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Direct Democracy: For better or worse, referendums give power to people
Direct Democracy: For better or worse, referendums
give power to people
British Columbia leads Canada in giving voters a direct voice on
matters
BY DON CAYO, VANCOUVER SUN
MARCH 29, 2013
Anti-HST protesters lined Georgia Street betw een Denman Street and Stanley Park in 2010, the only time in the history of B.C.’s 20year-old referendum legislation that a question has made it to the ballot. The debate continues on w hether or not allow ing the
public to make major decisions is good or bad.
Photograph by: Ian Smith, PNG
First in a four-part series
When the new version of the old PST kicks in Monday morning, it will mark the first time in Canada
that tax policy has been decided by a direct vote of the people.
It will be no doubt be celebrated as a triumph by anti-HST crusaders and many direct democracy
advocates. Yet it will also be seen as a worrisome milestone by those who fear the potential for
capriciousness in a not-very-engaged electorate. And it leaves questions hanging for those who see
merit in arguments both for and against putting more power in the hands of the people, and who
wonder how far and how fast British Columbia will follow this path.
B.C. trails many U.S. states and a few other countries in implementing the tools of direct democracy.
However, despite deep populist roots in the Prairie provinces, we have moved to the head of the pack
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Direct Democracy: For better or worse, referendums give power to people
among Canadian jurisdictions when it comes to giving voters a direct voice — no matter how
infrequently they can use it — in shaping public policy.
Legislation that allowed citizens to force the 2011 referendum on the HST is just one of several
mechanisms adopted over 20-plus years to chip away at the power of elected governments to do
whatever they want, at least until the next election.
The journey down this road began in 1991 in the dying days of the Social Credit party.
It was what Simon Fraser University political scientist David Laycock calls a Hail Mary pass: Rita
Johnston, the short-lived premier who took over the reins of government in April of that year when
scandal forced Bill Vander Zalm from office, was facing an election in October that she was widely
expected to lose.
Under the Referendum Act passed in 1990, only the government could put a question on a provincial
election ballot. But, in a bid to mollify unhappy voters, Johnston used this power in October 1991 to
ask if people wanted the right to put their own questions on the ballot and to recall MLAs for poor
performance.
Johnston lost her seat, and her government was trounced. But the recall and initiative provision won
80.9-per-cent support.
It then fell to the new premier, Mike Harcourt, and his NDP colleagues to implement the direction given
by the electorate and to write the nitty-gritty rules.
Those rules were tough — deliberately so, says David Mitchell, a political historian who was then the
Liberal opposition’s House leader and is now president and CEO of the Ottawa-based Public Policy
Forum.
“The NDP got stuck with this,” he said as he looked back on that era during a recent interview. “No
one can ever tell me they liked it.”
The rules
The recall legislation the NDP came up with requires petitioners to sign up 40 per cent of the voters
who were registered in the riding for the last election, and who still are. It has been tried 24 times, and
only once has it succeeded — sort of.
Enough signatures were collected in 1998 to initiate Elections B.C. action against Paul Reitsma, then
the Liberal MLA for Parksville-Qualicum, who had been accused of writing phoney letters to local
newspapers to praise his own performance. But the recall law was never fully tested because Reitsma
resigned before any action was taken.
As for referendums, getting a question on the ballot requires a proponent to collect signatures from
10 per cent of the electorate — a huge number. If it sounds daunting, it’s only the beginning.
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Direct Democracy: For better or worse, referendums give power to people
B.C.’s rules also require the support of 10 per cent of the electorate in all 75 ridings — and each
person who signs has to endorse the correct petition. This makes signature-collecting difficult pretty
much everywhere, and almost impossible in busy hubs like a SkyTrain station where people from
many ridings converge.
As well, the proponent has just 90 days to sign people up, and can use only volunteer canvassers.
So it’s no surprise that the HST question was the first and only in the law’s 20-plus-year history to
make it to the ballot.
“The initiative idea is a powerful one that merits attention,” says Antony Hodgson, the president of
Fair Voting BC. “But the rules make it practically unworkable in B.C.”
Even the HST referendum — the product of an unprecedented combination of frustration,
organization and resolve — would likely not have passed if a final barrier had been left in place.
“The initiative law requires 50 per cent of registered or eligible voters,” Hodgson said. “So if you had
49.9-per-cent turnout and 100 per cent were in favour of the question, the question loses.”
Given that HST votes were cast by just over half of the eligible electorate, and that “only” 55 per cent
of those who sent their ballots in on time voted to scrap the unpopular tax, the outcome fell far below
this very high bar set by the NDP back when the law was enacted.
What saved the day for HST foes and cooked the government’s goose was, ironically, the personal
intervention of former premier Gordon Campbell — the man anti-HST campaigners loved to vilify and
who was ultimately squeezed out of office because of the issue — and of his successor, Christy Clark.
While Campbell was still in office, he decreed the vote would be held not under the onerous terms of
the Recall and Initiative Act, but rather under the Referendum Act, which requires only a simple
majority of votes cast. Clark, who took over before the balloting in 2011, followed through on
Campbell’s promise.
Other experiences
This was by no means Campbell’s first dabbling with direct democracy and related mechanisms —
from fixed election dates to attempts to introduce proportional representation. His keen interest in
such things went back at least to 1996, when he was struck by the unfairness of his Liberals losing by
six seats to the NDP despite winning more of the popular vote.
During his 10-year term as premier, Campbell tied his own government’s hands, at least to a limited
extent, with both balanced budget legislation and fixed election dates. And he initiated three
referendums before the one on the HST.
The first turned out to be — despite getting the results the government appeared to want — pretty
much inconsequential.
