OH, GEE, THE LIBERALS ARE BACKTRACKING ON ELECTORAL REFORM. WHO’D HAVE SEEN THIS COMING.

unhappy with the government and their approach that people were saying, ‘It will take electoral reform to no longer have a government we don’t like,’ ” he ruminated. “But under the current system, they now have a government they’re more satis- disastrously bad argument for breaking the promise even if it is true — bad on principle, and bad politically. Maybe the Liberals should start marketing “because I’m a hypocrite” stickers.

There are “small changes” to which the Liberals still might commit — online voting, say — and call it reform. But the FPTP promise would still have been broken. If the whole project is going in the bin, why not chuck it there with a little class?

Well, perhaps it’s a clever ploy. Perhaps Trudeau is “trying to drive a hard bargain with the NDP and Greens to abandon their own ambitious preference for a proportional voting system and settle for a more modest change to a ranked ballot system,” a Canadian Press report speculated — the principle, apparently, being that “ranked balloting (is) better than nothing.”

That assumes they would, in fact, see it as better than nothing — and considering how many in Ottawa think ranked ballots are a nefarious plot to keep the Liberals in power forever, and that this was the goal of the exercise all along, I’m not at all sure they would see it that way. Politically, what’s their incentive to “get something” out of the process that they didn’t particularly want in the first place? Why not let the Liberals wear the cloak of ignominy?

The Ottawa Citizen’s Kady O’Malley more plausibly suggested talk of abandonment could be designed to spook the other pro-reform parties into agreeing to some kind of referendum — a possibility the Liberals have never quite ruled out. Here, the NDP might well feel an incentive: a referendum on proportional representation would be no small win, even if it ended up in a loss, and the Liberals could save at least some face.

All very interesting. But if either theory is true, what we are seeing here is politicians playing silly buggers with the way we elect them under the idealistic banner of electoral reform. It is a far worse, far less defensible way to enact electoral reform than first-past-the-post is to elect MPs. I won’t say it’s the worst system imaginable, but none worse immediately spring to mind.