At least 40 per cent of Burnaby voters were cheated in the recent municipal election, according to a local advocate of proportional representation.
The Burnaby Citizens Association got all of the spots on council with 60.3 per cent of the votes, and all the school board spots with 53.9 per cent of the votes.
"People deserve representation," said David Huntley, a Burnaby resident and member of the Burnaby/New Westminster Citizens for Voting Equality group. "This is a fundamental thing."
"You have more voices, more points of view, and you ultimately wind up with better decision-making," he said of a proportional sys-tem. "People are happier. They feel as though they're represented on council."
By Huntley's calculations, a proportionally representative council would have five BCA councillors, two TEAM Burnaby councillors and one Burnaby Municipal Greens councillor. The school board would have four BCA trustees, two TEAM trustees and one Burnaby Parents' Voice trustee.
"The way it is now, one of my neighbours voted for the BCA slate, and she now has eight representatives on council," Huntley explained in a press release to the NOW. "Another neighbour voted for the TEAM slate, and she has no representatives on council."
People need to advocate for a fairer system, he said in a phone interview Wednesday.
Huntley's is not a lone voice in the electoral reform wilderness. Aside from the local group, proportional representation has many proponents throughout the world, including renowned political scientist Arend Lijphart, Huntley pointed out. More than 80 countries use some form of proportional system for some level of government, if not all levels.
Systems range in complexity from the single transferable vote (STV) system vetoed in a B.C. referendum in 2009 to the mixed member proportional system in New Zealand.
The system has a set number of members elected by geographic constituency and a set number of party members.
New Zealand adopted the system in 1994 and is having a referendum on Nov. 26 to decide whether to keep it, or choose from four alternatives, including
first past the post (the system used in B.C.'s municipal and provincial elections, as well as federally) and STV.
"The politicians in power will never change the voting system that got them elected unless they see some particular advantage for them," Huntley said in a previous interview with the NOW.
He amended that comment in his phone interview Wednesday, saying systems are sometimes changed due to "foot in mouth disease" - when a candidate promises to change an electoral system while campaigning and has to keep that promise once elected.
That's what happened in New Zealand, he said.
But Burnaby likely won't be getting proportional representation anytime soon.
Mayor Derek Corrigan has said he does not support the idea of a proportional representational system, as it is too complicated for voters.
Corrigan spoke to the issue at a series of all-candidates meetings before the election.
Corrigan mentioned the results of the 2009 provincial STV referendum were against the shift to a proportional system. STV needed 60 per cent of the votes provincewide, and at least 51 of the 85 electoral districts needed to have more than 50 per cent of votes in favour, for it to pass.
But in 2009, B.C. STV took nearly 39 per cent of the vote provincially, and only a handful of ridings surpassed the 50 per cent mark individually.
The provincial government would not support a change to a proportional voting system, Corrigan added.
But he said he would consider a ward system if the province indicated it was willing to consider it.
A ward system would divide the city into wards with a number of city councillors specifically representing each section of the city.
jfuller-evans@ burnabynow.com
