British Columbia Citizens' Assembly

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 14.2

The sortition model that has become the predominant design in the early twenty-first century is known as the citizens’ assembly. It was launched in 2004 in British Columbia (BC), when the provincial government appointed Dr. Jack Blaney to chair and coordinate the creation of a representative body of non-politicians to examine and propose any needed reforms to the province’s election system. The creation of the  British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly was perhaps the most significant advance for the worldwide awareness of sortition as an alternative democratic tool.  I agree with the chair of the Citizens’ Assembly, who stated in a public address to municipality leaders in BC, 

“In the histories of democracies, this will not be a footnote. This will be something very, very important.”

The circumstances that led to the creation of this landmark use of sortition are interesting. In 1996, although the BC Liberal Party won a plurality of the votes province-wide over their main rival the New Democratic Party (NDP), by 42 percent to 39 percent, with most of the remainder going to parties of the right. However, due to split-votes in a series of winner-take-all plurality multi-party contests in districts (ridings) throughout the province, the NDP (though receiving fewer votes) won more seats in the provincial legislature and formed the government. This “unfair” distortion of the “public will,” generated by the specific characteristics of the electoral system, prompted Liberal leader Gordon Campbell to pledge that the next time the Liberal Party gained power they would convene an assembly to examine the electoral system and propose reforms, if deemed appropriate. In the following election, in 2001, the Liberal Party won a majority (57.6 percent) of the popular votes, but as a result of the winner-take-all plurality election rules in each riding, won a wildly inflated 97.5 percent of the seats in the legislature (seventy-seven out of seventy-nine seats).  Such wild swings in election outcomes from substantial, but still far more modest swings in voter preferences, are a risk in any winner-take-all single-seat election system. Rather than simply enjoying their extreme good fortune, the Liberal Party leader Campbell followed through on his commitment to convene a special assembly to study how to improve the election system. 

In 2002 the new Liberal government appointed a respected former legislator, Gordon Gibson, to propose a format and process for an assembly. Recognizing that politicians had an inherent conflict of interest when it came to evaluating election systems (naturally favoring those methods likely to favor their party) Gibson recommended setting up a body containing no politicians, and not appointed by any politicians. He proposed the innovative¹ concept of using sortition. Average citizens would be paid to work (mostly on weekends) over a ten month period on behalf of the entire citizenry. The Citizens’ Assembly was authorized and financed by a unanimous vote of the legislature in 2003, and was convened in 2004. 

To assure a body that was “broadly representative of the adult population,” it was decided to supplement the ancient Athenian lottery process by adding modern scientific stratified sampling. An equal number of men and women, stratified according to age, were randomly selected from the voter lists of each of the province’s 79 districts. These people were invited to attend a local selection meeting where they could ask questions and learn more about the process. Out of 23,000 people invited, 1,700 expressed interest in participating and a little under 1,000 attended the final selection meetings. Thus, unlike mandatory jury duty, there was a substantial self-selection element within the random selection process. 158 people (half male, half female) were selected by lot from this pool. One small minority, the aboriginal (called “Native American” in the U.S.) was unrepresented, so a special random drawing from among all the aboriginal people who had attended any of the meetings was held to select one additional man and woman, making a total of 160 members. The Assembly had professional staff and was chaired by a former University president and experienced facilitator, Dr. Jack Blaney.

The citizens’ Assembly had three phases:

1) A learning phase: Over six weekends from January through March the members met in plenary sessions and small groups to learn all about the variety of election methods used around the world. Staff gathered a vast amount of balanced and impartial information reviewed by a committee of academics and experts, and arranged presentations. The Assembly members not only attended meetings but ate many meals together and developed an esprit de corps based in respect and a common purpose.

2) A public hearings phase: In May and June members of the Citizens’ Assembly participated in 50 public hearings across the province. The hearings were two-way, with presentations for the public and input from British Columbian individuals and organizations. The Citizens’ Assembly also received some 1,600 written submissions. At the time, I was working with FairVote promoting proportional representation, and submitted one of those 1,600 documents. 

3) A deliberation phase: From September through November, the Assembly used a variety of means to identify the most important values they wanted from an election system. The group quickly reached a consensus that some sort of proportional representation system would be superior to the plurality winner-take-all single-seat district system currently in place (the same as that widely used throughout the United States). The options were narrowed to two. In a secret vote, 123 members favored the single transferable vote (STV) method of PR used in Australia and Ireland, while 31 preferred Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) form of PR used in Germany. In the final vote the members agreed to recommend that the province adopt STV by a vote of 146 in favor and 7 against.

This proposal for a new election system, according to the legislative act creating the Citizens’ Assembly, then went directly to the voters in a referendum, bypassing the provincial parliament (as provided for in the enabling legislation – again recognizing that the politicians had a conflict of interest). The reform recommendation was approved by 57.7 percent of the vote, following a campaign in which both supporters and opponents received equal government funding for voter education. Unfortunately, the parliament had imposed a super-majority 60 percent requirement, thus preventing the new system from taking effect. Ironically, that 57.7 percent was just larger than the 57.6 percent majority the Liberal Party, which had imposed the super-majority requirement, had received in the previous election, and substantially more than the 45.8 percent the Liberal Party received to win a majority of seats in the 2005 election.

Despite the fact that the product of their work did not pass into law, the competence, commitment of the participants in this sortition deliberative process was inspirational. As Jack Blaney noted in a public address near the end of the process, praising the work and civic-mindedness of this random selection of residents, the politicians

“invited 160 British Columbians – ordinary British Columbians, they called them….[T]hese 160 British Columbians feel a great sense of responsibility to all British Columbia. They have become the most extraordinary British Columbians the government could have created…Attendance at the meetings is about 98 percent. This is a Guinness-Book-of-Records kind of statistic. I have not in my life belonged to an organization where there has been such dedication and commitment.”

The members of the Citizens’ Assembly were extremely positive about the experience. As one member said during the final wrap-up, this

“democratic experiment, I think, is going to have a profound impact on not just ourselves, as individuals, but our society as a whole.”

1.  I was uncertain whether to use the word “innovative,” since it was in fact the opposite of innovation when using a long timeframe. But among nearly all contemporary academics and political figures it was essentially the same as a brand new idea.