Last year Justin Trudeau said that 2015 would be the last federal election conducted under the first past the post voting system. The Liberal Party’s website goes even further “within 18 months of forming government, we will introduce legislation to enact electoral reform.”
But here we are, more than 13 months after the last election with no consensus on electoral reform and a muddled effort from the Liberals at tackling the issue.
Liberal Party members on the Special Committee on Electoral Reform have been urging Trudeau to break his promise and delay changes to Canada’s voting system until 2019 and that’s probably for the best considering Canadians are not engaged on this issue. Changing Canada’s electoral system is not something that should be taken lightly and Elections Canada would need time to adapt to any change.
Since the Special Committee on Electoral Reform released its report last week, the government has launched a postcard campaign encouraging Canadians to take an online survey at mydemocracy.ca. The questions have been widely criticized and NDP MP Nathan Cullen has said that they did not come from the special committee.
The fine print of the mydemocracy website says any responses lacking the “optional” fields like gender, year of birth and postal code won’t be included in the data, so potentially many of the responses won’t be counted as part of the overall results of the study. For those responses, the government is simply wasting Canadians’ time and has hidden that fact in the fine print.
Maybe the whole issue has been a time wasting experiment. MPs have held town hall meetings, and the special committee has held hearings. There have been two online surveys and the democratic institutions minister had toured the country, yet the Liberals aren’t close to following up on their promise.
Perhaps Trudeau’s preference for ranked ballots has caused these delays and poor execution. Liberals are the most likely to benefit from that system as the number two choice for both Conservative and NDP voters.
Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Monsef has attacked the special committee, accusing them of not meeting their mandate. The committee had recommended that whatever system the government chooses it needs to score well on the Gallagher Index, which measures the difference between the percentage of votes received and the percentage of seats a party gets. But Monsef is not hearing that message, and even mocked the Gallagher Index. It’s a wonder that the Liberals even bothered to form a committee when they weren’t willing to listen to its results.
Do we need to keep doing surveys until we end up with a result that’s likely to help the Liberals?
If Canada is going to change its electoral system, it needs to do it right. Change for the sake of change is never a good option.
To date, the Liberals have shown they lack credibility on the issue and they aren’t taking it serious. There are plenty of other issues that matter more to Canadians at the moment and most people have not been properly educated on the different types of systems. It’s best that this issue be shelved until after the next election in 2019.
