Not With A Bang But A Whimper

It's beginning to look like electoral reform is dead in the water. In the end, Chantal Hebert writes, our political parties could not rise above partisan self interest:

The Conservatives came into this discussion riding the referendum horse, and they come out of it more firmly in the saddle.

They have not budged an inch from their sense that the first-past-the-post system remains the best option. But they have found support from the other opposition parties for their contention that any change should clear the hurdle of a national vote.

That support is more tactical than principled.

Even as they are part of a pro-referendum consensus, the New Democrats, for instance, continue to argue that it is not necessarily essential to put a reform to a national vote prior to its implementation.

If the Liberals set out to put in place the more proportional voting system the New Democrats crave, the government could find support on their benches for dispensing with a referendum.

But it's the Liberals who have truly bungled this file:

As for the Liberals, they have managed to turn a secondary policy front into a field of ruins.

With the logistical clock ticking on moving to a different voting system in time for 2019, the government waited eight months to set up a process to follow up on the prime minister’s election promise.

It never articulated a set of principles that might guide its management of the file.

The Liberals went into the debate with a known preference for a ranked ballot but could not be bothered or could not find a critical mass of intervenors to advance that option.

The Liberal committee members ended up rejecting the time frame set by their own leader to achieve a reform as unrealistic and the notion of a more proportional system as too radical. 

Electoral reform is an idea whose time has come. But it looks like it's an idea that will end, not with a bang, but a whimper. 

Image: Ottawa Citizen

The Ball Is In The Government's Court

The NDP has come out in favour of holding a referendum on electoral reform. Given the recent history of such efforts -- Brexit and the American election -- we're getting into dangerous territory. The status quo looks more and more like the outcome.

Dennis Pilon writes that there are essentially three positions on electoral reform:

Since the Liberals announced their plan to move forward on voting system reform, responses have fallen into three broad categories. One response insists that everything about changing the voting system is constitutional in nature and would, at the very least, require the sanction of a referendum.

The second approach says that as there is no perfect or ‘right’ voting system, the issue is simply a matter of taste that depends on what you prefer in terms of electoral outcomes.

The last approach argues that voting system reform is a means to significant and necessary democratic reform and, as such, is not really up for legislative debate or a public vote — that changing from an undemocratic system to a more democratic one is the only acceptable option.

Two of the parties now favour the first approach. How much support is there for the third approach? Well, Pilon writes:

The third position — that voting system reform is a matter of urgent democratic reform that should be implemented by the government as soon as possible — is the only one that has any serious academic support. Canada’s traditional single member plurality voting system fails to represent what most individual voters say with their votes. It misrepresents legislative results for parties in terms of their popular support, and tends to create phoney majority governments that do not enjoy the support of a majority of Canadian voters, leading to all sorts of problems.

And there is plenty of evidence to support that position:

By contrast, the experiences of western countries which have used different forms of proportional representation suggest we can do better — that we can create more accurate and inclusive representation in our legislatures, with governments that really do reflect a majority of the Canadian electorate. Critics complain that PR is all about giving parties what they want — but this is just empty campaign rhetoric. PR is about empowering individual voters to get what they want, by equalizing their voting power.

There really are no compelling democratic arguments for keeping our current voting system. Indeed, most of the arguments against reforming it sound a lot like 19th century arguments against giving working people the vote: that they’re too ignorant, that they might vote for parties that elites don’t like, that it might lead to unpredictable outcomes, etc.

The ball is now in the government's court.

Image: fairvote.ca

Electoral Reform Cannot Be Postponed

This week, Justin Trudeau backed away from his promise to reform Canada's electoral system by the next election. There was -- rightly -- an explosion of criticism. By the end of the week, Trudeau was saying that his government is "deeply committed" to electoral reform. Alan Freeman writes:

Trudeau was rightly attacked from all sides for appearing to duck out of his election promise to reform the first-past-the-post system in time for the next election — and for the arrogance of the claim that his election alone was enough to deal with the issue once and for all.

Dropping an election pledge is nothing new. Freeman writes that lots of leaders have backed away from promises if they thought they could get away with it. George W. Bush, for instance, tried to privatize Social Security:

Bush launched a campaign to promote a dramatic reform that would allow Americans to set aside a portion of their Social Security and invest it themselves in private accounts. The ideological right and the investment industry, which had been pushing the idea for years, were thrilled. But voters, particularly older ones, were horrified when they realized that the change would simply impoverish the already-stretched Social Security system and risk the guaranteed benefits they depended on in return for the crapshoot of the stock market.

And Stephen Harper, with the support of Jim Flaherty, tried to harmonize the GST:

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty was initially a big proponent of GST harmonization, throwing billions of dollars at Ontario and British Columbia when they decided to come on board with a harmonized sales tax. He embraced the view of leading economists and his own Finance Department — that a harmonized GST would lead to tax efficiency and remove the burden of provincial sales taxes from business.

