Vancouver Province
for July 5, 2001

Suddenly, surprise surprise!, there is constitutional reform in the air in what’s left of NDPland. In the far left but the interesting and well written The Republic of East Vancouver, publisher Kevin Potvin complains at the disproportionate number of seats (97%) the Liberals received for their 58% of the popular vote and questions the enormity of the mandate thus obtained. There is no mention, needless to say, of the fact that the NDP in 1997 kept power with 3% less of the popular vote than obtained by the Liberals. And we have former national NDP leader Ed Broadbent leader criss-crossing the country plumping for Proportional Representation (where parties are allotted seats in accordance with their percentage of the popular vote) as the salvation of our democracy from the evils of the "first past the post" system. What Ed is really saying, of course, is that "first past the post" is killing the NDP and PR is their only hope to stay alive long enough to reinvent themselves as something electable.

I believe there must be reform. The present system is clearly wrong. But it was even more wrong when it gave the second place finisher first prize in 1997 than it was when it merely inflated a majority last May.

But it’s more than a bit galling to hear the NDP now calling for reforming the system, for if there’s anything the NDP have been over the past 30 years it’s silent on change unless that change solidified the status quo.

I was BC’s Minister responsible for Constitutional Affairs when, in the early 80s, Pierre Trudeau was patriating the constitution. Here was the opportunity for Canada to make any changes it wanted to the way it was governed because for that brief moment the constitution was crossing the Atlantic, all options were open. In fact there was huge interest in change everywhere except on the left. Conferences on constitutional change sprang up all across the country with every imaginable possibility open for debate. The federal government floated a bill which would have dramatically changed the Senate to a "Council of the Provinces". The Pepin-Robarts Commission heard representations of Canadians across the land. During this time the NDP in BC sat on their hands. I tried to interest the Opposition in participating in our government’s contributions but, with the laudable exception of then Liberal leader Gordon Gibson, there was bored silence. The best Opposition Leader Dave Barrett could do was mutter something about the "whole being greater than the sum of its parts" while former Attorney-General Alex Macdonald occasionally popped up to demand the abolition of the Senate. (I must add in fairness that Alex has since publicly stated that his party ought to have paid much more attention to constitutional matters.)

The great Meech Lake/Charlottetown Accord debate that engaged Canadians for half a decade brought nothing from the NDP save Premier Harcourt demonstrating that he couldn’t count BC’s MPs correctly and an embarrassing wearing by NDP MLAs, in the Legislature, of "Yes" buttons on the eve of the referendum which saw British Columbians reject the initiative by nearly 70%.

During the Clark/Miller/Dosanjh years the NDP again displayed their rock hard conservatism on constitutional reform. Ujjal Dosanjh, while heading a committee to look into referendum and recall (which had been massively supported by the people in a referendum question attached to the 1991 election), spent endless months traveling the province to see if the people really meant what they said, then recommended "reforms" which endorsed these two ideas but made them unachievable in practice. When the Liberal opposition placed reform of the BC system on the table as an election issue the NDP refused to even acknowledge it.

It’s long overdue that we review and indeed change our system. Premier Campbell has promised a "constituent assembly" (wrongly, in my view, to be selected at random). Never before have electors felt so remote from those they elect. In the past two elections, the "first past the post" system has been thoroughly discredited. This is a time, then, when the debate should start with everything up for discussion.

To this seminal debate limps the New Democratic Party, historically utterly uninterested in real reform, sniveling and whining about the only part of that debate that interests them – changes to the electoral system that might increase their pitiful representation and somewhat postpone their deserved demise.