Dear believer, they are lying

It’s your fault, Canadians. You failed to live up to the standards your prime minister expected of you. You had your chance and you blew it.

It isn’t that the Liberals promised something they had no intention of ever delivering. The fault is yours, for not making it possible for them to deliver it. When the Liberal platform said the 2015 election would be “the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system,” when the Liberal leader repeated this vow 10, 20, 100 times since, you did not, as you should have done, attach a giant asterisk that read: “Assuming we don’t change our mind.” You took them at their word.

But that is not your worst failing. It is how you have behaved since the election that really marks you out for blame. Put plainly, you let your government down. It isn’t the Liberals’ fault, for wasting seven months before even launching the committee on electoral reform, leaving it with an impossibly short time-frame to report.

Neither can the Liberals be held to account, when the committee reported back, on deadline, with a recommendation that a proposal for proportional representation be put to the people in a referendum, for dismissing its findings with a claim that they had failed to furnish the government with a specific model of reform: more specific, that is, than that it should be proportional.

It wasn’t the Liberals who put a rookie minister with no judgment, ability or interpersonal skills in charge of the file, or who cooked up a biased and insultingly off-topic online survey with which to muddy the committee’s findings. Or rather it was, but they are not to be blamed for the delay, confusion and general sense of drift surrounding the file. Rather, it was you. You are to blame. Or, more precisely, you are being blamed.

For, as the prime minister explained in his mandate letter to the new Minister of Democratic Institutions, also a rookie, “a clear preference for a new electoral system, let alone a consensus, has not emerged.” So you see: You didn’t step up. You failed to show leadership. You left the hard work of governing to the government. Like the committee, which did not do a job it was not assigned, you did not answer a question you were never asked.

Now, you may wish to protest that this is untrue: that the overwhelming majority of those who presented testimony before the committee, whether experts or laymen, argued for some form of proportional representation, and that this, rather than the details of design, was the fundamental question before Canadians.

Further, you may point to the results of that online questionnaire that hundreds of thousands of Canadians dutifully filled out, which for all the skewed questions and tendentious summaries showed a clear willingness to entertain the idea of multi-party governments, of a kind that critics of proportional representation warn will bring disaster.

Finally, you may object that, even now, even after all the government’s dithering and manipulation and lies, there is nothing whatever to prevent it from proceeding with reform if it had any desire to: with or without a referendum, on any model or models it cared to propose. But this simply shows that you have not been listening.

For as the prime minister patiently explained — not to you, but to his minister — “without a clear preference or a clear question, a referendum would not be in Canada’s interest.” Perhaps you think framing a clear question is the government’s job. Perhaps you imagine that the point of a referendum is to find out what people prefer; to object to a referendum on the grounds that there was no clear preference in advance is to object to ordering a meal on the grounds that the waiter should have already brought it to you.

But that is because you are still, even at this late date, investing some literal meaning in the prime minister’s words, as if what he said and what he intended bore any relationship to each other. But if there is anything that you should have learned by now, after the two deficits of $10 billion that turned into 40 years of deficits as high as $30 billion — and the noncombat mission against ISIL that turned into troops on the ground firing and being fired upon; and the open competition to replace the F-35 that turned into another sole-source contract; and the Saudi arms deal and the “revenue-neutral” tax cut and all the rest — it is that you have no business believing a word that comes out of this prime minister’s mouth; that the most solemn promises, however unequivocal and however often repeated, are to him and the people around him mere bait for the gullible; and that if you ever believe anything they tell you ever again, on any matter large or small, if you ever trust them to keep their word from this day forward, then you deserve everything you have coming to you.

It is not their fault for lying to you. It is your fault for believing them.