can come up with is “take a leap of faith.”

Well, I would suggest their actions clearly demonstrate there is no faith in this process. There is no faith in what they’ve come up with. There is no faith in any of this. That is why we’re seeing the Attorney General bring forward amending language in a piece of legislation, while people are casting their votes, trying to change the narrative. It is beyond anything I’ve ever seen in my short time on this earth.

I can’t understand how the Attorney General would think that this is appropriate. I can’t understand, if we were running this process, that the Attorney General would be standing here, as a former head of the B.C. Civil Liberties, and say: “This is a wonderful day for democracy. You guys are changing the rules in the middle of an election process. Good for you. That’s the way it should be.”

[4:05 p.m.]

I’m sure that’s what the Attorney General’s speech would be. He’d be patting us on the back as a government for changing the rules mid-vote. He’d be standing up and saying, “It’s wonderful that people basing their votes on a certain set of rules…. You’re changing them, even as some people have already voted.” I can hear the speech now from the Attorney General. It would be magnificent.

What’s really magnificent is the total lack of competence that has been shown with this amending piece. We’re amending a piece of legislation that the government wants people to believe locks in future legislatures to have-to action. So we’re amending the exact piece of legislation that they’re trying to make the public believe can’t be amended in the future. It is ridiculous beyond compare that that is how little regard for the public this minority coalition government is showing.

We hear a lot. We hear the 16 years, the furtive cry: “Sixteen years, 16 years.” Well, I would point out that there’s a reason it was 16 years. The reason it was 16 years is that the public of this great province we all call home actually told the NDP they didn’t want them to be government. For 16 years, that’s what the public told them. “We don’t want you as our government. We’ve had that act. We didn’t like it so much. We’ve still got a bit of a bitter taste in our mouth.”

It was getting better each election. They was getting a little bit closer. They snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory one time there, not too long ago. But it wasn’t the B.C. Liberals that kept the NDP out of office for 16 years. It was the NDP themselves, with their policies and their positions. The public said to them for 16 long years: “Thanks, but no thanks.” So the NDP kept amending their policy a bit, and lo and behold, the NDP, after 16 long years, won an election.

But no, wait a second. They didn’t win an election. And that’s okay, because under the process we have, the process that the NDP and the Greens are trying to say is so fundamentally flawed that people can’t be governed this way anymore…. It’s so horrible that unless we change this, it’s like something out of Game of Thrones. It’s like you feel like winter’s coming. If we don’t change this, oh my, it will be perpetual winter and darkness. It’s ridiculous.

It’s okay that they didn’t win and are still governing. I can accept that, contrary to what some of the narrative out there is. You know why I can accept that? Because the rules of this House were followed. The public knew what the rules were when they were voting. The public knew, as we went through that election, that if it was a tight election…. There was a lot of talk near the end of the election that it could be a very close vote, and the Greens might hold the balance of power. Lots of discussion. There was an informed electorate that went out, and the electorate said: “We’re okay with that.”

The rules of this House allowed for that that to happen. The rules of this House, as it stands today, allowed for a minority coalition to govern. Yet, here’s the Premier ki-yaying away that for four years, he wasn’t listened to, that for four years, nothing happened in his riding. Well, for four years, he was getting the better part of an announcement every month in his riding.

He’s been in office as the Premier now for almost a year and a half. I haven’t seen a private member’s bill voted on in this House. I haven’t seen a private member’s bill debated in this House. You don’t need to change the voting system for that to happen. We don’t need Bill 40. We don’t need to make some promise that will never be kept to make that happen. We need a little political will to actually follow through on the words that they keep throwing out there to people. But that seems to be a little lacking these days.

When you look at coalitions and you look at this confidence and supply agreement…. Why it’s so important, about the fact that the Greens and the NDP could not even keep the most simple, basic promise…. Even the Premier was publicly speaking about a simple yes-no question. Even that basic promise is in their confidence and supply agreement.

[4:10 p.m.]

Why that is so important, as we look at Bill 40, is because that’s exactly what happens in a coalition government. Under PR, as soon as there’s a vote, there’s going to be an immediate scrambling of two or three parties to try to figure out how to negotiate who gets what, if you’re going to support me and prop me up.

The precedent has been set. It’s going to be written out in a five, ten — in this case, 11-page document. It’s going to get all signed up and taken to the Lieutenant-Governor, who will decide whether it’s credible or not or whether we need to have another election.

What faith is there if you’re one of those minority junior partners, like we have right now, that your first order of business…? In this case, the junior partner’s first order of business was to have a prop rep referendum. It wasn’t the climate change. That was further down the document. We can worry about climate change later. We’ve got lots of time to worry about climate change, apparently. No, no. What they wanted to worry about was proportional representation. We must do this, first thing.

By the way, let’s just break all of the language in that clause at the same time once we get power, once we get sworn in and allowed to be government by the Lieutenant-Governor — all under the rules of this House. I’m not disputing that in the least. But that’s exactly what happens under proportional representation.

If you think for a minute that a new minority junior partner coming into this place would not make a condition of their first agreement be to repeal Bill 40 that we’re debating today…. Well, I could sell you the Massey bridge, I guess, but it doesn’t exist. We’ll have to go with the Pattullo. Maybe we can sell that off in chunks for people. That’s what happens.

There’s this belief, this sales pitch going on, that somehow 40 percent of the vote should equal 40 percent of the power. Well, we have 40 percent of the seats. We have, actually, about 40 percent of the bills sitting on the docket right now. Maybe he could bring forward those 40 percent, and then our 40 percent would feel listened to.

Don’t need to change the rules of the House. Don’t need to change our democratic process. Just have to show a little bit of leadership. Just have to show a little bit of follow-through for your own words and your own actions and actually change how this place operates.

We’re not seeing that any time soon. That’s the fundamental difference, and that’s the fundamental problem with this. It’s a great little tagline: 40 percent, 40 percent. Well, there’s no guarantee under PR that if your party gets 20 percent…. That doesn’t mean you get 20 percent of the legislation in this House. I’m not seeing that anywhere in the literature.

I’m not seeing anything that says that the party that gets 20 percent of the seats and the vote also is guaranteed to introduce 20 percent of the legislation. That’s how that 20 percent gets their voice heard in this place, if that’s what the Premier was complaining about for the last four years.

But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re just talking about how many seats you sit. We’re not talking about how you divvy up the legislative calendar, how you enact change. How you enact change is that, instead of rhetoric about doing politics differently, like we hear from the Green Party….

I don’t know. Maybe they could actually vote against a government bill the odd time — not one that’s going to bring the government down. That wouldn’t contravene their agreement. In fact, it says right in there that they’re allowed to. They’re actually allowed to vote against the government, as long as it’s not going to bring them down. Haven’t seen them do it. It sounds really good in theory.

You know what else is in theory? At least two of these three systems they want us to vote on. If they can’t even demonstrate by their own actions, their own conduct, how these systems would actually work in real time, I guess that explains why the Premier says: “Just take a leap of faith. Just trust me. It’ll all be good.” Well, it’s kind of hard to trust.

The other problem with that statement is…. “Just trust me and take a leap of faith” is one thing, but you don’t change your whole electoral system and base it on the personalities of two people that, for the time being, happen to be getting along. I know there are a lot of people out there supporting PR that think it’s inevitable that the Greens and the NDP will always form the same coalition. I’ve got news for them. That’s not always the case.

[4:15 p.m.]

If there had been an agreement cut the other way, I guarantee you — especially after 16 years of practising heckling from the opposition benches and with another four years in front of them — we’d be hearing loud and clear if we came up with such a sham, a debacle, a complete embarrassment of an electoral vote like this, and rightfully so, frankly. But I hazard to guess, given our track record of doing referendums and how we brought them forward twice, that wouldn’t have happened.

The sheer number of things in this whole process that are just ridiculous to the extreme…. It really is. It’s almost like you’re watching an HBO sitcom or a Netflix sitcom, where they’re chronicling some incompetent government trying to bumble its way through rigging and getting a result that they want.

You have to wonder — you know, you hear it out there — are they tanking this on purpose? It is beyond ridiculous that we have an Attorney General — who used to be the head of B.C. Civil Liberties, who keeps trying to insist he’s neutral in this, which is laughable in the extreme — who would actually, truly think it was appropriate to bring forward a piece of legislation like Bill 40 while people are literally sitting at their homes right now with the legal ability and right to vote.

They can be casting their vote. I cannot believe that trying to change some of the parameters and put into law some of the parameters…. People are making a decision on how they may or may not cast their vote, and doing that in the middle is somehow okay? It’s ridiculous.

I’ll tell you, from the handouts at polling stations to regular Elections B.C. rules around what you can or can’t do on election days…. But apparently, this doesn’t count as an election day. It’s the only election day I’ve ever seen where I can legally vote, but it is not considered an election day.

We’re not really sure what the official election day is, because the Attorney General hasn’t clarified that. But it is a viable, open election period. Here we are, standing in this House, trying to debate and change the very rules that may fall out of this, rules that we know can get changed in a moment’s notice after this vote has happened, rules that wouldn’t have to be enacted till 2021, because that would be the first PR vote.

Let’s use the two extremes. You’re either going to have four years and another four years — which is eight, which I highly doubt, because it’s going to be new — and there’s just going to be a blood sport when it comes to negotiations and throwing each other under the bus. So let’s say it goes the whole eight years, and 2021 has to be the first election. So you’re talking 2029.

Let’s deal with it right now, in the middle of the vote. It’s critical we do that. Let’s take care of this in the middle of the vote, because we need to have this in place for 2029. If it’s not done this week, oh, we won’t make the deadline for 2029.

Let’s assume that under PR, it’s not dissimilar to what we see in Italy. That would mean that if 2021 was our first election, this would have to take place by 2023, because that would be our second general election. Governments would come and go and come and go and slingshot around, just like they do in Italy, just like they do all over the world.

Those are your two extremes. We’re dealing with some­thing in October of 2018, meddling in the middle of an election process, because of the great urgency to have it in place in legislation before 2023 at the earliest. If that doesn’t scream ridiculous, I don’t know what does — that we need to have this in place for five years from now and we need to be dealing with it now, in the middle of a referendum. It was either intentionally missed in the spring, when we dealt with this, or it’s intentionally being inserted right now.

As I said at the beginning, it’s either incredible incompetence on the handling of this file, or there’s been zero proper consideration given to the ramifications of proper electoral process while we’re being asked to trust three unknown electoral processes that are all going to be sunshine and roses for us and that this government and the Green Party members will not have any strange clauses come out after the fact.

[4:20 p.m.]

When this government and the Green Party members can’t even live up to their own language in their own document…. I certainly didn’t write that confidence and supply agreement. No one on this side of the House wrote that confidence and supply agreement. You know who wrote the confidence and supply agreement? The Green Party and the NDP wrote the confidence and supply agreement. And you know what they did? They broke it. They didn’t break it to each other. No, that one they’ve been very clear about. They’ve made sure that the two of them haven’t broken any clauses as it relates to how they’re going to work together.

The only clauses they’ve broken so far, as it relates to proportional representation, were the words of trust they were offering to the public. The words of trust they offered to the public, saying: “We are going to pick one form of proportional representation and put it up against first-past-the-post.” Those are their words in their document to the public. Instead, what we have are three systems — two of which are made up — on a secondary question. Their new word is: “Trust us, when it comes to those other 29 procedural ways, that this will be implemented.”

Well, if the public couldn’t even trust them to follow through on the most basic language in their own document that they created, how can they possibly trust them to deal with the 29 complicated pieces — each one with a ramification that impacts the other decision — post-vote? You can’t, because they have not given the public any reason to trust them. They really don’t.

The public is fully in their rights to be skeptical about this. The public should be very concerned about this. The public should be asking themselves what exactly it is the government is hiding from them and why they won’t come up with proper details about how all these will actually work. Because governments…. I hate to break it to the members opposite. Maybe it’s because it’s been so long since they’ve been in government that they don’t realize this, but people have a natural distrust toward government in the first place.

Well, the folks on the other side have done nothing to dispel any of that with this sham of a process that has been designed for a very specific outcome. Instead, what we have is an Attorney General running around, patting himself on the back. He keeps insisting no one’s happy with the process, so it must be good. What a strange way to govern.

What a strange way to come up with an electoral process, where your claim to fame is that you insist that no one likes it. Yet one of the groups that you keep saying doesn’t like the process — their system has been handpicked to be in this process. They’ve been handpicked to actually be the official proponent for this process. I have a hard time believing that they’re really that upset with the Attorney General, despite how much he wants to try to promote that.

For this and many other reasons, I cannot support Bill 40. It is nothing but a crass attempt to try to manipulate the electoral outcome of a system whose rules in this House would not change anyway, under this vote, a system in this House that could change tomorrow, if the Premier and the Government House Leader chose to do that.

