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VICTORIA — Earlier this year, the president of the B.C. NDP outlined a sneaky plan to get British Columbians to vote for proportional representation without telling them what they were voting for exactly.

“The ballot question should be simple,” wrote NDP president Craig Keating in a letter to Attorney General David Eby, the alleged “neutral arbiter” of the coming referendum on electoral reform.

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“To ensure that as many people in B.C. can participate in the referendum question regardless of the language they can speak, there should be a single ballot question that is easily translatable into multiple languages (and) contains no abbreviations and slang.”

The ballot should ask people in general terms if they “support moving to a system of proportional representation,” argued Keating.

But above all the NDP government should make sure that the ballot question “does not mention specific systems of proportional representation.”