In with the old

Yesterday, British Columbians faced a referendum on electoral reform, namely the adoption of single transferable vote (STV) elections. As I explained last year, the current voting system disenfranchises most voters, disadvantages new parties, and leads to unstable governments. That isn’t surprising considering it survived mostly unchanged from the Community of the Realm of medieval England. Alas, BC soundly rejected STV, which will likely forestall any other attempts at electoral reform for the next 10 or 20 years.

This is a setback for Canada, but even more so for the Green Party—unless we can become the first or second most popular party, the most we can hope for is a handful of MP’s at the back of the backbenches. I still intend to vote and volunteer for them, but without electoral reform they can only be the handmaiden of a broader social mobilization rather than an independent agent of change.

Although the STV defeat is a serious long-term setback, the GP also has an important short-term advantage courtesy of the Liberal Party of Canada. In the last federal election, roughly half of Green supporters voted Liberal to support Stéphane Dion, who brought several ecological policies to the Liberal platform. Given his party’s track record, I wasn’t convinced that he could really implement such policies; we’ll never know now because he was edged out of 24 Sussex by Stephen Harper. After his defeat, Dion pledged to keep the party strong until their national convention in May. Instead, in December leadership hopeful Michael Ignatieff cut some kind of backroom deal and became Liberal leader without a contest. The national convention, which just passed, had no meaningful content. For those who don’t know him, Ignatieff’s contempt for democracy, along with his support for the Iraq war, corporate globalization, integration with the US, etc. make him almost indistinguishable from Harper. Therefore it will be crystal-clear in the next election that voting Liberal means four more years of industrialism, imperialism, and inequality. So I expect we’ll see a rise in Green votes as “Dion Greens” return to the fold.

Some Greens refer to the other parties as factions of a single Grey Party because despite their different visions (watered-down conservatism, liberalism, socialism), they are united in their pursuit of industrial capitalism, an inhuman and unecological economic model. With Stéphane Dion, some greens believed that the Grey Party itself would become a powerful force for progress; but with Ignatieff that is clearly not the case.

An election in which only Stephen Harper or Michael Ignatieff can become Prime Minister also shows how absurd Canadian democracy has become, which could give a second wind to the electoral reform movement.