Yukon to form citizens' assembly to study options for new voting system

Yukon MLAs voted Tuesday in favour of forming a citizens' assembly to study how the territory could change its voting system.

The recommendation was one of several to come from a final report by the territory's special committee on electoral reform, which was tabled in the legislature this week. The committee isn't recommending an alternative to first-past-the-post, but it did suggest ways to find one.

The committee report included three major recommendations: any new voting system must maintain a balanced representation of rural and urban voters; a citizens' assembly should form to investigate and recommend alternatives to the current model; and the territory should ask Yukoners, through referendums, whether they want a new system and what that system should be.

The committee, made up of one representative from each of the three parties holding seats in the legislature, formed in 2021. It's since held hearings with experts and consulted Yukoners, with a public survey on electoral reform garnering more than 6,000 responses last April.

It also hired a researcher to investigate and compare what models might work best in the Yukon.

NDP Leader Kate White chaired the committee. The committee was a condition her party included in its confidence and supply agreement with the territory's Liberals.

She said she's been pushing for reform for a long time.

"Electoral reform has been really important to me personally, since I was first elected," White said in an interview Tuesday. "We believe that there can be a better way than what we've got. And I think the Yukon public is more than able to make those decisions."

White says she's unhappy with the current system, which has allowed governments to form without winning a majority of the votes across the territory.

The Yukon Party, for example, won the most votes overall in the 2021 election, but the Liberals were still able to form a government.

That hasn't persuaded Yukon Party leader Currie Dixon to support a shakeup. He said the territory has bigger issues to worry about.

"While electoral reform is important — very important — to a few people, it's not on the radar for most Yukoners," he said Tuesday. "We think that issues like the cost-of-living inflation, the challenges facing our healthcare system, our education system, are all issues that are more important." 

Details of citizens' assembly still need to be hashed out

Though Yukon MLAs voted Tuesday afternoon to accept the report's recommendation to form a citizens' assembly, Dixon said his party disagrees with that recommendation as well.

The idea is to select a group of people from the general public who would research alternative systems and recommend the best options for Yukoners to vote on. The selection process isn't defined yet, but the report says it should be random and include people from different voting districts.

The idea, as expert witness R. Kenneth Carty told the committee last year, is "that ordinary, randomly selected citizens would be able to, in some sense, represent the electorate as a whole."

Tuesday's vote passed nine to seven in the Legislative Assembly. The details of how the assembly will come together and operate still need to be worked out.

Sue Greetham with Fair Vote Yukon said determining the details of the assembly is "critical."

"How many people will be on the citizens' assembly committee? Because it needs to reflect at least 19 districts," she said. "And of course, even within each district, you probably need a couple of members that would represent their own communities so that we really bring together all Yukoners in this discussion."

Once that's figured out and the assembly makes its recommendations, Greetham said the territory then needs to decide how to best educate voters on the merits and nuances of the proposed alternatives.

After all that, a serious effort at electoral reform is still far from realization. The report acknowledges it's a tricky process. 

Past promises in the Yukon around electoral reform haven't materialized. Elsewhere, referendums have maintained the status quo in B.C., PEI and Ontario. Two attempts in New Brunswick never reached a vote. 

At the national level, the Liberals pledged to reform the federal system in its successful 2015 election campaign, but abandoned the promise in 2017.