Some Metro Vancouver candidates want to bring the ward system back. Here’s what to know

Some political parties in Vancouver and Surrey are proposing changes to the way municipal elections are run in the future by bringing back the ward system, which is used in every other major Canadian city.

The Vancouver Liberals promise to convene a citizens’ assembly to consider the benefits of the ward system, where councillors are elected to represent a specific geographic area within a municipality.

In Surrey, former mayor Doug McCallum said if his Safe Surrey party is elected, he would split the city into eight wards based on an independent commission and councillors would be elected to represent these.

Here’s a look at the different systems and why changes may be slow to come:

Currently, municipalities in B.C., including Vancouver and Surrey, use an at-large system, where each councillor is elected to represent the city as a whole. This has been the case for decades despite attempts to change. During elections, voters sometimes have to choose from a hugely long list of candidates to fill all available council seats.

Many cities in Canada, including Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Edmonton, Winnipeg and Regina, are divided into geographic areas known as wards. In these cities, voters elect a representative for their ward or neighbourhood — in the same way provincial and federal elections use ridings.

Vancouver voted to get rid of wards in 1935 and the provincial government abolished Surrey’s ward system in 1957.

The shift to an at-large system in Vancouver was driven by divisions within the B.C. Liberal party during the Great Depression and the rise of the B.C. Co-operative Commonwealth Federation or CCF party, which is the predecessor to the New Democratic Party, according to York University’s Dennis Pilon, who is from Vancouver and has written extensively on political institutions and elections.

“The CCF are seen as class warriors and this alarmed the west side of the city, Vancouver, which like today, was very much split between east and west. And the west side of town is the wealthy side and the east side of town, of course, is the more working class side,” said Pilon.

“The new system was essentially kept in place because it was doing the job that Vancouver’s business community wanted it to do, which was to marginalize working-class influence, marginalize that left-wing influence on the city.”

There was a movement in the 1970s and 1980s to bring back the ward system, and there have been several referendums.

The last one was in 2004 when voters said no to a ward system by a margin of 54 per cent to 46 per cent.