The Government House Leader and the Premier tomorrow could, under our existing rules, enact the changes in this House that they keep insisting you need to vote for PR for. The Premier and the Government House Leader tomorrow could call forward private members’ bills for debate and listen to those voices of the opposition that are bringing forward ideas, just like the Premier was complaining about in this House last week.

But no, they won’t do that, because they don’t really want change. All they want to do is try to figure out a way to…. After the last election results, the only change we would have seen in this House was that the Green Party could have hand-selected 12 unelected people to suddenly become MLAs, representing who knows where in the province — located from where, no one knows in the province. And that’s all we would get out of this.

It is nothing but a direct payback for that confidence and supply agreement, the one that they are not living up to at all. They’ve already broken their word to the public. Why should we take a leap of faith when they can’t even hold their word on something as simple as how to put forward the question to the public to vote on?

For those and many other reasons, I will not be supporting Bill 40. Thank you for the time today.

[4:25 p.m.]

D. Ashton: I rise today to speak to Bill 40.

British Columbians in every corner of this province are debating and discussing the merits of keeping the current electoral system or moving to a new process.

I have to say…. I have to thank my esteemed peer from Kamloops–North Thompson. I hope people listen to and heed what that gentleman just had to say. There’s an awful lot of people behind those television lenses that look at us when we’re up in this wonderful House of the people, speaking. I really, really do hope they take in all, or most, of what the MLA for Kamloops–North Thompson said. He laid it out beautifully. He laid it out in an opportunity that many could understand. He laid out what people really should be listening to about what’s happening in this province over the next several weeks.

A great man in many’s eyes said: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Another gentleman that I really appreciate in my life, not the gentleman that I just originally quoted…. My father said: “Take the high road. The view is better.” He also said: “Treat everybody how you like to be treated.” Unfortunately, that’s not happening in this process.

The bill we’re here to debate today is of great concern to many. All of us gathered here know the fundamental rules of this wonderful House of the people. We simply cannot limit the power of those who come after us to pass whatever legislation they see fit.

Fundamentally…. I came through civic government. It was one of the first rules that we were told. You can’t pass any bylaws that are going to be beholden to the next council. We know here that we can’t pass any bills, can’t pass any legislation that another government can’t look at, but that is exactly the promise that is being held out with this bill that is on the floor at this point in time, a bill that has been brought forward in the middle of a referendum process, a process that wants to change the democratic process of how each and every citizen in this incredible province that we all call home is going to be affected into the future.

The philosophy behind this bill imagines that somehow, in two or three elections from now, the government of the day will be bound to hold a referendum on a possible return to first-past-the-post, if that’s what the people want. Ain’t going to happen, hon. Speaker. Ain’t going to happen. I say “two or three elections,” because we’re all aware that any snap election that could be held before the next official election would be held under first-past-the-post.

So British Columbians take what has already been called a great leap of faith by the Premier and decide to shift to a proportional representation electoral system. They’re being asked to take this bill with an even bigger leap of faith.

It’s really, really unfortunate that this is taking place. You know, governance is difficult. I’ve only been here for five and a bit years, and, as I said, I have incredible awe for not only this place that we spend an awful lot of time in, but for each and every member in this House, because we’re all here representing the citizens that elected us to represent them.

I, myself, and I’m sure that 99.999 percent of the individuals in this House…. When somebody comes into our office to see us, seeking information, seeking to help solve a problem, we don’t ask if they voted in the last election.

[L. Reid in the chair.]

We don’t ask what party they belong to. We don’t ask what party they voted for. We’re there to help them. That’s what makes our system and our democracy in this province so great.

They’re being presented, at this point in time, a bill that, in my opinion, really has no teeth. It lacks any connection to the realities that will likely be playing out into the future.

Imagine with me that British Columbians have just concluded a second election based on one of the proportional representation models that are being voted upon in the next few weeks. I really hope that doesn’t happen. I hope most citizens just take a look at the first question on the piece that they’ve been sent in the mail and mark that and resend the voted piece of paper back in.

I won’t actually trouble you at this point with the complex formulas that are going to be determining the outcomes of that referendum question. To me, having gone to university, and having been in sciences — and not being the best at physics — they really, actually, resemble a lot of the chalk marks that my professor put on the board in the numerous physics classes that I attended.

[4:30 p.m.]

I guess the difference is that in physics, the laws of nature can’t be misrepresented for political debate. Unfortunately, they really are, underneath this bill.

I’m going to take you back a little bit. There’ll be a new government after the second PR election. It will be made up of some amalgamation of parties. Some of them are going to be new. Some of them are going to be represented in this House today, and some of them are actually going to be chosen in a back room by political parties off a list that they may have friends on, or associates on, or may have past members on, or maybe even have spouses or relatives on.

What’s going to happen is that the government is going to put that forward after the people have voted — after the people have voted for what they thought was a process to elect an MLA, like the ones I’m looking at on all sides of this House. Individuals. And I’m going to repeat again: individuals in this House that have a huge concern for the people that they represent. And individuals in this House that, I can say, 100 percent represent their citizens, that have always made a difference to those people that they represent, by bringing their problems here.

But you know what? They got elected in a process. They were elected by the people in their communities, probably after years of serving the public. They maybe started off working in a non-profit board. Maybe they just started off helping out at Soupateria. Maybe they started helping out at the SPCA, and maybe they moved on to a school board. Or maybe they moved on to a council, and they really got the people of the community aware of their beliefs and their actions that they could bring back to the community. And they committed numerous, numerous hours of time in their community, helping out the citizens in any way that they could.

The citizens knew them, and the citizens got to know their ideals, got to know their families, got to know their backgrounds, got to know if they were good or bad, got to know their flaws. Sometimes they accept them; sometimes they don’t accept those flaws. You know what? They knew those individuals.

Underneath the new system that’s being proposed, those people may not be representing the citizens in the House, because they’ll come off a list that has come out of some organization, some back room, somebody’s thoughts of what they want in this House, and I just don’t understand that process. I just don’t.

I think we all realize that the communities that we live in and raise families in and have an incredible amount of respect for really should have an opportunity to elect people to come into this, the people’s House of British Columbia — not from a list of favouritism.

I want to say that after numerous attempts — over two that I’m aware of — from a previous government at trying to bring forward some form of proportional representation, with everything laid out, with maps, procedures…. In the maps, it would show the various areas that the individuals would represent. People were able to make a real informed decision on what they wanted. Unfortunately, today, that’s not what’s happening in this.

I don’t want to throw stones, because sometimes people do that, and they live in glass houses and people throw stones back. I just fail to see why a government that over the years has prided themselves on being a government for the people and have shown, to be very frank, some real good policies and procedures that have come forward and that have actually made a difference to a lot of people — a lot of people in the area that I represent.

When I take a look at the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, I take a look at more and more people that are now getting roofs over their heads and are able to call a place home. The government has done a lot of good things. I just scratch my head why they would bend and do what it seems that they’re trying to do to the people of British Columbia, with a referendum coming forward that doesn’t give us the information about what is going to happen in the future, doesn’t give us the opportunity to see who we are going to be voting for. And right smack in the middle of that, they bring forward another bill that says: “Oh, don’t worry. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. If you don’t like what happened in X amount of time, we’re going to give you the opportunity to reverse it.”

[4:35 p.m.]

I just really, really don’t see why a government would be doing that, especially after the five-plus years that I had heard the government, when they were in opposition, saying that things were going to change from a perception that they felt that they had of the government at that time. I can’t fathom it. I really can’t fathom it.

There are a lot of people that we all get to listen to and probably that have a lot more experience. They’ve been around here a lot more than each and every one of us has, especially a couple of them. A couple quotes:

“The New Democrats have withheld a dozen aspects of how MMP works, to be decided upon after the referendum is over. Nine of those will be decided by a committee of MLAs, where the New Democrats and Greens will have the majority, and they can vote their party interests.

“Among the things that will be decided is how many seats in Legislature will be reduced or combined or consolidated. It could be as many as 35 of the existing seats in the House. Where and when, we don’t know. The number will be decided by the politicians. The Boundaries Commission will then draw up the boundaries.”

Again, can you imagine being a voter in one of the communities that we represent? You voted in somebody because you thought that they were going to be representing you in that area, and somebody comes along with a pencil and draws a whole new map and says: “Oh, with all due respect, sorry. Joe Blow’s coming in, and you’re actually not going to be able to be representing the area that you thought you were going to be.”

Here’s another issue with those lists. In countries that use MMP, it matters who controls the list. I’m going to say that again. It matters who controls the list. If the political party controls it, the first dozen or so names on the list will be old party hands or political party hacks. They can be, anyway, people who’ve served the party for years. They get a seat in the Legislature if they get picked.

In some countries, the voters are allowed to control who gets elected. So you can actually vote against somebody that you don’t want to win, and one of those people off of that list will get that seat. That’s decided after the fact and will be based upon a committee based upon members of the New Democrats and the Greens.

We heard about New Zealand. We heard what happened down there.

One other…. I’ve had a note from somebody saying: “Well, why is it you’re saying that it will be decided by politicians afterward?” I said: “Look, everything the Greens and the New Democrats have done so far, including the promises that they have broken about this, has been done to serve their political interests, not to serve the people that they represent — to serve the political interests of this House.”

That’s wrong. We’re not here, or we shouldn’t be here, for the political interests of our party and this House. We should be here representing those people that elected us, each and every one of those people.

Coming back to what was said. So you’re telling me that after the referendum is over — say we’re getting MMP — the Greens and the New Democrats are not going to tote their political interests in the terms of those undecided matters? No, not a chance.

I mean these two parties, back in the spring, back in May, signed a power-sharing agreement in which they promised that what they were going to do was based on the consult of the public on a single system and put forward one system on the ballot up against first-past-the-post. They consulted the public. There was no consensus, so they created their own two-step ballot. The Attorney General himself picked the three options to go on the second ballot. So they’ve already broken two of the key promises in order to get what they want, and it’s a shame.

The government today, along with their partner in governing, has a really great opportunity. The member for Kamloops–North Thompson said it. There are a bunch of private members’ bills on the agenda here in the House that have an opportunity to be debated in the House.

For five years I heard the concerns, for four of those, coming from opposition that they were never listened to. Well, opposition is now in government. Opposition is in government with a sharing agreement by another party, and they have that opportunity. So if you’re going to change or you’re going to ask the people of British Columbia to give you the opportunity of a change of government, why don’t you show the people of British Columbia that you’re going to change when they give that to you? Give an opportunity for everybody to collectively work in this House.

There’s been a few votes, and the government has brought forward some bills where this side has stood up. I’ve seen and heard the clapping on both sides of this House, and I’ve seen the smiles on both sides of this House, where something got through and passed.

[4:40 p.m.]

I don’t remember the exact word that the Clerk uses when she stands up and says…. Somebody might be able to help me on that. But it does make a difference.

Interjection.

D. Ashton: Pardon? See, even a member that’s been here a lot longer than me can’t remember. But in unanimity. It does make a real difference.

What worries me is also the opportunity that is given. I’m not going to be one to fearmonger at all, but what gives me a real concern is that there is an opportunity for individuals that represent parties that are appreciated by some, I would assume, but maybe not appreciated by the vast majority of British Columbians to get a foothold in, as what’s transpired in other places in the world. You know, that really bothers me.

I take a look at one of them, the Cascadia Party of British Columbia. It says: “We contend that Ottawa and, subsequently, Victoria are illegitimate by default.” These are new comments that are being said. The Vancouver Island Party. The Vancouver Island Party lays out its declaration of independence from British Columbia. That’s kind of funny. I don’t know how they’re going to get to the Mainland. “We need to join together to form a new province of Vancouver Island” equal to a government for the rest of British Col­um­bia. I can’t see that.

The one that really, really scares me is the Communist Party of British Columbia: “While PR does not guarantee more positive government policies, it increases the chances to elect communists.” That was a statement from the Communist Party of British Columbia in June 2018. These are individuals that have the right to make a comment. One other comment that came from that is: “A small party like ours could potentially hold the balance of power and use that position to help extraparliamentary movements to block neo-liberal austerity policies.” That came from a gentleman from Kamloops–North Thompson, who’s a member of that particular party.

In a democracy, people like that have a right….

Interjections.

D. Ashton: Well, unfortunately, Make Every Voter Count was going along saying that every vote is going to count. But now it’s only going to be if you get 5 percent or more, which may exclude some of these individuals, and it’s probably stuff that many of us don’t want to see.

We have a process, first-past-the-post. Maybe it’s not the best in the world. Maybe it’s not the worst in the world. But it’s giving each and every one of us in this House an opportunity to be here. What’s being proposed right now…. For the record, I’m all in favour of a referendum for what the people of British Columbia may want. But if we’re giving a referendum to the people, let’s do it in a proper, unbiased, non-political way. And I really think that this may backfire on government.

