Taking on the challenge of fixing Canada’s democracy

Single transferable vote. Preferential ballot. Mixed member proportional representation. First past the post. Have we lost you yet? We sincerely hope not — because you’re going to hear an awful lot of this sort of talk in the next 18 months.

That’s one of the problems with electoral reform: there are many ways to cast a ballot in a democracy, and each method has its pros and cons. The perfect voting system has not yet been devised, that we know of.

But the federal Liberal government wants to make things closer to perfect, and so Minister of Democratic Institutions Maryam Monsef on Wednesday announced the creation of an all-party parliamentary committee to study electoral reform. In a show of outreach, it also invited the Greens and the Bloc Québécois to sit in as non-voting members. The committee must report by year-end; the Liberals want reforms in place for the 2019 election.

But creating a group of MPs to study what would be a historic altering of Canada’s democracy is toe-in-the-water stuff: a staggering amount of work lies ahead if the government is to change how MPs are elected and do so with robust public support. Many details of how it hopes to get there are not yet known.

We’ve asked before: What is the problem with our current voting system that the government needs to solve? Reformers answer that Canada’s “First-past-the-post” democracy (start learning these terms, voters!) values some votes more than others, because governments routinely win a majority of seats without a majority of votes. Small parties that may have been supported by thousands can end up with no seats at all.

“It’s part of why too many Canadians don’t engage in, or care about, politics,” Monsef said. “The current system has been criticized for the tendency to distort the will of the electorate, to lead to strategic voting, for example.”

A better system, reformers believe, could help solve these problems.

Monsef would not say which sort of proportional representation system she favours. But getting public buy-in for any proposal must be about more than a well-meaning committee. So the minister also wants all 338 MPs to hold town hall meetings in their ridings. She says she will conduct “significant public outreach” to complement the work of the committee — reaching the young, people in remote areas, lower-income folk, the disabled, new Canadians, indigenous communities. How? Through social media? Surveys? Google Hangouts?

“Digital outreach will be a key component,” is all Monsef would say Wednesday.

Will she consider citizens’ assemblies — which were used in both British Columbia and in Ontario to educate regular citizens, explore potential changes to the electoral systems, and make recommendations free from partisanship? We don’t know yet.

Will she hold a referendum on whatever the government eventually recommends? We don’t know this yet, either, though the government seems to have opened the door a crack on this demand from the Conservatives.

The opposition will hammer the government for months to come over the details of its exercise in changing Canada’s electoral system. And it should. The world is full of fragile democracies. We need to ensure good intentions don’t accidentally weaken our own.

Liberals want reforms in place for the 2019 election.