Many British Columbians could be found Wednesday morning crying great tears of disappointment into their coffee cups. No, it wasn’t the defeat of our beloved Canucks in the Stanley Cup playoffs on Monday night (though that still hurts). Rather it was the defeat of a radical new voting system in Tuesday’s provincial election that has many electoral reformers crying the blues.

In a surprising (to me at least) and decisive referendum result, 61 percent of voters turned thumbs down on the proposed single transferable voting system and instead voted in favour of the status quo, for now. The result probably will cool discussion of electoral reform for the immediate future in BC, and perhaps in the country at large.

The proposed transferable system – out here we call it BC-STV – seemed to have a lot going for it. There was, and still is I think, an appetite for electoral reform that was kindled by two particularly unfair provincial election results. In 1996 the NDP won a majority in the legislature despite winning fewer popular votes than the Liberals. And then in the very next election, the Liberal Party, in a stunning victory, all but annihilated the NDP, picking up every seat except two even though opposition parties won a combined 42.5 percent of the vote.

Recognizing the inadequacy of a system that could produce such unfair results, the provincial government convened a Citizen’s Assembly on Electoral Reform and it was this body that proposed BC-STV. In the 2005 election, the STV was put to a referendum for the first time. It failed to win approval of the required sixty percent of voters, but it came so close (58.6%) that another try seemed appropriate. Yet for some reason, this time around many voters lost faith in STV. Now that it has been rejected again, and quite overwhelmingly, it is hard not to think that BC-STV is dead.

Which raises the question, what about electoral reform generally? Is there any appetite to pursue other alternatives to our present first-past-the-post system with its admitted failings. On election night some commentators were writing off the possibility for change any time soon, and it is true that a measure of voter fatigue on this issue probably has set in. Plus, the last two provincial election results have not shown the odd disparities of the previous two, so the need for change seems to have become less urgent.

Still, there is no reason why another voting system, some variant on proportional representation for instance, might not find favour with voters if they were asked. But that would require the Liberal government of Premier Gordon Campbell to open up the whole process of community consultation again, and there is no indication that he, or the opposition, wants to.

Other provinces have been considering following BC down the road of electoral reform. British Columbians had a chance to be out front on this issue. Instead we chose on Tuesday to contradict our well-earned reputation for political zaniness and to stick to the status quo. The rest of the country may well be thinking that if you can’t make change in BC, where can you make it?