Commitment to “Real Change”

Seeking this mandate, in addition to speeches and brochures, the Liberal Party’s campaign website, highlighting its “Real Change!” theme, was explicit: “We are committed to ensuring that 2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system. Within eighteen months of forming government, we will introduce legislation to enact electoral reform.” The Liberal leader, seeking to become Canada’s prime minister, constantly reaffirmed this promise in public appearances, reassuring many who voted Liberal for this specific reason.

The Liberals’ mandate was further reinforced by throne speech alchemy at the opening of Parliament on December 4, 2015. Governor General David Johnston’s text, provided to him by the prime minister, outlined ways the government would implement its contract with voters. Through this ritual to formally sanctify electoral promises offered and accepted, the people’s electoral mandate was now Her Majesty’s as well. “To make sure that ‘every vote counts’,” confirmed the governor general as spokesperson for the Crown, “the government will undertake consultations on electoral reform and take action to ensure that 2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system.”

The drive to implement electoral reform did not end there. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “mandate letter” to Maryam Monsef, the minister responsible for democratic institutions, outlined what she had to do to fulfill their electoral mandate: “Bring forward a proposal to establish a special parliamentary committee to consult on electoral reform, including preferential ballots, proportional representation, mandatory voting, and online voting.”

A Fully-Vetted Alternate Electoral System Was Ready and Waiting

The campaign pledge to replace Canada’s electoral system because it was “unfair” had not been made by an ill-informed fringe group, but rather by a major political party with deep institutional memory and decades of successful governing. Liberals knew, first, that this extended timetable was tight for a new voting system to be in place for 2019’s election. Chief Electoral Officer Marc Raynard had himself publicly confirmed, early on, that the new voting system would have to be law by 2017 to complete the switchover in time for the 2019 election. Time was of the essence. That well-understood reality is why the Liberals, from the outset during the election itself, had promised legislation “within eighteen months” of forming a government — April 2017 at the latest.

Second, the Liberal Party’s brain-trust was fully aware that the Law Commission of Canada had already completed an exhaustive four-year inquiry, drawing from its extensive public consultation sessions across Canada as well as hundreds of written briefs from electoral system experts, and recommended “mixed-member proportional” as a superior alternative to first-past-the-post.

In British Columbia, Quebec, Ontario, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, extensive provincial efforts had also devised better electoral systems, based on thorough public consultations and even recommendations by constituent assemblies. All five provinces thus had recommendations for a specific alternative to first-past-the-post, generally mixed-member proportional. As a consequence, by the time Justin Trudeau became prime minister with a mandate to upgrade the electoral system, research and study of suitable proportional electoral systems, all costing millions of dollars, was an existing Canadian asset.

For “Real Change,” Only Action Was Needed

All that was needed was to implement. However, despite having superior well-developed made-in-Canada electoral systems available, Justin Trudeau wanted to start over from square one. He did not instruct his minister of Democratic Renewal to draft and introduce legislation to revamp the election of MPs. Instead, Maryam Monsef was merely asked to get a parliamentary committee set up to “consult on electoral reform.” What could this possibly mean?

In May 2016, Minister Monsef underscored the government’s fundamental understanding of its electoral mandate: “Our commitment to end the first-past-the-post system was clear” in the election and that proved how “the will of the people” is for a new electoral system to be implemented. But what began to unfold was not action to implement proportional representation in accordance with that mandate, but a government killing time at public expense and people’s inconvenience through open-ended consultations, a distracting effort to enshroud a clear electoral mandate in meaningless clouds of unfocused possibilities.

Had Liberal commitment to “real change” been as serious as the party’s leader asserted during 2015’s campaign, his Democratic Renewal minister would have been asked to bring forward legislation drawing from the Law Commission’s solid recommendation, itself based on extensive and unhurried consultation with Canadians, to implement its proposed mixed-member proportional system. A specific bill could then be referred to a parliamentary committee for focused hearings, a precise report, and parliamentary debate on the legislation in the course of enacting the measure and fulfilling the Liberals’ mandate.

If the prime minister and his cabinet didn’t want mixed-member proportional, other options developed in Canada through extensive public consultation were available. But one had to be chosen. That was implicit in the promise made during the election. Leadership requires making a choice, and then making the best of it. But once Justin Trudeau replaced “real change” with open-ended consultations, electoral reform inevitably drifted into a political twilight zone.

Creating a Foggy Muddle

To the history of electoral system changes in Canada – from decades-long periods of toying with systems for proportional representation, to protracted attempts at deliberate consensus-seeking – would now be added Prime Minister Trudeau’s sabotage of his own oft-repeated pledge to Canadians. Given well-honed Canadian proclivities, consulting one another about electoral reform was an ideal formula for sucking folks into a swamp of paralyzing indecision, resulting in no electoral system change.