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Direct Democracy: For better or worse, referendums give power to people
This 2002 referendum asked voters to endorse eight principles for future treaty negotiations with First
Nations. Some, as critics pointed out, were vague motherhood statements, some were clearly beyond
provincial jurisdiction, and at least one was so ambiguous as to raise questions about what a yes-orno vote would mean.
There were calls for a boycott, which was quite possibly heeded as only about a third of the mail-in
ballots were returned.
The result — an 80-per-cent endorsement — never appeared to have any impact on subsequent
actions of the government, which went on to make significant progress on several treaty issues.
The next two government-initiated referendums, one in 2005 and another in 2009, proposed
changing B.C.’s first-past-the-post electoral system to one involving proportional representation. Both
failed — the first because it fell a little short of the 60 per cent required for it to pass, and the second
because it was opposed by the majority.
These votes — like many that experts cite as best practices from other jurisdictions — were preceded
by a citizens’ assembly. This is a thorough and thoughtful deliberative process whereby randomly
selected citizens are educated on and weigh the merits of potential alternatives before recommending
one for the electorate to endorse.
Alternative voices
Seth Klein, director of the B.C. office of the left-leaning Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, has
rare words of praise for right-leaning former premier Campbell and his role in initiating the assembly.
Klein is generally no fan of referendums. For example, he says the HST vote merely polarized the
electorate by offering “two bad choices” — a flawed provincial sales tax model that most jurisdictions
have wisely rejected, or a badly implemented version of a better-designed value-added tax.
By contrast, the citizens’ assembly, although too costly and cumbersome to be used on every issue,
fostered genuine collaboration and deliberation on complex ideas.
“Public policy is about trade-offs,” Klein said. “No public policy is all good or all bad. Each has costs,
benefits, risks, opportunities, winners and losers. The best you can do is deliberate over those.”
A key seems to be the trust — or, rather, the lack of it — that lies at the root of every push for more
direct democracy. With the citizens’ assembly, as in similar exercises in other places, a group of
randomly selected and not overtly partisan citizens tends to be trusted by the electorate, whereas
politicians usually aren’t.
It is the widespread suspicion of politicians that so often leads to a seemingly unlikely coalition of leftand right-leaning voters when electoral reform is at stake, says Preston Manning, who has observed
the phenomenon both as a leader of the federal Reform Party in the 1980s and 1990s, and now as
the head of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy.
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Direct Democracy: For better or worse, referendums give power to people
“The common element in this discussion is that the big guys — although the right and the left may
argue about who the big guys are — have more power than the little guys,” Manning said in an
interview, recalling how his party once won several Vancouver Island seats from the NDP on the
strength of its electoral reform policies, then lost them when the issue got put on the back burner.
Former premier Vander Zalm, who stormed back into the headlines in recent years at the head of an
informal left-right coalition to oppose the HST, agrees.
“The left blames corporations for controlling governments,” he said. “The right blames unions and
other groups like that.
“They’re both right. We are governed by special interests.”
The answer, says Vander Zalm, is more referendums — lots of them, maybe starting with one on BC
Hydro’s smart meters, a hot-button issue to many of the people who supported him on the anti-HST
campaign.
Others are less sure.
How much is too much?
Klein concedes there may be occasional uses for a referendum, perhaps when a government wants
to do something significant that it didn’t campaign on.
Manning sees potential to use this direct democracy tool more frequently, but would like to minimize
potential divisiveness with carefully crafted questions that offer more than two starkly opposed
alternatives.
Hodgson, who strongly favours a greater public voice and broad discussions in place of what he sees
as chronic partisan warfare, is also wary of yes-no questions.
“I’d rather see a process where the people can empower, or force, a government to consider a piece
of legislation,” he said. “But the elected representatives should do their job, which is to craft it and
modify it and make it work. You don’t get that with initiatives.”
All three strongly favour the kind of citizen involvement and the education process embodied by the
citizens’ assembly.
But even Gordon Gibson, a former Liberal leader and now a Fraser Institute fellow who wrote a report
that provided the basis for B.C.’s assembly exercise, has reservations about how far this approach
can go.
“I would never ride in an airplane designed by a citizens’ assembly,” he said. “They are not qualified
to do that kind of thing.
“They’re not qualified to do budgets, either. These involve innumerable trade-offs, and they require a
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lot of experience. Or take the issue of aboriginal rights. This is a legal question, and a bunch of
people sitting around opining on the subject aren’t going to do much good.
“On the other hand, something like electoral reform is the perfect issue for a citizens’ assembly. But
these kinds of issues are, quite frankly, few and far between.”
THREE NATIONAL REFERENDUMS:
Canada has held just three national referendums, with decades-long gaps between them.
The first was on the issue of prohibition in 1898. It passed narrowly, although it wasn’t until 1920 that
Canada became officially “dry.”
The second referendum was on conscription in 1942. It passed by wide margins everywhere but in
Quebec. This ultimately led to a conscription crisis in 1944 that ended after only a few thousand
soldiers were drafted and the policy was quietly dropped.
The third was in 1992 and sought ratification of a package of constitutional amendments known as
the Charlottetown accord. It failed.
[email protected]
MONDAY: California has led the way along the path to direct democracy in North America — often
with disastrous results.
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
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Direct Democracy: For better or worse, referendums give power to people
Anti-HST protesters lined Georgia Street betw een Denman Street and Stanley Park in 2010, the only time in the history of B.C.’s
20-year-old referendum legislation that a question has made it to the ballot. The debate continues on w hether or not allow ing the
public to make major decisions is good or bad.
Photograph by: Ian Smith, PNG
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