The gentleman that held that seat, Madame Speaker, before you told me, as I was thinking about provincial politics: “Never, ever, ever doubt the electorate.” The electorate have an opportunity….

Interjections.

Deputy Speaker: Members, through the Chair.

D. Ashton: As I was saying, the opportunity is going to present itself, possibly in the future, with what my two friends on either side of the House…

Interjection.

D. Ashton: I would prefer that you didn’t.

…are talking about.

Coming back to it, the former Speaker said: “Don’t ever doubt the electorate. Give them a chance, because they will vote what’s right for the people of British Columbia.” I really hope that that holds true, that the people of British Columbia will take a hard look at what’s being proposed — not only this bill that kind of, in my opinion, supersedes the referendum that is being proposed to the people at this point in time — and will really take a look at the referendum and decide what they think is best for the province of British Columbia, but specifically for the other citizens in this incredible province.

[4:45 p.m.]

A lot of the things that have been said today have been repeated verbatim. It’s up to, again, those citizens to listen, and it’s up to, in my opinion, the media to get out there and report fairly and honestly about the opportunities that this referendum is going to propose for the future, not only for themselves but quite possibly for their children and their grandchildren.

I really hope that people pay attention to the ballot and the information that has been provided by Elections B.C. and really consider the options that the future of this province may be governed under.

Madame Speaker, I thank you very much for the opportunity to speak, and I really want to thank my peers in this wonderful House of the people for the job that they do representing each and every one of the citizens in their area.

J. Rustad: It’s a pleasure to join into the debate in here on Bill 40. As I was sitting here listening to the previous speakers, there’s an issue that needs to be thought about.

Many of us stand up in this Legislature and we give passionate speeches about particular issues and particular topics. The reality is there’s only a small group of people that listen and watch this. It’s a tremendous honour to have the chance to be able to get up and do this, and it’s also a burden to get up and represent your riding. But it’s something that we’re all passionate about doing, coming in here and giving our speeches and talking about the various issues.

For me, having the honour of representing Nechako Lakes is huge. It’s what democracy is about. We’re a representative democracy. I get the opportunity to put my name forward, put my issues forward. If people want that, they elect me. It’s a tremendous honour to have that opportunity, but it’s a responsibility to come down here and argue and debate for the issues of my riding.

The challenge we have here, of course, as I just mentioned, is there isn’t actually that many people that watch this. So when you think about Bill 40, you’re hearing all of these debates. Bill 40, of course, is about having a second referendum, but it refers to the first referendum, so that’s why it’s important.

The reality is there are many, many people out there who don’t get an opportunity to hear this. They don’t get an opportunity to watch and see this. There’s a ball game on. The children need to be fed — whatever the issues are. There are many reasons why people don’t engage in politics. The reality is that for most people, they aren’t even aware that this referendum’s going on.

I had the opportunity just this afternoon to talk to a young lady. I asked her about proportional representation and the referendum. She said: “Oh, yeah, right. That’s going on.” I asked her: “Do you plan to vote in it?” She said: “Well, yeah, actually. I have been engaged with some politicians. I actually want to look up and read a little bit about the issue. Yeah, I plan to vote in it.” The question came to her: “If you weren’t engaged with local politicians, if you didn’t have that exposure, do you think you would participate?” She said: “No, not a chance.”

Here’s a young lady who, because of her circumstances, happens to be engaged and know about people that are in politics. She has an interest in it, and she wants to take some time to learn about it. But for most people, they don’t even know this is going on. And if they do, they don’t understand what it means in terms of the impact on democracy, because they’ve got lots of other things that are important in their life.

That’s why it’s important to have a televised debate — to help get people engaged, to get the conversation out there. It’s sad that we’re seeing the Premier of this province dodge this issue. It is too important an issue to just take lightly.

This is our democracy. People in our society have gone and fought overseas, have laid down their lives to fight for the principles of democracy. That’s not something that just should be flippantly done or gerrymandered through a process that’s rigged. This is something that is critical to our future — my people, the people that I represent in Nechako Lakes, but all the people in the province of British Columbia.

[4:50 p.m.]

We should be taking every opportunity to get information to people, to explain the full process — explaining things, showing maps, going through details — so that people have at least a basic understanding so that they have an opportunity to participate in what is the foundation of our society.

Democracy, the rule of law, how laws are created, how the process is done — that is what we’re talking about here. This isn’t just a matter of the NDP or the Green Party or the B.C. Liberals or the Conservatives or any of the other groups of the 25 some-odd groups we have in democracy. This is about how our fundamental society operates.

When I think about this whole process, and I think about the young lady that I spoke with today, how do we get people more engaged so that they understand what this is about and it doesn’t just become the special interest groups that are engaged in making this decision? Public television debate is a key piece of that.

This is important. But as I said, not that many people watch this or pay attention to it. Yes, the media may throw a bone every once in a while to something that is said in the Legislature, which is good. But the reality is that we need people to have that opportunity to be able to engage.

The ballots, of course, have been mailed out to many ridings already. My household has received our ballots, which is good. I look forward to participating in democracy when I get the opportunity to travel home. I know many other people have seen it too. But I saw a picture just today — on Twitter, I think it was. Social media is such a great opportunity to be able to see and share experiences of things that are going on. Above the mailboxes was somebody’s ballot, and it was mailed to the wrong address.

I find it interesting when we talk about…. The slogan for the pro-PR side is: “Every vote counts.” Every vote does count, except for that person whose ballot wasn’t delivered because it was sent to the wrong address. How is that vote going to count? It’s sitting out in the wrong place.

Interjections.

J. Rustad: I love the chirping that’s coming from the other side. It’s great to see them engaging. I wish you would get up and actually debate, but you won’t. But that’s fine.

For the reality is, for an individual like that that doesn’t even know the referendum is going on, that hasn’t been engaged or involved…. Their ballot won’t even come to them. How do they even know to go and ask for a ballot if they don’t even have the basic information because they haven’t been paying attention? We’re all wrapped up in here in the bubble that is politics. Many, many people do not do that.

I’ll tell you, over and above that, that another young lady that I had the opportunity to hear from just the other day asked a question. She said: “Well, what is this proportional representation thing that I’m hearing about? What’s actually going on with this?” So we explained the details about what’s going on, on the no side and on the yes side and what the potential impact is and the changes to our democracy, particularly for northern B.C. She looked, and she was shocked. She said: “I had no idea that this is what we’re actually voting on. I have already thrown out my ballot.”

Here’s another young individual that, if they had had the opportunity to hear about it in advance, wouldn’t have thrown out their ballot. So now she’s actually going to go back, and she’s going to dig through her garbage to pull out this ballot. That’s good. She’s going to participate in democracy. That’s an important piece.

The reality is that without a debate and without this kind of engagement, people aren’t aware of what’s going on with this. Many of those ballots will be thrown out.

I see the member from Sunshine Coast would like to enter. Maybe if you go to your chair, you will have an opportunity to do that — or stand up and vote, of course. Stand up and speak to the bill yourself.

Regardless of that, we’re in this situation where there is this lack of information. In my riding, I know that when I go and pick up my mail from my mailbox, and I know that where many people do, there’s usually a bin that’s beside there, and these types of things are thrown frequently into the bin.

As a matter of fact, I know we’re going to see some pictures of that in the near future, and it’s a shame. Part of the reason those ballots get thrown out is because, just like those two examples I gave, people are not engaged and aware of this.

Yes, we’re talking here about Bill 40, which has a second opportunity for people to look at it. Maybe at that point, they will get engaged. But in the meantime, we’ll end up, potentially, with a process that people will go look back at and say: “How come I didn’t get a say in it?” It’s a challenge. It is a real challenge.

[4:55 p.m.]

Another person that I ran into who had the opportunity to talk about the municipal elections and, of course, the upcoming referendum explained and said: “How come this is coming out now? I thought the election was over.” Well, the municipal elections were over, but the referendum is only just getting going. But she looked at it, and she thought it was part of the previous municipal elections, and, once again, threw it out. Now she’s scrambling, and she’s contacting Elections B.C. already, the day after the ballots came out, saying: “I need another ballot, because I didn’t realize this was going on.”

This is the challenge that we face with this referendum, which is why it is a rigged process. It is gerrymandered to try to drive a certain result. It doesn’t have maps. It doesn’t have questions answered. That stuff is not being supplied out there, and it’s why a debate is so important. It is why a debate is so important.

For the people up in my riding, they ask continuously — the people that I have the opportunity to engage, which, unfortunately, is only a small portion of the people in the riding…. They say: “Well, what will the riding look like?” I have to say I have no idea. They say: “What do you mean, you have no idea? We’ve got to vote in this thing.” And I say: “I don’t know. All three options — I haven’t got a clue.”

I don’t know how many ridings there are going to be. I don’t know how many MLAs there are going to be. I don’t know how many will be assigned. There’s a complex formula if one of the particular options is picked. And the lady once again…. It was not only the lady. I happened to run into a number of these people. You know, that’s an opportunity when you’re grocery shopping and things.

The lady asked me, and I said: “Well, we’re out grocery shopping here. So tell me something. If you go down the aisle and pick out your tomato or your vegetables, your carrots, do you pick it up? Do you look at it? Do you feel it for texture? Do you maybe smell it? Do you decide, ‘This is the one I want. This is the one I want to take home to eat’? You do that because you’re making an informed choice about the things that you’re going to eat, something as simple as groceries.”

Yet something as fundamental as the democracy that we have today…. They don’t have that information to be able to make that decision. It’s a leap of faith, and we’ll make those decisions after the vote? It’s crazy. I can’t believe that this side thinks, for some reason, that’s a fair process. It’s gerrymandering. It is rigging the election for one reason and one reason only. It’s because if they put the information out, they know they wouldn’t get it passed. That’s sad.

What that is, is a party that could never manage to appeal to a broad enough public to actually get elected as a majority wanting to change the electoral system for their own benefit. If you look at that, that’s actually against the Canadian constitution and the laws that have been defined in this country. It shouldn’t be allowed, yet here we are in this institution, the pillar of democracy in this province, debating something like this. It’s unbelievable. I would use language, quite frankly, that’s unparliamentary, but I can’t get to that point in this.

You look at this and, once again, back to shopping for groceries and talking about this with individuals, there are no regional….

Interjection.

J. Rustad: They know about it because I talk to them, for the member from Vancouver, west side. It’s unfortunate that is the way they have to find out about it. To that matter, I can’t even pay to send information out to my constituents to express my concern with this because I’m not allowed. Those are the new rules that have been brought in. It’s pretty sad.

Regardless of this….

Interjection.

J. Rustad: MLAs aren’t allowed to do third-party advertising, Member. Maybe you should try looking in the rules.

Regardless of that, when I’ve talked about this, I’ve let people know there are no regional thresholds. It doesn’t matter what the northern half of the province has to say. It doesn’t matter what three-quarters of the province has to say. It only matters with regards to the total vote. So there are no regional thresholds like there would be in a normal referendum. There are no regional thresholds.

As a matter of fact, there’s not even a requirement for a minimum turnout. If it’s 15, 20 percent turnout, that’s it. It goes ahead. There’s no requirement for a 60 percent majority across the province to support this. There is a higher restriction for somebody who is part of a strata to make a decision to change a strata than there is to change fundamentally how we do democracy in this province.

[5:00 p.m.]

It is scary to think that, yet this is the partisan approach that this government has taken. For example, if somebody wants to go out and recognize their fundamental democratic right, put up a sign…. They’re going to make a sign and put it on their lawn saying: “This is the way I want to vote.” They’re not even allowed to do that, not unless they’ve registered. Sad. Very sad.

People, en masse, are turning to social media, and people are trying to get information on what this means. There are all kinds of people out there on the yes side or the no side. They’re all out, making all kinds of claims. It’s good. That’s part of democracy. People are getting information out there, but there’s no filter. There is a tremendous amount of misinformation that is out there. I would use other language about it that is somewhat unparliamentary, but I won’t.

The reality is that there is information out there that is probably only utilizable for fertilizer on a field. It is not factual. It makes false claims. Yet this information is out there and freely flowing out there — misdirecting information, misdirecting voters — because we did not have a citizens’ assembly. We did not have a source of accurate information that was put out there. We did not have this whole process that could have been there to be able to have a valid and proper referendum.

Now we want a second referendum. Guess what. The second referendum is going to be on the same rules as the first referendum. What does that mean? How is that going to work? More importantly, I also look at it…. Why is this coming forward right now? Here we are, beginning of the voting period for a referendum on our fundamental democracy, and government is going out there and saying: “Hey, don’t worry about it. If you don’t like it, you get a second vote. You get a second chance at it down the road.”

Why wasn’t that part of the original bill? Simple. It’s a one-page piece of legislation. Certainly, the legislative drafters wouldn’t have taken long to draft it. Why was it not part of the original bill? I tell you, Madame Speaker. It was not part of the original bill because it was intentionally brought in now to be able to be used as part of this referendum, once again, gerrymandering and rigging a process to try to get a result to favour a political party, which quite frankly, is illegal.