But the moment grassroots opposition to harmonization started to build in British Columbia, Flaherty ran for cover. He never spoke about harmonization again. At the Finance Department, where I was working at the time, the order came down that the department was not to answer any questions about the issue — to act as if it didn’t exist. In the end, B.C.’s harmonization effort died and the province refunded the big grant it had been given to go ahead with harmonization. Flaherty and Harper had dodged a bullet and spent not a cent of political capital doing it — but an opportunity to change tax policy for the better was lost.

Electoral reform is a bullet Trudeau can't dodge. If he takes that tack, he will not make it through the next election -- even if it occurs under the First Past The Post system.

Image: CBC

No Referendum

There is a lot of chatter -- particularly from the Conservatives -- about holding a referendum on electoral reform. Gerry Caplan doesn't think a referendum is a good idea. He writes:

To raise issues related to democracy is to raise the question of referendums (or referenda), which are favoured by the Conservatives. They insist only a referendum can legitimize something as fundamental to our democracy as changing our voting system. Presumably the Conservatives also believe a referendum would end up supporting the FPTP status quo, as they themselves do.

But there’s a huge problem here. As any sensible political scientist will attest, the legitimacy of a referendum depends to a substantial extent on the clarity of its language. It must not be too complex or raise issues that most voters will find baffling and thereby diminish the credibility of the result.

Consider the question which was used a few years ago in Ontario:

“Which electoral system should Ontario use to elect members to the provincial legislature?

“The existing electoral system.

“The alternative electoral system proposed by the Citizens’ Assembly (Mixed Member Proportional).”

How many Ontarians were really familiar with what the Citizen's Assembly had proposed? The best solution -- after having a fair hearing on the subject in the revamped  parliamentary committee -- is to  choose one system and give it a trial run. If it doesn't work, it can be abandoned or tweaked. If it does work, we should keep it.

Image: the star.com

When People Know What They're Buying

When the Trudeau government agreed last week to adopt an NDP motion which populates the election reform committee on the basis of the votes each party received in the last election, it set up a working model of proportional representation. Andrew Coyne writes:

Strictly speaking, it does not matter whether a majority of the members of the special parliamentary committee on electoral reform are Liberals, or whether a majority are drawn from the opposition parties. The committee may be tasked with consulting the public, studying different models of reform, and advising the government how to proceed, but nothing says the government has to accept its recommendations.

On the other hand, symbolism matters in politics. Whatever influence the committee has will rely less on its formal authority than its moral authority, depending on how genuinely it is seen to have consulted, how warmly its recommendations are received — and how legitimate the committee itself is perceived as being.

The committee will give Canadians an accurate notion of how proportional representation works. And, if it works well, the going should get easier:

The whole issue of electoral reform is rooted in the divergence, common under the first past the post system, between the parties’ representation in the House and their share of the popular vote. If the Liberals’ rhetoric about the current system “distorting the will of the electorate” exposed them to ridicule for having set up the committee along those same distorted lines, the committee as now designed is a working model of proportional representation, “a lab rat,” as Conservative commentator David McLaughlin has put it, “for how PR might work in the House of Commons.”

 It's impossible to predict how things will work out. However,

already the possibilities are intriguing. A majority on the committee could be formed by any combination of the Liberals and the Conservatives (with three votes) or the NDP (with two) — or both the Bloc Québécois and the Greens, each of whom has one vote. Assume for the moment that the popular assumptions about each party’s position are true: the NDP and the Greens favouring PR, the Conservatives and the Bloc the status quo, while the Liberals plump for ranked ballots. Do the Liberals work out a deal with the NDP, some sort of hybrid of PR and ranked ballots? Do the Conservatives cut their own deal, perhaps with the Liberals, perhaps with the NDP, offering to vote for either’s preferred reform in return for the referendum the Tories hope will kill it?

Whatever happens, it's always easier to sell something -- and generate return business -- when people know what they're buying.

Image: langleytoday.ca

We Should Think Very Carefully

                                                http://www.knowledge.info/

A lot has been written recently about electoral reform -- which option is best, and whether a not the proposed reforms should be put to a national referendum. Duff Conacher writes that electoral reform is about a lot more than holding a referendum:

The first important question is the makeup of the committee of politicians that will lead the public consultation. Normally, the Liberal majority would mean a majority of Liberals on all committees. However, no more than half the committee should be Liberal MPs in order to ensure they can’t just push through whatever system they want. (The Liberals should have no concerns about giving up their majority on the committee, given that Liberal House Leader Dominic LeBlanc has said voting-system reform should have “broad support in Parliament.”)

The committee should also undertake a “deliberative judgment” process as the “national engagement” process the Liberals have promised, as it is the best practice for meaningful public consultation. Such a process would involve either several meetings of one large citizen assembly (as B.C. and Ontario did in the past to review their voting systems) or of many small focus groups across the country – learning about the issue, deliberating and then deciding what changes (if any) to recommend.

Most importantly, there should be a number of options for consideration:

As the Liberals’ election campaign promised, the process should cover “a wide variety of reforms” – including the right to vote none-of-the-above (as voters in Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario and Saskatchewan can do by declining their ballot), and the right to file complaints and have politicians penalized by an independent watchdog for unjustifiably breaking election promises.