Gradually, through mid-2016, the government shifted its concrete plan to replace the “unfair” voting system to a vague seeking of “consensus” about what to do. The government always claiming to want an “informed consensus” on diverse and complex electoral systems. But this consensus-seeking gambit stirred discussion without any contextual framework beyond the “unfairness” of the existing system. The parliamentary committee on electoral reform heard from hundreds of experts during 2016. Other MPs dutifully engaged citizens about electoral reform or sent questionnaires to constituents. The government mailed simplistic postcard questionnaires to millions of households. All the while, Canada’s minister of Democratic Renewal was taking her own soundings with Canadians even as, simultaneously, she had a parliamentary committee doing this work.

In late August 2016, Monsef lamented that “no consensus was emerging.” The unfolding scenario, and complaints from the government, began to seem a calculated effort to nudge the electoral reform project beyond time available for action. It seemed the Liberals, like others before, decided a system that could elect them to majority government with only 39.74 percent of the popular vote wasn’t so flawed, after all.

Several Liberal MPs began pushing a revisionist line that electoral pledges weren’t really meant to be implemented, just to start public dialogue on a subject. By December, in the Commons, the minister for Democratic Renewal berated the all-party parliamentary committee for not recommending an alternate electoral system, something it had expressly not been asked to do. A public sense of apprehension that electoral reform may be dissolving was now being supplanted by cynicism about the Liberal’s campaign.

Constructing an Exit Ramp

The parliamentary committee recommended the government study electoral systems further, on a par with asking Campbell’s to review other recipes for tomato soup. The report wasn’t even unanimous, and a couple appendices expressed dissents and qualifications. Some MPs wanted a referendum to approve any new voting system, once the government figured out what it should be.

In January 2017, Maryam Monsef was moved into a different portfolio. Rather than close down his now-functionless “Ministry of Democratic Renewal,” Prime Minister Trudeau asked MP Karina Gould to take over pushing the Liberal’s empty wheelbarrow. The new Minister of Democratic Renewal glibly told Canadians that a series of town halls and online consultations had shown a range of views about replacing the first-past-the-post system. That, she concluded, made it “evident that the broad support needed among Canadians for change of this magnitude does not exist.” She added, as if it had been ordained, that “electoral reform is not in my mandate.”

That was a misleading reference to the “mandate” letter Prime Minister Trudeau had given his new minister, not the mandate given to the Liberal Government by voters, which was definitely in her mandate, as it had been in her predecessor minister’s, as well as the prime minister’s and the mandate of other elected Liberals, who’d all campaigned for and been given a clear mandate to change the electoral system.

The Blandness of Brazen Betrayal

Reaping the benefit of confusing distractions he’d put in motion Justin Trudeau then rose in the Commons four years ago and stated that “lack of consensus” indicated there was no sense proceeding with electoral reform. He expressed no hint of regret, offered no apology to Canada’s electors for a complete reversal of an election promise which, according to the Trudeau Tracker website, he’d personally given more than two thousand times.

But he did sound a false note of alarm, asserting “a divisive referendum at this time is not what Canada requires.” Nor, he threw in, did Canada require “an augmentation of fringe voices” that could hold the balance of power in Parliament, yet another of the hoary alarmist fears routinely cited by those opposing proportional representation.

With Justin Trudeau’s brazen repudiation of his own electoral mandate, the much-needed electoral system upgrade was dead. His ministers and MPs alike, who’d enthusiastically campaigned for no more “unfair elections,” melted into their twilight zone where “real change” proved ephemeral and old clichés were trotted out to deny representation in Canada’s national law-making assembly that was proportionate to how Canadians themselves had voted.

Having cynically violated their mandate, Liberals would seek re-election in 2019 under the very system they’d condemned as “unfair,” statements which, when they won another majority government with a minority of votes, seemingly attested to their own illegitimacy as an “unfairly elected” government.

“A Cynical Display of Self-Serving Politics”

Four years ago today, New Democratic MP Nathan Cullen, vice-chair of that all-party committee on electoral reform, called the renunciation of the electoral mandate a “cynical display of self-serving politics” and that “Mr. Trudeau proved himself today to be a liar.” Green Party leader and MP Elizabeth May, who’d also run the fool’s errand on which the Liberal government dispatched the hard-working committee of MPs, was “more shocked by the brazen reversal than anything else in my adult life.”

Public protests erupted across Canada, petitions were signed, and letters sent by the thousands to Liberal MPs. A constitutional challenge to the first-past-the-post system, placed in abeyance when the Liberals promised and got their mandate to change it, was revived, with donations pouring in to support the legal costs.

Meanwhile, the antiquated first-past-the-post electoral system that Prime Minister Trudeau had perversely decided to save, so that under a proportionate system “fringe voices” could not hold the balance of power, had itself produced in British Columbia’s May 2017 election three Green Party representatives in the legislature. They not only held the balance of power, but used it to oust the governing Liberals and install the NDP in office. At times, irony is almost poetic.