It’s sad. It’s sad to see. This is our democracy. We’re about to come up on Remembrance Day to remember people that laid down their lives to fight for our democratic rights, and they’re just being brushed aside as part of a gerrymander process. It is very, very sad to see.

Interjection.

J. Rustad: The member opposite talks about things moving to the absurd. I tell you what’s absurd. What’s absurd is that this political party and its Green allies somehow think that they can do this in the province and get away with it. You know what? If people don’t care about democracy, they will.

I’m not afraid of fighting an election under any particular rules, if it’s going to be PR or if it’s going to be first-past-the-post. I’m not afraid of fighting that election. It’s not about that. It’s not about what I’m worried about. What this is about is my people in Nechako Lakes. This is about northern B.C. This is about rural B.C. This is about our province. This is about their rights and democracy. I can tell you they have lots of questions.

Their vote matters, and the reason why we have the system we have today — in particular, the range of differences in populations — is because we have unique geography. We’ve got large areas of this province that are significant resource producers that have huge benefits that flow to this province.

They are recognized…. Yes, they have a lower population, but your vote and your voice matters. That is recognized as part of our current system. That’s why they’re allowed the plus or minus 25 percent variance in population. That’s why we’re allowed to have — under special circumstances, very special circumstances — ridings that even go beyond that, like my riding of Nechako Lakes.

That voice gets taken away under this. Those components of fundamental values in our society, in this province, are gone if PR passes. That’s why I’m fighting this. I don’t have a problem with fighting an election under whatever the rules are. That’s why I’m fighting it, because I don’t think it’s fair. I think the people of this province recognize something that is not fair, fundamentally unfair.

[5:05 p.m.]

I’ll also say this, for the people in my riding and the people in northern B.C. The northern two-thirds of this province has 6½ percent of the population. Currently they have 11½ percent of the seats in this Legislature. Once again, that is a recognition of the significant differences of geography and resources and how our province is put together. That’s why those seats are there.

Under proportional representation, what will that look like? Will northern B.C. have 6½ percent of the seats in this province, as opposed to 11½? Will you have a riding that is half of the province represented by one or two people?

Those are all questions that are unanswered. They are questions that are fundamental and that there is no answer for because the rules will be made up after the election. And I think if the people in the Lower Mainland and the people on the Island and other areas of the province understood that, there’s no way they would consider supporting this. But it’s impossible to get that information out.

Debate might help. It might be able to get some of those things out, maybe a little bit of clarity. But it’s impossible to know because the rules aren’t going to be made up until after. It’s fundamentally wrong, and it’s fundamentally unfair.

Does this referendum help the province? What is it we’re trying to change? We’re all in here debating democracy. We’ve got one of the best democracies in the world. We’ve got one of the best provinces in this country, and we’ve got one of the best countries in the world. We’ve got one of the longest life expectancies. We have some of the best health care outcomes. We have the best educational outcomes. We have some of the highest quality of life and highest values. Our society has advanced incredibly in this province. We have a beautiful province. It’s got areas protected. It’s got the balance of industry. It’s got good rules around the environment. It’s got good rules around protection of people in this province.

What is it we’re trying to change? What is so fundamentally wrong with the electoral system, with the governance system that we have that created one of the best places in the world? People around the world say: “Canada is the solution.” Only it seems to be looking for a problem. What is it we’re trying to change?

There’s only one conclusion. The political parties in power seem to think it’s unfair because they cannot appeal to a broad enough audience to get elected, so they want to change the electoral system. They’re not out to change the way our society is to improve things. We’re already one of the best in the world. Yes, we can try to improve things, but it’s not the democratic system that does that. Yet they want to change it.

Why? Simply because they want to try to hold on to power and grab power. That is it. That is the only argument that makes any sense. Anything else is jiggery-pokery, as one of the members from the opposite side used to like to say.

For all of these reasons that I’ve mentioned and for the constituents of mine in Nechako Lakes, for the good people of this north that help, on a day-to-day basis, to make this province as great as it is and for the good people all around this province, I can’t support this bill. I couldn’t support the original bill. I’m glad I’ve had the opportunity, in the second bill, to be able to stand up and talk about this.

The reality is that this is not right for the province of British Columbia. It’s not fair. I hope, as people out there may have the opportunity to listen to these debates and we’ll get to share some of this information out there, that the people of the province will agree that democracy is about being fair. It’s about balance. It’s not about a rigged process designed to gerrymander a specific result for the benefit of a few.

S. Chandra Herbert: I rise today to speak in steadfast support of this legislation and in support of proportional representation in general. I do that because I believe in hope. I believe in the people of British Columbia. I believe we get more when we involve more people, not less. I believe we get a better democracy when more people have power rather than fewer people having power, as has been the case under our current first-past-the-post system.

[5:10 p.m.]

This legislation…. Although many who have spoken on it before haven’t really addressed the specifics of this legislation — choosing to speak more broadly about proportional representation or first-past-the-post, as I will do later — it’s legislation that, I should be clear, gives people a choice.

If we move to proportional representation, as I hope we do, people will get a chance to vote again on if they want to move back to the current system we have. It’s almost, as they might say, a money-back guarantee, a return to sender on delivery if you don’t like what you’ve got. You get a chance to try it out before you buy it long term.

I think that’s a good thing. Our democracy is not perfect — no party is perfect; no process is perfect — but people want a chance for change. My citizens, my constituents, voted consistently in support of changing to single transferable vote. They believed that that was a good idea.

When I walk the streets of my community, I hear again and again support for a change to a system of proportional representation, a system where you would get a chance to work more collaboratively with parties across the spectrum. It’s not just me as a New Democrat MLA for Vancouver–​West End supporting this. I just read that the B.C. Conservative Party has said that they, too, support this change. I know that my colleagues in the B.C. Green Party support this change.

I would tell you, to the horror of my colleagues opposite, that I’ve had a number of B.C. Liberal colleagues, friends and neighbours in my community come to me and say that they support this too. They’re ashamed that their political party, the B.C. Liberal Party, is trying to stop it, because they, too, want a Legislature where people will work more closely together, where you don’t have a system where those who win one more vote than the others win all the power, where you don’t have a situation where somebody — who might have been elected, as in some provinces, with maybe 32 percent of the vote — wins the majority of the seats in the Legislature, the majority of the power, even though the vast majority of the population vote against them.

Now, I know many folks have spoken about how they work colour-blind, as they might say. They don’t look at who people have voted for in order to help them. That may be true on an individual level, but I think the Legislature and legislators have to admit that, obviously, we each have our own biases. We each bring our own values to an argument.

To seem to suggest, if you had a Liberal majority, a New Democrat majority, a Green majority or a Conservative majority government, that somehow that majority government, of that one partisan hue, will also act as a party for everybody else who didn’t vote for them — often, in some cases, at cross-purposes with what they believe — is just not sensible. That’s why the electoral system actually has to represent the values of who has voted.

We’ve had many circumstances in our Legislature where people win power and they don’t have the majority of the votes — in fact, far from it. Sometimes they have fewer votes than the second party, the opposition party. That has happened in our history. Instead of voting as a majority and trying to control everything, as has happened in the past, I would plead for humility. I would plead for a system that actually got them to work with everybody else in the House to try and develop a better, more broad, collaborative approach to government, so that it’s not just: “I win; you lose” or: “Yes or no.”

Sometimes there’s a third option. Sometimes there’s a better value that can come out of collaboration with people. No party has a monopoly on good ideas. No party knows everything. I tend to believe that my party, the New Democrats, has the best balance, but I know that there are great ideas on all sides. Even parties that aren’t currently elected in this House have much to add to the debate.

Just like we work as neighbours, just like we work in our communities, I would hope we could bring into this House, for a change…. If we brought the kind of values, the kind of beliefs we have in this House, back to all our neighbours, you’d have people bickering and fighting way more than you would ever have today. Instead, people in our home communities go: “Let’s collaborate.” I don’t say: “Well, you’re a Liberal. You’re a New Democrat. We won more seats than you. Ha, ha, I don’t have to listen to you.” No. That would be political suicide, for one thing, but it would also give us really, really bad politics. But that’s what I hear being argued for: “We want….”

I understand there are those who campaigned for a system of first-past-the-post — the current system we have — which sets up false majorities, which sets up one vote more getting all the power. Everybody else, even if it’s a majority of the population of British Columbia voting for a different vision, don’t get to sit in the seats of government. They don’t get to make those decisions. They sit, in many cases, outside the doors here, arguing and upset that their government’s not listening or following their values. It’s happened again and again over the last 16 years, and it’s one of the reasons that the former Premier, Gordon Campbell, acknowledged that we needed to look at these issues years ago.

[5:15 p.m.]

My community voted in favour of change. They wanted a fix. They wanted us to acknowledge that every vote should count and that we should collaborate, not be afraid of each other. What we hear now is a campaign of fear about the future and fear about each other as neighbours, fear about, “Oh my God, we’re going to have radicalization,” and trying to spin these fears that somehow we will fall apart as a society if we have to collaborate.

That’s the farthest thing from the truth of what would happen. Because when you actually collaborate, when you actually have to listen to the battle of ideas, listen to the values each other share and have them adequately represented in the Legislature, you learn from each other. You learn who you disagree with, sure. You’re not always going to agree. But you actually have to listen to each other.

People, I think, will get more greatly involved in their democracy if they see that their votes truly count, not just that you mathematically count them — sure — but that they actually count here, in terms of who sits in this chamber. You’ll have more young people involved for sure.

The number of times I’ve heard from people who say: “Well, I live in a Liberal riding where it goes Liberal all the time. I’m not voting, because my person will never get in.” Or a New Democrat or a Green — the party label doesn’t matter. People feel they get shut out of this House if their party is not adequately represented.

I understand that. I know for many years, there were large numbers of people — 10 percent, 17 percent, 20 percent or more — in this province who were shut out 100 percent, their voices not heard in these halls at all. I would hope members for those communities would agree that that is wrong. It would be saying to your community, if you had a community meeting: “Well, 30 percent of you, I don’t agree with your view. You’re not even allowed in the door of this community hall, because your voice doesn’t matter. I got one more vote than you, and you didn’t get any. So sorry. You’re out the door.”

That’s not how democracy should work. But unfortunately, in first-past-the-post, we create it because of the mathematical formulas — not even a majority — pluralities that you can win just because you got one more vote more than the other next runner-up, even if that next runner-up only got 20 percent of the vote, only got 15 percent. As long as you get that one more vote, you win all the power, even if the vast majority of your community voted against what that value and belief that you hold is. That’s wrong.

That’s why I want a change, but that’s also why I want a referendum to give people a chance to change back. Because, really, I get it. There’s fear. Change happens, and that’s not easy. We don’t always understand every single element of what change we’re moving to. I think it’s important that we give people that opportunity to say, “Okay, either it didn’t work or it did,” and that they get to choose, just like they did in New Zealand.

For those who are saying: “Well, the systems that you want to change to proportional representation…. It’s so confusing. Oh my God. It’s not going to work. Nobody knows how to do it. Nobody can vote. Oh, it’s so, so confusing.” The vast majority of the world uses this system. Most of the economies that are doing well in the world use this system. Most of the economies in the world that have some of the best life expectancies use this system. Most of the economies and countries in the world that have the greatest electoral participation use this system.

It’s not a hard system to understand, unless you want to suggest that our population can’t understand what the vast majority of the world does understand. I don’t think that’s true. I know our population understands being involved, collaboration, having their values count in this House. That’s why in so many communities, they did vote in support of changes before and why people tell me they want to vote in support of change now.

It’s not partisan. If it’s partisan…. I know I hear this from all of my colleagues from across the way, that this is just about getting a certain party elected. Oh, it’s just about trying to trick the system.

Well, some would suggest that this is all about the B.C. Liberals being afraid that the B.C. Conservative Party might make a breakthrough and many of their members would like to abandon their party to the B.C. Conservatives and their supporters and their voters. That’s what the B.C. Conservatives argue, that that’s why the Liberals are afraid of this.

If you want to get partisan and argue it’s just about two parties wanting to get elected, then I think you’ve got to acknowledge that there’s a partisan interest here for the B.C. Liberals to try to maintain the current system because they’re afraid of the B.C. Conservative Party. They’re afraid that many of their members would like to and supporters would vote B.C. Conservative if they had a better chance of getting into this House.

Don’t believe me? Okay, well, let’s look to the former Premier. The former Premier, Christy Clark, was on a podcast the other day. She’s reappeared in the media, is making her presence felt. She was asked about the B.C. Liberal Party, who they are. The argument she made around why they have to stick together in this kind of first-past-the-post system is that they wouldn’t look at things like women’s rights issues, access to choice, LGBT rights, transgender folks’ access to bathrooms, because that would split their party in two.

