According to the Vancouver Province, BC has a new political party, the Nation Alliance Party, which is focused on the 350,000 people in B.C. who are of Chinese heritage. The Elections BC website shows the National Alliance Party registered with Wei Ping Chen as its leader. Some may think that a political party based on ethnicity is not a good thing, but as long as it doesn't violate the Human Rights Act, actions to increase the political power of any particular ethnic group are legitimate; this finesses the efforts of major parties to cater to ethnic votes.

The Nation Alliance Party may be a few years ahead of itself. If the referendum on BC-STV passes on May 12, 2009, it will be implemented in time for the May 14, 2013 provincial election. In that event, there will likely be dozens of new narrowly focused political parties seeking to parlay their base into electing one or more representatives to BC's legislature.

STV, the Irish voting system, uses fewer but larger multi-MLA constituencies. In mid-August the Boundaries Commission will release the proposed boundaries that would be used in 2013 should the referendum pass. For the sake of illustration, let's assume that the three current Richmond constituencies are merged to form one Richmond riding that would elect three MLAs, and that the four Burnaby ridings (including Burquitlam) are merged to form one riding that would elect four MLAs. Recall that in STV you don't mark an "X" on your ballot, instead you number your preferences 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and so forth until you get tired, run out of candidates or decide to stop. The vote counting then involves a complicated process in which your vote can be shifted from candidate to candidate. The key to winning is for a candidate to receive a number of votes equal to what is called the "quota" which is calculated as the number of valid ballots cast in a riding divided by one plus the number of MLAs to be elected, and one is added to the results of that division. Using the number of ballots cast in 2005, our merged riding of Richmond would have 62,834 valid votes cast to elect three MLAs, and Burnaby would have 87,162 valid votes cast to elect four MLAs. The magic quota would be 15,710 in Richmond and 17,433 in Burnaby. In percentage terms in our example, it would take just 25.0% of the vote to elect an MLA in Richmond and just 20.0% of the vote to elect an MLA in Burnaby. If you are surprised by that, you'd be even more surprised to learn that it takes an even lower percentage (about 13%) to elect an MLA in a 7 member constituency, and parts of the province would have such enormous constituencies and low thresholds. The 25.0% and 20.0% examples for Richmond and Burnaby are important when considering the electoral prospects of the new Nation Alliance Party.

Data on the BC Stats website indicate that 40.0% of the population in the combination of the current three Richmond constituencies, and 25.2% of the population in the combination of the current four Burnaby constituencies is Chinese. In other words, if the Chinese population turned out to vote as a block for the new ethnically based political party, BC-STV would virtually guarantee that they would elect MLAs in Richmond and Burnaby. Of course politics are not so simple for any "group", be it based on interests or ethnicity. Some would argue that internal politics within narrowly defined groups can be more challenging than anything you see between political parties. Nevertheless, the opportunity to have a virtually guaranteed win if internal discipline can be maintained might be a powerful incentive for narrowly defined parties, including ethnically defined parties, to register and run candidates under BC-STV.

In 2005, BC-STV was almost adopted; it received a majority vote in 77 of 79 constituencies (40 were required to pass) and 57.69% of the total provincial vote (60% was required to pass). Consideration of issues like the new ethnic party might influence votes both ways in the next referendum on STV. We can only hope that voters are fully informed as to what the system might entail the next time they consider changing how MLAs are elected.