Electoral reform needed in New Brunswick, group says

Fair Vote Canada is hoping the results of Mondays provincial election will reignite a debate over electoral reform in New Brunswick.

The national organization promotes the adoption of proportional representation.

Kelly Carmichael, a spokesperson for Fair Vote Canada, said 193,144 people , or nearly 52 per cent of voters, voted for candidates who didnt get elected on Monday.

There are a lot of ineffective votes, if you have more than two candidates, you start splitting votes, she said.

In the New Brunswick election, you had 52 per cent of all votes didnt elect anybody, so those are pretty much unrepresented votes and we call those wasted votes.

The Liberals won 27 seats, which is 55 per cent of the 49 seats in the legislature, with 42.7 per cent of the vote.

The Progressive Conservatives earned 34.6 per cent of the vote and ended up with 43 per cent of the seats. The Green Partys 6.6 per cent of the vote led to two per cent of the legislatures seats.

Meanwhile, the NDPs 13 per cent of the vote and the Peoples Alliances 2.1 per cent both left them shutout of the legislature.

Under a system of proportional representation, Carmichael said the Liberals would have had 21 seats, followed by 17 Tories, six NDP MLAs, three Green MLAs and 1 Peoples Alliance MLA.

She said proportional representation will not solve all of the provinces democratic programs, but it would create the foundation for real democracy.

The push for electoral reform has faced an uphill battle in Canada.

We need a legislature to change it and unfortunately the first-past-the-post system, the way the system works, works in the favour of parties, she said.

Former New Brunswick premier Bernard Lord appointed the Commission on Legislative Democracy shortly after he was re-elected in 2003.

The commission released its final report in 2005. The report made several recommendations, including the call for a referendum on mixed member proportional representation system.

This system would elect 36 MLAs from larger ridings, while also introducing an element of proportional representation to elect 20 MLAs.

However, the Lord government did not respond to the report until about two months before the 2006 election. Lord had promised a referendum on the new voting system in the 2008 municipal election, but he did not put that into law.

He lost the 2006 election and the Shawn Graham government hadnever supported the move to the new voting system. The Graham government adopted some of the commission's recommendations, but it disregarded the call for electoral reform.

Brian Gallants Liberal platform promises to look at preferential ballots and online voting.