[5:20 p.m.]

The B.C. Conservatives and those that don’t support those values would go somewhere else, and other parties would then win in British Columbia, so they don’t talk about those issues. That’s what she said on the podcast.

It shocked me that it was that brazen, that the former Premier would come out and just say that there were certain issues some members of her party don’t like, don’t support, like my own human rights, and thus they just don’t talk about them because it might give my party, the New Democratic Party, a better chance of getting elected. I was shocked to hear that. She herself said she was a supporter of LGBT human rights but that she wouldn’t act on them because there were a few members that sit across the way who don’t support those human rights.

Well, it sounds to me like there’s a certain extremist value that is still at home in a first-past-the-post system. It’s just hidden. It’s just hidden in a political party. They try to hide it and don’t move forward on any values that might divide that interest, for power — for crass, partisan power. I would prefer to see that kind of value, rather than hiding in the background being able to influence the government of the day, being right out there and visible. You can’t fight extremism if it hides. I think, rather than hiding it in a first-past-the-post system, we’ve got to name it, so that we can fight it and we can bring it down.

I don’t believe the vast majority of British Columbians support those kinds of extremist values, and I would rather that we get to be clear on that and fight it at its source. I’m not afraid of taking on that battle. That battle only wins in the shadows. Extremism only wins when it’s hidden. Racism, sexism and all the various other isms only win when you’re in the shadows and you’re unknown.

I think first-past-the-post allows that to be hidden — and, sometimes, to show its face — when a minority of the population wins majority power, as we are seeing in some jurisdictions down south of us, of course, where the president is preying on racism and other things to divide a country because he hopes he can get that one extra vote to win majority power — even though he doesn’t, in many cases, have a majority of the voters. It’s just that one extra vote above everybody else who gets shut out.

We’re seeing that in some of the other provinces. I think Ontario, for example, won a majority of the power with a minority of the votes. They didn’t win all the votes and again are using that power to push more of a radical agenda than I think the people of Ontario thought that they were getting, or hoped for, based on their actual votes.

It’s clear to me that proportional representation is a better path. It’s going to lead to more moderate politics than we’ve seen in B.C., swinging one way or another. It’s going to force politicians to be more humble, to listen to their constituents and to listen to other members in this House more often, to try and pick up the best values that each of us have, to negotiate and bring that back to our constituents — what we’ve worked for and who we’ve worked with.

I believe it’ll force us to bring the better out of each other, as opposed to the worse. If you have a winner-takes-all system where it just takes one more point, one more punch, one more slight way over the top than the other guy, you fight for every last inch. You crawl; you scratch. You do whatever thing if you’re in that kind of life-or-death, I-win-you-lose situation, but if you’re in a situation where you have to negotiate with other people, you play better in the sandbox.

We see it in elementary schools, kindergartens. We see that with our own kids. It’s better when you share. It’s better when you listen to other values, as opposed to saying: “Well, you got to the top of the pile. Too bad. Everybody else falls away. You don’t have to listen to them. You are the commander-in-chief. You are the king of the castle.” That’s how I think you get to a situation of widening inequality, of might makes right, of power over the many by the few. It’s not how you get to a system of more democracy, more equality, more fairness and more togetherness and community.

That’s how I think we need to move. We need to be moving towards a more proportional system, giving people that chance to try it out and giving them that change to say whether they thought it was a good idea or not after they’ve seen it in practice.

You know what? I think that’s about giving our constituents credit, giving our belief that they can make that choice, just as we’ve given them the ability to make a choice in this referendum through a simple ballot. You fill it out. You’ve got your questions. You can say if you want proportional representation or first-past-the-post. When you get to that second ballot that we’re voting on today around this referendum, you get that question: do you want to move back to the former system or stay with proportional representation? It’s fairly simple.

I trust that people can make that decision. They will vote as they want to, as they see the need to. I think they will vote in support. It’s my hope, and at least in my community, that’s been the history — that they do believe we can work together with a change of the system.

[5:25 p.m.]

Instead of one power for one person, let’s bring power to many people. Again, no party has a monopoly on good ideas. Let’s make this Legislature work more collaboratively. Let’s make it so that the Leader of the Opposition or the leader of the government, whatever the stripe may be, can’t get away with name-calling and other such things as we’ve seen recently in this House. In fact, they’d actually have to work together and have a level of respect for each other.

I’ve heard all this stuff about throwing derision on other members as being somehow beholden, that it’s all about their self-interest. Well, look at yourself in the mirror. Everybody has a belief, a bias, a value. Some people are afraid; I get that. Some people think the first-past-the-post system is the best system ever. Some people think proportional representation is the best system ever. I would appeal to us, I think, to try and raise the bar on this and say: “Do we think this system gets the best out of us right now?” I don’t think it does. “Do our constituents deserve better?” I think they do.

I think in so many of our communities, we already operate this way in practice. Why don’t we update the legislation so the Legislature can work the way we try and work in our communities? That is listening to each other, collaborating and trying to get the best out of our community, as opposed to: “Might makes right. I won; you lost.” It’s a divisive polarization of politics, which we see far too much of in this day and age. Let’s get people involved. Let’s involve them in this process. Let’s vote for change. Let’s give people that chance so that they, too, down the road, can vote if they want to return to the system. It’s only fair.

Previous governments in this province, in this Legislature, just changed the system without any vote. If you go back to what led to the creation of the Social Credit Party, they voted for a change to a version of the single transferable vote because they thought it would serve their best political interests. They didn’t even have a referendum. They just changed the system. That’s what they’re doing in Quebec. They’re just voting to change the system.

I ran. I said very explicitly to my constituents, as did all New Democrats — I know the Greens did as well — that we did want a change. We committed to a referendum. I know the Greens just wanted to change the system. I guess, had they won a majority, they would have just changed the system without a vote. We felt it was important to give people a vote, to give them a referendum, to give them a chance to have their say.

We’re having that referendum now. In order to have the system ready to go for votes in the upcoming election, we had to have that vote now. I’m glad we’re fulfilling that promise. It’s a promise that many constituents told me they were glad we made. Some of them told me we should just do it — just boom, bring in proportional representation. I said we should give people a chance to vote on it, to be clear on their intentions of where their values are going. We’re doing that now.

Secondly, I said to my constituents that I wanted them to have a chance to vote on it again, down the road, so that they could test it out and see if they wanted to make that change. You know what? They appreciated that. I heard from B.C. Liberal voters, Conservatives, independents, Greens, New Democrats, what have you, people who didn’t even know who they support. They change their views all the time. They said that they like that guarantee. They like that argument. They like that we’re going to put it into legislation, put it into law, so that down the road a future government is going to have that referendum, and it’s clear.

I think that’s the kind of thing that we should be doing. Nobody is infallible. Everybody makes mistakes, but let’s trust in the people of British Columbia. Let’s give them the chance to have, first, this referendum and vote, and give them a chance to vote again down the road. I believe in them. I hope that this House believes in our citizens as well — to choose, to their best ability, so that we can all work in their interests.

B. Stewart: It’s great to rise on Bill 40 to speak against this particular piece of legislation. I want to kind of talk a little bit about why I think that this piece of legislation is flawed, especially with the timing of it.

I think one of the things that we have to remember is how this all came about and where the existing system came from. Why has it been preferred? Why is it used in literally dozens and dozens of countries around the world? How did it evolve from an earlier feudal system?

What was the system of making decisions in a collaborative manner back in the days of Neanderthal man and people like that when they were really struggling? Whose decision as to where they were going to sleep tonight or eat and do those types of things evolved into something that is tried and true and that has been used for hundreds of years. Although not perfect, the system itself has proven that it leads to long, stable majority governments.

[5:30 p.m.]

[R. Chouhan in the chair.]

Now, one of the things that I think is particularly important is the fact that there was no commitment to run a proportional representation referendum by the government prior to the confidence and supply agreement. So I think that in reality…. Where did this come from? It came out of this agreement, which really is the very first thing that is stated under “Foundation of relationship” — “making democracy work for people,” which…. That’s great. That’s a fabulous statement, but on the other hand….

Interjection.

B. Stewart: I’ll get to that, Member, when I speak about the comments that the Premier made yesterday here in Victoria about the fact that he ran on that. As a matter of fact, he even made the claim that the Greens and the NDP had run on this platform. That’s contradictory, unless the Greens and the NDP were working on this prior to the election, which I can hardly imagine, unless they anticipated that they were going to end up in the voting situation they were in.

They talk about making proportional representation one of the things “making democracy work for people.” “The Legislature shall be recalled within one month of the swearing in of a New Democrat government.”

The second item, proportional representation. “Both the New Democrat government and B.C. Green caucus are committed to proportional representation. Legislation will be introduced in the first sitting of the next session of the B.C. Legislative Assembly, with a New Democrat government establishing a referendum on proportional representation that will take place in the fall of 2018, concurrent with the next municipal election. The form of proportional representation approved in the referendum will be enacted for the next provincial election.”

Those are both facts.

“The parties agree that they will work together in good faith to consult British Columbians to determine the form of proportional representation that will be put to a referendum.”

Honestly, I have no idea where this consultation took place. It must have been maybe in the back room, in the caucus rooms, but it certainly didn’t happen out in British Columbia. Most people didn’t know until it was barbecue season that we were even going to have a referendum, because Bill 6 was introduced in the fall, and the actual question didn’t come in until May 30.

The Attorney General, the people that we’re talking about, this consultation…. The on-line consultation that took place in a very specific narrow bandwidth of time was very convoluted, and even the people that have written about it question the validity of that consultation.

The reality is thatS there’s nothing like what was done by Premier Gordon Campbell when he was here and promised to look at an electoral reform system.

They took 160 voters and went across the province for over an entire year. They looked at these systems that are being proposed. The situation is that those systems were rejected, and they recommended the single transferable vote.

I think that we know that, under the Recall Act, there was a threshold that British Columbians expected for something of this magnitude and change in British Columbia. What ended up happening is that it was defeated. It didn’t meet the 60 percent threshold or the regional threshold, and I think that the rest became very clear that Gordon Campbell felt there maybe had been not enough information — the same public consultation that I was talking to — to make certain that people knew exactly what they may be giving up after this investment in the citizens’ assembly.

In the 2009 election, the same election that the member for Vancouver–West End was elected in, it was on the ballot, and it was supported in certain ridings, as he mentioned. But it was defeated soundly. The bottom line is that British Columbians, after twice voting on this, said: “We do not want a change in our electoral system, and we don’t prefer the STV system, even after a year’s consultation.”

I go back to this agreement. Who has made the decision, within the Greens and the NDP, to ignore the fact that they signed this agreement? It was touted, published, shared with everybody, the fact that there was going to be these things. “This is what you’re going to get from a B.C. NDP and Green coalition. You’re going to have wonderful relationships, the consensus-building, as it’s talked about in here.”

[5:35 p.m.]

I think one of the things that is a cornerstone, and what British Columbians were led to believe, was that there was going to be a consultation to determine the form of proportional representation that would be put out on a referendum. Again, the parties both agreed to support some form of proportional representation, which they did last night.

The ballot introduction I talked about came after Bill 6 was introduced in the fall session. Bill 6 talked about the Electoral Reform Referendum Act — how it was going to be run and what the rules were going to be. I mean, it’s a relatively simple document, only being six pages long.

We are basically amending that with Bill 40, and that’s one of the things that I don’t agree with. It’s the fact that we’re in the middle of the election. We’ve been in an election.

As a matter of fact, some people have already received their ballots, and they’ve sent them back in. They voted. Is that democracy? The fact that people were led to believe, when they were told that there was going to be this referendum, they could be going off and travelling or something like that. They filled that out, and now, here the government is proposing an amendment to actually have an adjustment to something that’s not going to happen until the year 2030.

I mean, if this unfolds the way that the government goes the full term, it will not happen until 2030, when we’ll actually be having this vote. Who’s going to remember what happened in 2018 and the discussion here in this chamber that’s commonly referred to as a wonderful channel to fall asleep with? If you happen to get tired at night and you can’t go to sleep, turn on Hansard. The fact is that that is not the type of debate that….

Our leader has been asking the Premier to sit down and to debate this and be very transparent and honest. Let’s talk about the systems. Let’s talk about the fact that we want a television debate that actually is going to give people an informed decision, not after they’ve already voted, not after they’ve had the ballot for a week or two weeks. The idea is that we want to make certain….

This is not the TV channel that people tune into. It is commercial-free, so I guess that’s one good thing.

The ballot was introduced on May 30, and that particular ballot question is the one that we know is the simple yes-no question. The bottom line is that it is not that simple. The ballot itself, as most people know because they’ve received it by now, is two questions. It’s a false dichotomy. That is what they say when, essentially, you get something — especially from what is supposed to be a non-partisan, arm’s-length statutory body of government that is not interfered with by government in terms of the way that they run things….