As well, when the deliberative judgment process is ending and people are asked what changes they support (if any), best-practice methods should be used to record their choices. These methods don’t offer take-it-or-leave-it choices (which can be easily biased) but instead let people indicate the level of their support of various options.

And Conacher adds this caveat:

That public consultation process, done properly, can produce a road map for change (if change is supported by most people) that is just as democratically legitimate as a referendum result.

Referendums seems straightforward. But as someone lived through the first Quebec referendum, I can testify that they can become  hornet's nests. Conacher warns:

The difficulty with a national referendum in a federation is the rules. What proposal should be on the ballot, or should there be multiple, detailed proposals? Should a minimum national percentage of voters be required to vote – or a minimum in each province or each region? Should politicians be allowed to campaign using public funding or should their parties pay?

If a referendum is held, given that the Constitution guarantees each province a specific percentage of seats in the House of Commons, the same rules for amending the Constitution - a majority of voters in seven out of 10 provinces representing 50 per cent of the total population - should be required to approve any proposed change.

When you're changing the way a country votes, a simple majority of fifty percent plus one won't do.  We should think very carefully about how we will go about electoral reform.

That's Just Funny

                                               http://www.theguardian.com/

It was never going to be easy reforming our electoral system. Rona Ambrose and her party are determined to make sure it won't be easy -- because, she says, they stand four square for democracy. Michael Harris writes that Ambrose's claim should be greeted with a chorus of guffaws:

Ambrose says she is ready to use the CPC’s majority of hacks, bagmen and shills in the Senate to block legislation. (Hmmm, sound familiar, Michael Chong?) Yes, the Leader of the Opposition is prepared to scupper legislation using the unelected and now ethically compromised Senate — even though it will have been passed by a majority in the elected House of Commons.

That’s how deep her commitment to democracy. 

It is instructive to re-consider recent Conservative history:

Remember the risibly named Fair Elections Act? You know, the one that made voting harder and cheating easier. The one that gelded Elections Canada, first by severing its investigative arm from the main institution, and then by denying powers of subpoena to EC investigators.

Where was Ambrose’s vehement commitment to democracy when Pierre Poilievre was giving his pathetically partisan response to the Robocalls scandal? Only sad little “Skippy” could confuse doubling down on skullduggery with reform. Still Ambrose didn’t seem to mind rigging the electoral system without a referendum when it was her team that was doing the rigging.

Where was Ambrose the Democrat when her leader was shutting down the House of Commons for partisan reasons, violating the parliamentary privilege of committees by withholding documents, and ultimately being found in contempt of parliament? Oddly, there’s no sign of her standing up for the people on any of those occasions.

I wonder does Ambrose remember those days not so long ago when Conservative MPs could not even open their mouths without submitting “Message Event Proposals” to the prime minister’s own department, the Privy Council Office. Was it democratic for the PCO to put the exact words that could be used into the mouths of otherwise functioning human beings? There were even critics to be found who claimed that such a system was a better fit in North Korea than Canada.

Whether or not there is a referendum on what the Liberals propose, the Conservatives can't claim they're on the side of democracy.

That's just funny.

A Broken System

Angelo Perischilli and I share few opinions. But this morning, I find myself heartily agreeing with him. In today's Toronto Star, he writes that Ruth Ellen Brosseau can "take credit for exposing the inconsistencies that are weakening the Canadian political system and changing the attitude of the electorate toward it." Brosseau is a symptom, not a cause:

How can we criticize a 27-year-old single mother for going on holiday during the campaign without criticizing the voters who elected someone they didn’t even know existed?

But nor can we criticize the voters for acting in such an apparently irresponsible way without asking why they did it.

What happened in Berthier-Maskinongé on May 2 was not an isolated anomaly but the result of conditions that are now common in nearly every riding. The only difference is that in Berthier-Maskinongé all those anomalies piled up and produced an unexpected offspring, one conceived by the unhappy marriage of a dysfunctional political system and flawed electoral laws.

The problem is that, with an unassailable majority, Stephen Harper is not going to fix a system which has rewarded him so handsomely. He may talk "reform" -- after all that was the name of the party which thrust him into the spotlight. But, as his appointment of three failed Tory candidates to the Senate illustrates, that was then, this is now.

And, as far as that contempt of parliament motion is concerned, one need only note that Bev Oda -- who misled parliament and whose actions were at the heart of the contempt motion -- is still a minister in charge of the same ministry.

If there is one ray of hope it is this: Historically, Conservative governments -- even when they are ushered in with overwhelming majorities -- are inherently unstable. That was true of both the Diefenbaker and the Mulroney governments. They rotted from within. You can already see the signs of Conservative discontent brewing in the reaction to Harper's Senate appointments and in the looming battle over the status of Conservative riding associations. And then there is the problem of all those backbenchers who have remained loyal and who have been consistently passed over for cabinet appointments.

Mr. Harper's grasp of Canadian history seems to go back only as far as Pierre Trudeau and the National Energy Program. In the past, when he faced opposition from within, he banished the dissenters. Consider Belinda Stronach, Garth Turner, Bill Casey and the hapless Helena Geurgis. It will be interesting to see what happens when a growing number of Conservatives raise their middle fingers to the Prime Minister and then go public.