A potential minority government could usher in electoral reform in B.C., which, rather ironically, would almost certainly lead to more minority governments.

With absentee ballots to be counted and recounts to be undertaken, we're still a long ways from a final outcome in last Tuesday's provincial election, however, should all that counting leave us without a majority government, you can bet the king-making Greens will leverage their three seats to push for a revision of the way we vote, namely switching to some sort of proportional representation.

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The Greens have been hurt the most by our first-past-the-post system in recent years and even this month's breakthrough, where the party got more than 16 per cent of the popular vote, only gave it three seats in an 87-seat legislature.

Proportional representation would change that moving forward (the Greens would have won 14 seats had it been in place this time around), but with a viable third party now in the mix, it would almost certainly spell the end of the way we've been governed.

The Liberals have been in power for the past 16 years, but you have to go back to 2001 when Gordon Campbell almost wiped the NDP off the map to find a B.C. election where a party has received at least 50 per cent of the vote. More recent elections saw the Liberals hold power with about 45 per cent of the vote.

That works with our first-past-thepost system, where we routinely give 100 per cent power to parties that get as little as, in the case of the federal government, 40 per cent support, but that type of vote splitting doesn't cut it with proportional representation.

A minority government isn't necessarily a bad situation as it forces parties to cooperate in order to get things accomplished, which theoretically means more input when legislation is being crafted, but that version of utopia rarely lasts for any length of time. Conciliation has never been a strength of our us-versus-them style of governing so if proportional representation is to work in B.C., it would take a fundamental shift of all involved.

Easier said than done, I know, but at the end of the day, it makes sense to have voices at the ballot box be in step with those in the legislature.