In this particular case, you have your two questions. The first one is whether you support the continuation of first-past-the-post or you prefer the proportional representation voting system.

Now, it’s been very difficult, on the second question, to find out from Elections B.C. the actual facts, even though I have right here the actual facts that they have published on their website. The situation is that there is concern that if people answer for first-past-the-post, and they answer question 2, that that could lead to a spoiled ballot.

I think that there’s too much conjecture. There’s too much concern by voters that this is a system that has been trumped up, modified, manipulated. I don’t know about the other terms that some of my colleagues have used. But the bottom line is that it is not the consultation that British Columbia voters expected when they signed on to allow both the Greens and the NDP, under the current system, to basically form government and sign this agreement.

Obviously, it means nothing, as we know from the leader of the Green Party. I mean, he’s made all sorts of statements about the fact that he wouldn’t support the speculation tax — in this House, outside of this House, all through the summer, talking to the people that are now directly impacted. The bottom line is: what does that mean about the value of his word when it comes to these type of things?

This is about power. That’s what these people…. That’s what this is all about. People want to remain in power, regardless of what the circumstances are.

[5:40 p.m.]

I think that many people have talked about the situation that this type of voting system can lead to. I mean, there are examples of where this is, people say, working perfectly. I mean, Italy has had three times as many elections since the Second World War — 65 elections, versus the 22 that we’ve had in Canada. The fact is that this is a system that has led to an unbelievable amount of angst.

I know colleagues that work in our company. They work in New Zealand and Australia and places where they’ve adopted this. The idea that you can just unwind something or change something, especially when we, maybe, grow from 27 registered parties in British Columbia to 127…. The fact is that those fringe elements, those parties that have a single issue, come here to the Legislature and want to advance that and get their support — get the 5 percent, which is the threshold that has been talked about in here.

I don’t know what happened to the 5 percent of voters that voted for that fringe party. Their votes don’t count, right? I mean, they’re completely discarded. The bottom line is that it doesn’t mean that every vote counts. If you’re one of those 127 potential parties, the bottom line is that this has led to angst and to where there have been many disagreements.

As you can imagine, a system of proportional representation in this House will not likely change unless there are four, five, six, seven other parties represented in the House. And then, truly, you will have to work to get coalition governments, as many do in Israel and other places like that, where they have a system that is fraught with arguments and fighting and infighting. The fact is that fringe parties end up arguing about things that become…. You know, they’re populist.

I mean, you look at the changes in Europe right now in terms of welcoming immigrants from countries that are war-torn. It’s led to all sorts of factions of groups that are now represented in parliaments across Europe that are saying: “No, we don’t want that. We don’t want immigrants. We don’t like them. We don’t want them.” That’s the non-inclusive type of society that I think everybody in this House is about, the way that Canada is, the fabric that we grew up under….

I think that when it comes back to British Columbians trying to be informed, trying to get the information, well, we have this document that arrived. It was put out last week. It was circulated. It talks a little bit about the fact that your ballot will be coming out. It’s only 20-some pages to try to explain a ballot system that’s supposed to be simple. It’s supposed to answer the question about all of the choices that are in front of British Columbians.

Well, here in this particular document, on page 8, it’s already been printed, and it’s by this arm’s-length, non-partisan statutory part of government. It’s saying right here the things that will happen, which have been stated here: “An independent Electoral Boundaries Commission will determine the number and boundaries of electoral districts and regions representing in the Legislature.”

The independent Electoral Boundaries Commission. Is that going to be kind of like the independent consultation that was in the confidence and supply agreement that never happened? Is that the type of…? Who are we to believe? Are British Columbians actually going to be able to count on the…? Who are they going to count on?

Let me just tell you one more thing about this document. Before we’ve even passed this legislation, which actually says that we are going to have this vote in 2030, it says that another referendum will be held after two elections to see if B.C. wants to keep the voting system or go back to using first-past-the-post.

How did Elections B.C. know that and publish and print this? How many millions of copies did they print? The bottom line is that they’ve been told, and these things are still happening in the background. What happened to the independence of Elections B.C.? The integrity, you know, is compromised here about the democracy of British Columbians’ ability to count on this independent body. Somehow or other, the government has infiltrated and is changing the way that either they think or they do things.

[5:45 p.m.]

It should not be done on assumptions. It should be done on clear, objective facts that everybody has in front of them. I think that, you know, we do see that the need for public information is important. We’ve got the information package coming out a week before the ballot arrives. I guess that’s the assumption. Everybody will sit down and spend time reading the 20-some pages that are in this document, 21 — sit down and read and understand. I think that there are many people here in this assembly that have tried to properly understand and articulate the three choices under the proposed proportional representation.

I think that is wrong for British Columbians. I think they’re being hoodwinked into a system…. Although the statements of claim have been made that every vote’s going to count — except for that 5 percent who, if they don’t vote for the right parties, won’t be counted, because they won’t have a seat at the table…. The bottom line is that these systems are confusing, and at best, we don’t know anything about the rules. Really, it’s going to be put into the trust of the independent Electoral Boundaries Commission, which I would question how independent it can possibly be.

Nobody has really talked about this. The advertising has started to show up now that the civic elections are over. I think that the situation is that many people are looking for information.

As the MLA in Kelowna West — it’s not a small riding, but it’s not huge — I took it upon myself to hold a number of updates. I ran through the riding — from Lakeview Heights to Westbank, Killiney Beach, Wilson’s Landing, Club 17 in Kelowna and one at Parkinson Rec Centre which is coming up — to open it up to anybody. It was advertised as being an update of what’s going on in terms of the riding. I wanted, and I prepared, a completely non-partisan presentation — where people can get the information, Elections B.C., to make certain they’re on the voter list, those types of things.

I’m trying to do my job as an MLA, to try and be able to answer those questions for the constituents, though over 60,000 constituents live in Kelowna West. I think that they’re asking the same questions: “Why is the ballot so complicated? Why are the maps not determined?” I mean, under the systems of dual-member, rural-urban and mixed-member, what are the boundaries going to be? What’s going to happen?

We know that there is a component that there’s going to be party lists. If we use the Droop formula or the Gregory method and we’re going to transfer the votes at a fraction of this, the bottom line is, I think, at the end of the day, the voters are not all math experts. I think that they’re expecting to be able to make some sort of informed decision about this referendum.

At this point, I think that the biggest shortcoming of what we’ve seen so far is that even the groups that were underfunded to actually put out the proper information about that are generally not going to be able to convince voters that they actually have enough information to make an informed vote. As the previous member, from Nechako Lakes, mentioned, many of these people are going to look at this, they’re going to unwrap the first envelope and the second one and the third one. They’re going to be sitting there confused, and they’re going to think: “You know what? This is already too complicated.”

The fact is that it wasn’t tied in with any general election, like it was done in 2005 and 2009. The bottom line is that the importance and the legitimacy of this particular mail-in ballot has got to be in question. This is a democratic right. As he also said, we’re coming up to Remembrance Day here, and the fact is that we have veterans, tens of thousands, that have fought….

Interjections.

B. Stewart: Well, they fought for the right to preserve votes. I mean, what do you think that Nazi Germany was doing back in 19…?

Interjections.

B. Stewart: Well, the bottom line is that…. I mean, do you think that they gave democracy to the German citizens? This is exactly the problem. The fact that these veterans really did put their lives on the line and many, many didn’t come home, including many members of my family.

[5:50 p.m.]

Anyways, the bottom line is that there are still disputes going on today about the fact of representation. I mean, we just finished a war. Out there on the cenotaph, right on the front lawn of this building is the cenotaph talking about how long the war in Afghanistan went on. The fact is that we are peacekeepers, but we want to preserve the democratic right of voters in British Columbia. That’s what we’re here to do.

At the end of the day, I think one of the worst parts of the….

Interjections.

Deputy Speaker: Members.

B. Stewart: You said that this is a partisan prop? This is the voters guide. I don’t think that that’s a partisan prop. There are people that fought for this country to make certain we preserve the freedom of the vote, and you will know that…

Interjections.

Deputy Speaker: Members.

B. Stewart: …if you talk to any one of them. As a matter of fact, maybe you should visit a cenotaph on November 11 and then go out there and talk to them. Ask them if they didn’t fight for that. Okay. All right.

One of the things….

Interjections.

Deputy Speaker: Members.

Continue.

B. Stewart: Thank you.

One of the things that I do want to talk about is that there are some changes about this. The referendum and Recall Act…. The bottom line is that, as I said earlier, we don’t have any maps that show the boundaries of what these new ridings are going to look like and how these party lists…. The proportional portion of this reallocation of voting — how is that going to be redistributed? If we end up with these ridings…. We had maps from the 2009 STV vote. Some of them showed that ridings are going to be as big as some European countries. The situation is that we don’t really know that.

We also have modified the threshold so that even though we have a mail-in ballot, the likely low voter turnout, just because of the fact that it’s…. We’ve just seen the municipal elections. Thankfully, there was a bit of an increase in terms of the voter turnout. In municipal elections, it was up slightly, but just about 30 percent.

I think that the reality is that with a mail-in ballot, it’s very difficult to expect that we’re going to have a very high turnout — likely a lower threshold than the civic elections and far less than the provincial elections, where the STV was put on two previous occasions where the turnout was roughly around 60 percent.

Why did we have to drop it to 50 percent? What’s the reason? Why would we drop it down to 50 percent of the votes plus one and without any regional context in it? What was the rationale for that? I can only surmise that the bottom line is it’s to help push this thing across the finish line and make certain that there’s no chance that the existing system will be successful, because we, essentially, are going to take the lowest common denominator.

On something that’s so fundamental to democracy, the value of our vote, again, here we are being disrespectful about the value of how hard the freedom of having a vote is. I mean, there are many countries still today where individuals’ rights are compromised. I know that many members on the opposite side of the House speak passionately and fervently about the fact that we do value those rights, and we want to stand up for them. This is a right that I think that British Columbians and Canadians have long since fought and worked hard to retain.

What we’re trying to do is to manipulate the system by lowering the threshold, taking away the big demographic difference we have in British Columbia. We have ridings that are…. I don’t even know the number of kilometres. But with 93 million hectares in the province of B.C., I know for some of the representatives in the far north, it takes days to travel their ridings. The reality is it’s going to only get bigger and worse.

The likelihood of people in Fort Nelson or maybe Dease Lake or Atlin…. Not that they’re visited often by their MLAs, but I still think that the reality is that if your riding runs all the way down to Prince George, it’s going to be pretty tough to expect to see your representative or even hear from them.

[5:55 p.m.]

That’s not a fallacy. The reduction is from 87 to a lower number of elected, and then the rest all become appointed from party lists. How do I get on that party list? Is there a nomination process? Is it…? Maybe we just have one big party list.

Interjections.

Deputy Speaker: Members.

B. Stewart: I ran in a nomination. My situation is that I went out there….

Interjections.

Deputy Speaker: Members. Order.

B. Stewart: Thank you.

Interjection.

Deputy Speaker: Member. Member.

Interjections.

Deputy Speaker: Member, take a seat, please.

Members….

Interjection.

Deputy Speaker: Member.

Minister.

The member will continue.

B. Stewart: Well, thank you, Mr. Speaker.

It’s obvious that we don’t have the answer to that question. I won’t even repeat it. But I do think that the idea…. To be honest, I’m a bit perplexed. I know we have different points of view, but at the end of the day, there is consensus on this side of the House. We don’t always have consensus, but this is a coalition of different people that think about what it is that they stand for.

My colleague from North Vancouver is passionate about certain things, but not everybody in our caucus is. The bottom line is that she helps keep us focused in on that. We have people that are concerned about the environment. We’re concerned about the land base, the natural resource industry, as is the other side.

They have their coalition within the NDP and a long standing with different groups. I really think that…. For the most part, unless they’re finding it difficult working with their coalition, why would they want to think that there should be some sort of immediate change to something that is so fundamental? We haven’t really informed British Columbians in the way that I think that their expectation is.

We’ve got an election that is happening right now. We’ve got a bill in front of us that talks about modifying or giving some changes — that leap of faith or the idea that we’re going to make certain that we…. I guess we know that there’s a possibility, if we’re going to do this in the future, we can change it back. I guess there’s always that possibility.

I want to just talk about a couple of things that were said last night by the two leaders at their event. I want to just read into the record the leader of the Green Party, the Third Party: “We” — John Horgan and Andrew Weaver — “both prefer to focus on issues that matter to people, not what’s wrong with the other parties. And you see that every single day in question period, as my colleagues and I ask questions of government that are relevant to people and get thoughtful responses to questions that aren’t softballs but are probing questions for key information that all of us can benefit from.”

Well, we think that we ask thoughtful questions too. I mean, we’ve been asking about the transparency. Why not have this TV debate? Let’s make it…. It’s 30-some days ago that it was committed to.

