ARE THE LIBERALS CONNING US, AGAIN?
The question is whether a more democratic end may be achieved by less than democratic means; whether an electoral system that is more responsive to the public may be imposed without meaningfully consulting that same public; whether a more consensual, less partisan politics is the probable result of a fairly naked attempt by one party to control the process from start to finish.
The question, in short, is whether the Liberals are conning us, yet again.
The depth of Liberal commitment to a more democratic politics was already in some doubt, in a week in which the governing party imposed “time allocation” on debate on three separate pieces of legislation, one of them the sort of hydra-headed omnibus bill it had sworn never to introduce.
The party, and leader, that promised open nominations, only to impose the leader’s preferred candidates; that promised free votes, only to whip even previously sacrosanct matters of conscience like abortion and (briefly) assisted suicide; that promised a more transparent budget process, only to produce an even more opaquely misleading budget than its predecessors; and that has broken faith with the electorate on half a dozen other of the promises on which it was elected may reasonably be the object of some mistrust, not least among the opposition parties it now beckons to “put partisanship aside.”
So although Minister of Democratic Institutions Maryam Monsef, in announcing that the government was finally moving ahead on the long-promised reform of the electoral system, took care to mouth every conceivable bit of boilerplate about moving “beyond narrow partisan interests” and “building a national consensus,” it was instantly noticed that nothing the government was actually proposing had much to do with the talking points she was spouting.
In particular, the contradiction was noted between the minister’s declaration that the “first-past-the-post” system on which her government was elected “distorts the will of the electorate,” and her reliance on the same system to apportion seats on the committee that will make recommendations on a new system.
The Liberals, with 39 per cent of the vote in the past election, have awarded themselves 60 per cent of the committee’s 10 voting members. For this the minister could offer no defence other than that it was in line with their share of the seats in the House.
Of course, first past the post is the system we have now, and it is a bit much to ask a government duly elected under the rules of that system to act as if it were already operating under some different system. But on a matter of such obvious partisan sensitivity as replacing the electoral system — how the votes are cast, how the seats are apportioned — with another, it is convention that governments should proceed with the support of all parties, or something approaching it.
The Conservatives were properly roasted for breaking that convention with regard to the so-called Fair Elections Act, but the attempts to tilt the pitch in that piece of legislation were as nothing compared to the potential for partisan mischief in the present case.
The point is this: if the government were genuinely committed to proceeding with the support of the other parties — or even one of them — it would not matter whether it controlled a majority of the seats on the committee. If, nevertheless, it insists on such a majority, we are entitled to ask what is up. That it should choose to do so, what is more, fresh from using its majority on the committee studying assisted-suicide legislation to bat away virtually every one of dozens of opposition amendments, sets off all sorts of alarm bells.
It’s especially remarkable that it should have taken so long to go about it, nearly seven months after it was first elected. How long does it take, after all, to divide six into 10? This is a party that in opposition had established some reputation for taking risks, and that in its best moments in government has sought to reach across the aisle. Yet on the single most important legislative initiative of this Parliament — for the design of the electoral system will shape all future elections, and therefore all future legislation — it has reverted to cautiously autocratic form.
With barely a year to go before its self-imposed deadline for implementing a reform plan, and just over six months to the committee’s own Dec. 1 deadline for proposing one, there seems little possibility of any farreaching exercise in public consultation such as the citizens’ assemblies used to make recommendations on reform in British Columbia and Ontario. (The proposed town halls in each riding are a distant second-best.) This, too, is troubling. The Conservatives have invested a great deal in the idea that any proposed reform must be put to a referendum, as a check on any attempt to push through a plan that was skewed against or in favour of one party or another. In the absence, so far, of any attempt to seek all-party consensus, that argument takes on greater weight.
But if gamesmanship is what worries them, a referendum on its own is not sufficient safeguard. It would be child’s play for a government to devise the rules for a referendum in a way that was more likely to yield one result or another. A truly nonpartisan approach, therefore, would need to start at the front end, in the design of the process as much as the ratification of the result. That the Liberals are instead unilaterally imposing a process they will unilaterally control bodes ill indeed.