New B.C. Green leader set on voting change

Now that Esquimalt city councillor Jane Sterk is the new leader of the B.C. Green party, voters can expect her to push for the single transferable vote (STV) until the May 12, 2009, provincial election.

"We will be supporting BC-STV as a party," Sterk told the Georgia Straight by phone. "We intend to have support on all of our literature for BC-STV, and our candidates will be speaking in favour of it."

Sterk said the STV preferential-style voting system is a viable alternative to the current "winner takes all" (or the so-called first-past-the-post) plurality system. Her passion stems from her membership in both Fair Vote Canada and Fair Voting B.C., organizations that want to see an end to plurality voting, because their members believe such a system skews election results and gives parties disproportionate majorities, while citizens voting for losing parties get proportionately less representation. (For example, Sterk's party garnered nine percent of the popular vote overall in the 2005 provincial election but, under a plurality system, has no MLAs in the legislature. With STV, generally speaking, candidates are ranked in a voter's order of preference so as to better reflect community opinion in the proportional makeup of the legislature.)

On November 10, Sterk will head to UBC for the Fall Electoral Reform Conference hosted by Fair Voting B.C. Her hope is that British Columbians vote to endorse STV at the ballot box during the municipal elections in November 2008, where it will appear again as a referendum question after it narrowly failed to reach the 60-percent approval threshold in May 2005. (The prevailing model will then be used in the May 12, 2009, provincial elections.)

"There is lots of excitement about making this transformation," Sterk said. "I am very excited and hopeful."

Sterk already exhibits more excitement than her predecessor as leader, Adriane Carr. When the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform announced on December 10, 2004, that STV was its chosen system for electing MLAs, Carr was initially opposed.

STV was the method for tallying votes at the B.C. Green party weekend leadership convention, held at Victoria's Royal Roads University on October 20 and 21. JM Toriel, campaign manager for Damian Kettlewell, the third-place Vancouver candidate and the newly elected board external liaison, told the Straight that he was a scrutineer and saw a "close race between the top three candidates". Ben West, who ran federally for the Greens in Vancouver Quadra in 2006, came second.

"The two lowest candidates [Silvaine Zimmermann and Jack Etkin] were eliminated in the first round, and it did go into two rounds," Toriel said. "Those votes [from Zimmermann and Etkin] were added on to the other three contenders in their second votes. Jane Sterk was the clear winner."

Sterk is a grandmother with a PhD in counselling psychology. She ran her own retail business for 11 years until recently, as well as a small consultancy company. She told the Straight she was a practising psychologist in Alberta, but chose not to upgrade her credentials when she moved to B.C. And she dismissed the notion that a stronger provincial Green party means electing the B.C. Liberals at the expense of the NDP.

"People are going to have to get used to the fact that the Green party is going to be around, we will be running people in every riding, and Green voters have a right to vote Green," she said. "I am hoping that we can persuade people, those who have that historic concern that we don't deserve to be in the political arena, that they are wrong."

Sterk added: "We see ourselves as very distinct from the NDP; we share some common viewpoints in terms of social-justice issues. I think we might approach them differently, I think from a more–hopefully, this won't get misinterpreted–entrepreneurial look at how we can reduce waste in systems.”¦But our understanding about how the environment is integral to all of the other things that the B.C. government has to do is quite profoundly different to the NDP."