What about the speculation tax? People heard on February 20 that there was a speculation tax. We know nothing other than the communities…. We do now, and now we still have amendments that still haven’t been introduced.

The community benefits agreement. The bottom line is we still have questions about that. Employer health tax, we haven’t even started debating.

It’s been a pleasure and an honour to stand here on Bill 40.

Hon. S. Simpson: I’m pleased to be able to join this debate. I’m more invigorated to join the debate after listening to the performance of the previous speaker. A bit of an embarrassment — an embarrassment, certainly, to himself and an embarrassment to his party — with that performance, particularly when he invokes veterans. He invokes veterans in the most unacceptable way.

[6:00 p.m.]

Let’s be clear here. We’re debating this issue, but there is not a question. Under our democratic processes in this country and around the world, you won’t find many people who won’t tell you there are two fundamental systems. You have countries and states that use a first-past-the-post system. You have countries and states that use proportional representation. They are both democratic systems, and the democracy of those places that use them is absolutely legitimate. Frankly, it’s embarrassing that you won’t acknowledge that on the other side.

Both these systems are legitimate systems. You can debate the merit of them. You can debate whether you like one better than you like the other. But they are both fundamentally democratic. Veterans around the world fought for us to have the right as citizens to vote on which system we want, and we’ll do that. It becomes a fundamental question of democracy, and that’s the debate that’s going on here.

We are making the argument, as are the supporters of proportional representation, that it’s time to change this institution, and it’s time to have this institution reflect what the people in British Columbia say when they vote. When they say that 40 percent of the votes should be B.C. Liberal, then 40 percent of the seats should be B.C. Liberal. When they say 40 percent of the votes should be New Democrat, then 40 percent of the seats should be New Democrat. Then it’s the responsibility of us collectively, here, to govern.

We come to this, and it becomes a question. We learned, with the formation of this minority government, that it isn’t about the party that has the most or the least. It’s about who can govern the confidence and gain the confidence of this House and who can bring together, in a collaborative way, the people that generate the confidence of this House. And that’s what happened with two parties on this side that got 57 percent of the vote in the last election. That’s what we’re saying.

The other side is saying we have a system where the winner-takes-all, whether it’s by one vote or by 10,000 votes. You take all. That’s not the system I believe people are looking for today. That’s not the system that we need. But sadly, that’s not the debate in this House. We’re not talking about the merits of proportional representation versus first-past-the-post, the fundamentals of those two systems, about which system better represents government.

There’s an argument to be made — and I hear that — that the other side would make that says you have better stability with a winner-take-all, first-past-the-post system because you get a majority government with 43, 44 percent of the vote, as the other side has done on numerous occasions, and you’ve got stability for four years. But with a proportional representation system, it may require two or maybe three parties to come together to form that coalition, that majority, to be able to effect government. There may be an argument about one lasting longer than the other. That’s a legitimate argument.

What’s not legitimate is the fearmongering that we hear in this place with almost every member on that side that gets on their feet. This can’t be a debate about fearmongering, and that’s exactly what’s happened. I get it. I understand it. I understand that you have…. I do worry. I will tell you I do worry that the fearmongering going on in the Liberal ranks is having an impact in our northern and rural communities. I worry about that. I worry that you’re scaring people. You’re not asking them to understand, to vote on what they believe in, to vote on what they think is right. You’re scaring them.

You can do that because you have no other argument than fear. We’ve seen…. You can look to the south. You’ve got a president in the south who is using fear to scare immigrants. He uses fear, and fear just is simply the wrong way to go.

[6:05 p.m.]

Why is that happening? Why is the other side so desperate on this? This is the other side — remember, not that many years ago — that put forward STV and brought the question of proportional representation to the table. They brought that process forward and created an argument, then, so it could never pass. They created a ceiling, a bar that could never be passed.

Here’s why. Here’s why we have this situation. This debate isn’t because the other side is fundamentally opposed, I believe, to a democratic process. It’s because the other side is desperately concerned about their survival as a political party. The other side knows that they will not form majority governments; neither will this side. You will have to be collaborative.

That’s outside the realm of possibility for that group as it has functioned in the last 16 years. You don’t have to go far. Go back and listen to some of the leadership candidates, in the last Liberal leadership campaign, who came out so vehemently and vigorously opposed to this. Almost without exception, the argument made to B.C. Liberal members — not to the public but to B.C. Liberal members — was: “Our party’s future is at risk if proportional representation passes, because we are a coalition of Liberals and Conservatives and Libertarians, and we will split apart in a minute if this happens.”

Now, I don’t know if that’ll happen or not, but clearly that fear has been well instilled and established, in the members sitting on that side, moving forward. That’s why we’re getting all this fearmongering. It’s about a party trying to survive on what has been a really good thing for that party. Sadly, it’s a detrimental way to move forward and to discuss important policy issues.

The reality is — I know this, and I think members on that side know it; I’m sure my colleagues know it — that neither system, proportional representation or first-past-the-post, is perfect in any way, shape or form. Both of those systems have flaws, and both of them still are at the behest of the people who are elected, in many ways. How people conduct themselves as elected has a lot more to say about how people point fingers at those systems, pro or con, than it has to do about the structures of the systems themselves. I think that’s the reality, but we’re not having a mature debate about that. Instead, we’re having this debate that is about everything else.

I don’t know what the result is going to be when this is all done at the end of the day. What I do know is that I absolutely have confidence in the people of British Columbia to make the decision, and I’m absolutely happy to respect that decision, whatever it might be. The other thing that I know is that politics is evolving in our province, in our country and globally.

I know we’ve talked in this House…. I’m sure both parties here — all three parties — have often talked about turnout. We’ve talked about how to engage young people in politics. We’ve talked about how to broaden interest in political process and civil society. We’ve talked about how we make it more relevant for people. What I hear, more and more often, is that people want more collaboration — that people want more problem-solving happening in this place. I hear from young people that they want the politics of this place to be more relevant to them.

People on both sides…. You know, we’ve got 87 personalities in this room, strong personalities, smart people and people who are invested in what they believe, and we have lots of back-and-forth. It should be vigorous. The debate should be vigorous, and it should be strong, and we should hold firm to what we believe.

[6:10 p.m.]

The nature of the institution, the nature of winner-take-all, is such that it actually creates, I think, a detriment to our ability to find the collaboration that, I would like to believe, most people on both sides of this House would like to see at some time. People on both sides of this House, at some time, have to be exhausted by what is the confrontational, adversarial nature of this. I know that I talk enough to members on the Liberal side to know that’s true there too.

I know I’ve been around this place long enough to know it’s true for many members. They would like to see problem-solving happen differently, because every member in this place knows that there are very real problems in their communities. There are very real problems in the province. Frankly, when we are at each other in this place, we do a disservice to solving those problems.

This becomes a debate about whether obliging us to be more collaborative, by having more diversity, having more voices and having more points of view, in fact supports a more collaborative approach and obliges us to that approach. The people of British Columbia will make that decision at the end of November. What we know here is that it is time — for the nature of this place, which has been here for all my time and for a hundred years before that, or however long this place has been around — for some change.

Young people are telling us it’s time for change. We need to remember that while there are young people in this House, there are a whole lot more of us who are less young in this House. At the end of the day, we should be looking at what engages young people in the process, what brings them to the table, what brings them into this place, with seats, to be able to be active participants in this discussion. That’s what I think that we need to do. The failure of that collaboration is what people are tired of.

We know that we have to effect change. What this particular piece of legislation does in that much broader debate of proportional representation is say: “There is a safety valve.” A couple elections down the road, if this doesn’t work, if the folks on the other side are right, then the people of this province will effect a change again, because the people of the province generally get it right.

It is time for us to look seriously at the change. Sadly, that debate does not happen in this place in a reasonable way. It’s time to set the fear aside. It is time to set the rhetoric and the bluster aside. British Columbians will decide. What this says is that they will have the opportunity, two elections afterwards, to consider the decision that they make in November, should it pass. They will have a chance to reconsider that decision should they choose to want to do that. That’s what we’re voting on today.

The more fundamental question is: should this place start to reflect what British Columbia looks like more than it does today? This place, to too great a degree, reflects, I think, what British Columbia looked like a couple decades ago. It has to start to look like what British Columbia looks like moving forward.

It is my belief that proportional representation affords us the best opportunity, the best vehicle to begin to evolve that change, to begin to make that happen, to begin to effect the change that people want. That’s what I hear from young people. That’s what I hear from people who’ve come to this country and want to be involved. That’s what I hear from vulnerable people who are looking for a place for a voice.

None of us should be scared of there being four or five parties in this House that all bring a view as long as we’re all sitting in this place with the commitment, the obligation and the determination that we are here to do best for British Columbians and to ensure the decisions here reflect the values, the interests and the aspirations of British Columbians.

[6:15 p.m.]

I think proportional representation gives us the best opportunity to do that. I look forward to that vote, and I am hopeful the vote will effect the change that the majority of people in this province want today.

D. Davies: I appreciate the opportunity to speak on this bill that we are here talking about.

We heard from the minister across, the member, talking about fear. I tell you there is a lot of fear. There is a lot of fear from the residents that live in my riding. There’s a lot of fear from the residents that live throughout this province and certainly in ridings that are smaller and more rural.

This fear is not from fearmongering. This fear is from people looking at this flawed process that this government has rolled out. This fear comes from the gaping holes that are in this process. This fear comes from not knowing what things will look like following this referendum. That is where the fear is coming from. It is not coming from fearmongering; the fear is coming from not knowing the facts, not knowing how this whole referendum will roll forward.

I just wanted to talk on a couple points earlier. The member for Vancouver–West End mentioned about people that have come to him in his riding and spoken about support, some B.C. Liberals that have spoken about supporting this. I can certainly talk from my perspective as well.

I have a number of NDP friends in my riding that have come up to me and conveyed their concern, their issues, as well, on the electoral reform process. I mean, we also have well-known NDP folks that have come out completely opposed to this. We have Mr. Tieleman. We’ve got former NDP Premiers that have come out completely opposed to this.

I do agree with the member that this is something that is divided. Our job here as legislators is to debate this wholeheartedly and to hope that the fine folks of this province do make the right decision.

I also wanted to talk about a brief comment: that the B.C. Conservatives support proportional representation. That is not correct. In fact, they have taken a neutral stance on this. In fact, Mr. Anderson — I believe he’s still the temporary leader — has also spoken about the process that the B.C. Liberal government put in place in 2005 and how he believed that it was put in place to capture the true intentions of the public and that he does not necessarily agree with the process that is being laid out right now.

This week, of course — in fact, I believe even as early as Friday of last week — residents around this province started receiving their mail-in ballots. The mail-in ballots, of course, do ask for the way that we elect our MLAs. I find it kind of laughable, actually, that we’re here debating Bill 40, Electoral Reform Referendum 2018 Amendment Act. A piece of this referendum is happening right now, and we’re still here debating pieces of it. It completely doesn’t make any sense to me.

Of course, just to the handful of people that are watching this debate right now, Bill 40 is basically to hold a referendum in more than a decade from now to judge what the government is doing today, to see if: boy, did we get this right? I find that in all reality, this bill that has come late into the process is nothing more than a final plea to the residents of British Columbia.

[6:20 p.m.]

It’s a plea to say: “All right, we know that this isn’t going well. We know this isn’t looking good. We will give you the opportunity to review and look at this 11 years from now, but in the meantime, take a leap of faith. Don’t worry about these 29 pieces that are missing. We’ll decide those later.” And if they’re wrong and if we get it wrong, we’ll go back to a referendum under who knows what government.

Who knows what the government is going to look like 11 years from now? I’m very certain that it’ll look different under proportional representation than it is now. “But take that leap of faith with us,” the Premier said recently at the UBCM. I find that wrong. I find that very wrong. “Trust us. Trust us on these 29 points, and we’ll make the world a happier place for you.” I don’t buy it, and I don’t think that the people of this province buy it.

I would like to stand, though, right now with my fellow Interior MLAs and rural MLAs, MLAs that represent the smaller ridings in the Lower Mainland and MLAs that represent large ridings in the Interior. I want to give my perspective — and the perspective of us, specifically, that represent rural ridings — on some of the discussions that we’ve been having.

For those of us that represent these geographically huge yet lightly populated ridings, having a dedicated voice in this Legislature is absolutely critical to carrying out our democracy in this province. I fear that under proportional representation, the representation of my constituents and constituents of rural B.C. will be lost or at least watered down.

I’m born and raised in Fort St. John. I’ve travelled my riding extensively over my lifetime. I certainly travel it a lot more now in my role as MLA. I know the issues intimately in my riding. I live them. I breathe them every single day when I’m home. I’ve lived them, and I’ve breathed them every single day as I’ve lived there, as I raise my family in Fort St. John. From issues facing our post-secondary students, issues facing teacher recruitment, rural road issues in my riding, getting a new bridge across into Taylor across the Peace River, to rural health care issues — I know these issues.

