There has been a lot of media lately as to whether or not there should be a national referendum on electoral reform. I thought I might make some comments on this topic.
When I was doing my graduate work, my major interest was in constitutional change and the need to accommodate Quebec which had not signed the 1982 Constitution.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s there were two attempts to amend the Constitution: the Meech Lake Accord and the Charlottetown Accord. Both of these accords failed.
There were major differences between Meech and Charlottetown. Meech was the invention of political elites, who set out a series of constitutional compromises without public consultation. The Accord did not require a referendum although it did require approval of the provinces, which it failed to do.
The Charlottetown Accord was created through a series of public consultations that took place across Canada. Charlottetown was interesting because it encapsulated the different views about the meaning and purpose of the Canadian nation.
As one might guess, the divergent views led to a document that was full of contradictions and compromises. The Accord was put to a national referendum and it failed to garner enough support to be adopted.
As a student I was amazed at how a document shaped by so much public consultation and input could ultimately be rejected in a national referendum.
In my search for answers, I looked at scholarship on institutional change. I found some very interesting work that suggested that we become vested in the institutions of which we are a part. For example, we usually have an identity in our workplace.
We may have a job title or a job description that defines our role and responsibilities. We have relationships with people that include power relations. We also have friendships or even personal antagonisms that shape the way the institution functions.
Organizational behaviour studies at the time suggested that changes in organizations, particularly extreme changes, even if they are generally thought to be positive, are resisted because an individual's identity is threatened in a new and unknown structure.
The changes in the Charlottetown Accord would have created a very different kind of Canadian politics and if we think of Canada as an institution it should not surprise us that people balked at the big and unknown changes that the Accord presented.
In 2005 and 2009, B.C. had two referenda on electoral reform. The choice about which electoral system to adopt was decided through a democratic process that brought together ordinary citizens who we educated about different electoral systems. They were presented with the pros and cons and decided on the Single Transferable System.
In the first referendum there was little fanfare about changing the system and the referendum failed only to meet the high threshold criteria set out by the government but it did still garner 58 per cent in favour. The fact that the yes vote exceeded 50 per cent led to the second referendum.
By 2009, a very active "no" campaign had developed and, as Ken Carty, Fred Cutler and Patrick Fournier argued in a Tyee article published at the time, Liberal Party supporters "...became more positive about the existing system's (capacity to produce) strong single-party governments."
The authors noted that the "problematic election results of 1996 and 2001" were fading in memory. In 1996, the Liberals were the opposition party despite having a higher popular vote than the NDP and in 2001 the Liberals won all but two seats in the legislature with 58 percent of the popular vote.
By 2009, when things had returned to a more normal seat distribution, the traditional first-past-the-post system seemed more appealing than the unknown outcomes of an STV system.
My point is that a referendum, which can appear democratic, can also be fraught with politics not because we are uninformed or mean-spirited but because we are unsure of how we may fit into the new power structures.
I understand the reason that people are upset that there will be no referendum on electoral reform. Many feel that changes, like electoral reform, need democratic input. But, I think that a referendum will likely end in a no vote.
If we want to see what electoral reform will mean for Canadian politics, I think we might just have to take the plunge.
