STV In B.C.: Those Who Forget The Past Are Doomed To Repeat It?

An interesting if overlong anti-STV piece from RK at the Western Standard. The good stuff comes at the front, and consists mostly of telling the story behind B.C.s 1952 and 1953 elections, in which a form of STV was employed. Two take-home lessons:

1) STV (at least some versions) can give very strange results. In 1952:

This system had been designed to enable the Conservative and Liberal parties to keep the socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation out of power. Unexpectedly, this enabled Social Credit to win the largest number of seats with the benefit of second-preference ballots from CCF voters.

RK thinks this is a negative feature. Since the 1952 election gave rise to W.A.C Bennett and ages of SoCred domination, I suppose he has a point.

2) On the other hand, the 1953 result proves that it is possible to achieve a parliamentary majority under (some version of) the STV system:

The minority government formed in 1952 by the conservative Social Credit of Premier W.A.C. Bennett lasted only nine months before new elections were called. Social Credit was re-elected with a majority in the legislature to a second term in government with almost 38% of the popular vote.

So maybe, if one fear is that STV shall produce indecisive minority after indecisive minority, then that fear too is overblown.

In any case, I am surprised B.C.'s previous experience has been entirely left out of the current debate.