My constituents talk to me every day about these issues. They come into my office every day and talk about these issues. I travel my riding extensively to talk about these issues. Rural health care is a big issue that I often hear about in my office.

As many know in this place, I myself was involved in a critical accident in March. I had a lot of time to think about rural health care issues that face Vancouver while I was waiting to be medevacked to Vancouver to receive the critical health care that I needed. I know these issues well, and I know the issues that are facing rural residents, especially around health care. I’m going to continue to fight like hell to make sure that every single constituent in my riding will continue to have a strong, loud voice in this place.

As I talk about these issues, in my riding, of rural health care, as I talk about roads, as I talk about all these things, you’re wondering where this fits in. In all likelihood, once the dust settles after proportional representation — if proportional representation becomes a reality…. My riding, which is already the size of Austria, Ireland and Vancouver Island combined, is roughly 165,000 square kilometres. It’s big; it’s massive.

[6:25 p.m.]

It’s very likely that my riding is going to get bigger. It’s hard to fathom that. I already struggle to make sure that I’m out constantly, out on the road listening to these issues. You know, talking about my riding of Peace River North…. We don’t know. Is it going to include Peace River South, my colleague to the south? Is it going to include that? Is that big enough? I don’t know. Is it going to go as far as Prince George, maybe, to get whatever is needed?

This is one of the problems that I’m going to talk about a little bit later, that we don’t know what ridings are going to look like. That’s one of those 27 gaping holes in this process that we’re being asked to vote on.

I’ve already mentioned that I drive thousands of kilometres, all the time, up to Liard Hot Springs, Toad River. I’ve already mentioned that I go up to Fort Nelson often. I have a constituency office, actually, in Fort Nelson. It’s the second-largest community in my riding.

We know that Fort Nelson has been troubled with economic issues in the last few years. But did you know that I’ve been working with that community? I’ve been working with the Ministry of Health and working with Northern Health to offer birthing opportunities in that community.

Why am I talking about birthing opportunities in Fort Nelson? I would bet that many people in this place — or elsewhere in the province, for that matter — don’t realize that women that are pregnant in Fort Nelson are being told to leave the community weeks ahead of their due date and to have their child somewhere else. This is due to a shortage of resources in that community, medical health resources.

Now, to tie this all together — talking about the size and very specific health care issues in my riding. My riding is going to get bigger, and we don’t know what that looks like. Well, we will know what it looks like after the referendum. But the government is not telling us what it’s going to look like. The government is not telling us how MLAs are going to be appointed to this place until after.

This really worries me. This worries my constituents, who don’t know if they’re going to be able to come to my office and look me in the eye and say: “I need help.” Or to pick up a phone and call me and say: “Member, I need help.” I field those calls all the time. I am accountable to every single one of my constituents. I’m accountable to them, whether they voted for me or not. That’s how this system works. Fundamentally, that’s how this system works.

I’ve spoken a little bit about some of the issues that my riding is facing. I’m intimately connected to those issues, from Taylor Bridge to the health care issues in Fort Nelson.

I worry about…. Again, we don’t know. If an MLA is appointed to the Legislature to represent a piece of whatever the riding looks like in the future, how are they going to truly understand and represent the constituents of Fort Nelson? How are they going to relate? Well, I tell you, I can relate. I do relate, and I will continue to relate to my constituents and the issues that are facing them. I will continue to fight passionately for the issues facing my constituents.

My riding is a long way — in fact, the farthest away — from this place. It takes a long time. I don’t know if anybody in this…. I’m sure there are a few folks in this room that have driven from Victoria, grabbed the ferry, driven up Highway 97, maybe taken a trip up the Alaska Highway and driven there. It’s a long ways from here.

[6:30 p.m.]

By the way, I do encourage you to do that anyway, if you haven’t. It’s absolutely gorgeous. It’s beautiful. Make sure you stop at the Liard Hot Springs. Take a dip in probably one of the most hidden secrets in the world. I’m digressing a little bit. But it’s a beautiful place, and I do encourage you to drive up there.

I encourage you to drive up there to understand the incredible diversity of this province. It’s unbelievable — unbelievable, the diversity of this province. The diversity of this province geographically and the differences that all of us in this province, whether it be culturally or otherwise…. We’re all different in all corners of this province.

In fact, I’ve often said that if you were to take someone from Fort McMurray and someone from Dawson Creek and Fort St. John and someone from Edmonton and Calgary and someone from Lethbridge and put them all in a coffee shop together and tell them to have coffee, their conversations would probably be quite similar. I mean, the demographics are fairly similar across the province of Alberta. The geography is very similar across the province of Alberta.

But not here. Again, this is what makes B.C. fantastic — the rich diversity of people, the incredible geography that we have, from the prairies, where I live, to the Rocky Mountains to our coastal communities. It’s fantastic. It’s unbelievable. I’m very proud to live in this province.

Back to my point. My riding is a long ways from Victoria. In fact, it’s so distant that it could be very easy for this Legislature to overlook the needs of the residents, to be drowned out by the incredible population that is located in the Lower Mainland. Again, this ties back into the diversity of our province, the demographics and geography.

At the end of the day, the residents of Peace River North, the residents of rural and remote parts of British Columbia, our voices aren’t drowned out in this place, because we have elected representatives from northern communities. We’ve got elected representatives from rural communities, whose sole job is to bust our butts in here for every single resident in our riding, to remind the government that our needs are just as important as the needs of everybody that lives in urban British Columbia.

Rural and remote constituents do matter. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Fort St. John or Fort Nelson, Prince Rupert or Terrace or in Vancouver, we all enjoy the same rights. We all enjoy, expect and deserve to be equally represented in this place.

Again, my job individually, as the MLA for Peace River North, is to make sure that my constituents have that voice and have that representation in this Legislature. My job, and all of our jobs in this place, every single one of us, is to represent our constituents, whether they voted for us or not.

When we come back to say, “Oh, well, under proportional representation, it’ll get every vote to count, and people will finally be represented,” that’s not true. That is not true. That is not true for any one of us who is sitting in this place — all 87 of us that have made a commitment to our communities, that have made a commitment to our constituents, that have made a commitment to devote ourselves to public life here.

It’s not just to represent some people or a little part of the population. It’s to represent whoever walks through that door. It’s to represent whoever sends us an email. It’s to represent whoever phones us. That’s what we do. That is the fundamental piece of being a member of this Legislature.

[6:35 p.m.]

To say that I need other people in my riding to represent all the other parties — I don’t buy that at all, not for one minute. I can guarantee if you probably ask anybody in this room…. Certainly in my riding, nobody feels like they’re not being represented when they come and speak to me about an issue that’s affecting them. Because I don’t do that, and I don’t believe that any of us in this room do that.

Every one of us has a moral compass that guides us, and I believe that’s why we’re all in here. If we don’t put people first, as I mentioned, we are lacking our primary task of being an MLA. I truly believe that under proportional representation, it will become more about the party, more about the parties than it will be regarding the people.

Under many of the proportional representation systems around the world, we see that unfolding. We see that today. You can look at almost every example of proportional representation around the world, and the governments under PR are not focused on people. They’re in survival mode, it seems. They’re almost always in survival mode, trying to hold the coalition together, trying to hold this minority whatever together. It becomes much more about the party than it does the people.

It’s going to be a sad day in British Columbia when it becomes more about a party than it does about representing constituents. I absolutely believe that, and I absolutely believe that’s going to be what’s going to come under proportional representation.

Of course, when I see legislation come through such as Bill 40, as well as the previous piece of legislation that has got us to this point here today, it is my job, it’s our job, to give it a thorough examination and to determine if it is good for the people — in my case, if it’s good for the people of Peace River North. I have to concur with my colleagues on this side of the House that have already commented on this bill.

I think each one of them has come to their own conclusion, I’m sure in consultation with the folks that they represent, that the whole process of this government and how they’ve rolled out this referendum is wrong. The fact that they are attempting to bind an unknown future government with this bill to provide a false hope is wrong. It’s trickery.

We’ve heard here, with a number of my colleagues that have spoken about…. It was our party on this side in the past that had launched a couple of referendums on looking at how we elect our MLAs — one in 2005 and the other one in 2009. I hear folks on that side of the House talking about: “Well, you guys are in favour. You campaigned on it in the past. Or the former Premier said this was a good thing.”

None of us over here are denying that. We have never said we’re not in favour of looking at electoral reform. If the people of this province had come out, or if there was a big push to say we need to look at electoral reform, I know that this side…. If we were in government, we would be looking at developing a process, again, that would keep in the best interests of all British Columbians. All right? We would be looking at a process.

Interjections.

D. Davies: I hear a member across saying: “We put it to the people.” Well, we did too, and we did an unbelievable job at doing that with the citizens’ assembly, picking random people from each of the ridings, bringing them together and talking about the merits of how we elect our MLAs — a grassroots way to come up with what is going to work best for British Columbians.

[6:40 p.m.]

A far, far different approach than what the NDP and the Green Party have mustered up in their little contract of happiness. It’s shameful. “Let’s ram this through. We’ll create an on-line poll that was….” You couldn’t complete the poll. It was so lopsided. I don’t know if that is what the member across was talking about: “We consulted the people.”

I’m sorry. That’s not consulting the people. Consulting the people is out there talking, out there doing a citizens’ assembly, like we have done in the past, getting people’s responses, being guided by the citizens of British Columbia, being driven by the citizens of British Columbia — not the other way around, which is what was done on that side or which is now what we see happening.

The best interests are going to come from British Col­um­bians, not the other way around. Going back to the process that was done in the past on the citizens’ assembly, picking men and women from across the province in every riding, making sure Indigenous voices were heard. The reason why the B.C. Liberals did that, the government of the day did that, was to ensure that the public had confidence in the process.

I have heard very little confidence in the process that has been rolled out to this date on the bill we’re talking about today, as well as the process that has led us to the referendum that’s happening right now. People don’t have a lot of confidence in the process.

I hear it every single day. I hear it when I’m at the grocery store shopping. People come up to me and talk about how concerned they are. I go to a restaurant with my family. People want to talk about proportional representation and the problems that they have with it.

The fear is created by the government who has filled it with holes, who have left so many unknowns. “Take a leap of faith. Walk with us. Don’t worry about it. Let us deal with these holes after you guys vote for it. We know what’s best for you. We’ll do what’s right.”

I believe that that is the message that the public is getting, when really, it’s nothing more than a deliberate attempt to rig the next election. I truly mean that. When we talk about looking at how the governments around the world are always on survival mode, it is really concerning to me that this is a way that we can guarantee that.

[Mr. Speaker in the chair.]

Interjections.

D. Davies: I’m hearing these comments across the way. They haven’t put up many speakers, but they sure want to speak to this now. As we continue this debate, I hope to hear from these folks here that, again, want to get their two bits in.

I see the clock is ticking here.

Proportional representation not only has the possible effects of blurring truly local representation, it really does make it hard for local voices to be heard in this place. This is why we are opposed to this bill. This is why we are opposed to the whole process that has been laid out before us by this government.

It has been done poorly. It’s been done wrong. Again, I’ve talked about 29 major pieces of the puzzle that aren’t there. Yet you want us to judge that puzzle. Yeah, that looks nice, but the whole face is missing. You know, that’s the 29 pieces out of it. And this is what we’re asking.

[6:45 p.m.]

The member earlier from Abbotsford had mentioned buying a car without knowing the brand or the size of motor or even if it has a motor. The tires — well, it may or may not have. I’ve got a car for sale. It’s going to be 10,000 bucks. Will you give it to me? No, people aren’t going to do that.

That’s the same thing that the government is asking right now — for people to vote on a referendum that has these huge holes in it. Maps not provided. Is it open or closed lists? We can’t even get to the debate. I understand there is something coming, but when is too late too late? The middle of November, I understand, might be the date for the debate. That’s too late. That’s not true.

In closing, the NDP and the Green Party think that they have a right to impose this style of government. I hope that the voting public turns out in full force and pushes back against the government, because I know that I’m going to be fighting tooth and nail to defeat this obvious political ploy that is being presented to British Columbians. I’m going to continue to step up, and I’m going to continue to make sure that the voices of my constituents are heard in this place.

Mr. Speaker: Member, Surrey-Cloverdale.

M. Hunt: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m also aware of the clock, so I’m really not sure whether you want me to start. Or should I simply move adjournment and hold my place to come back?

Mr. Speaker: That sounds like a good idea.

M. Hunt moved adjournment of debate.

Motion approved.

Hon. S. Simpson moved adjournment of the House.

Motion approved.

Mr. Speaker: This House stands adjourned until Thursday, October 25, at 10 a.m.

The House adjourned at 6:47 p.m.