DEN TANDT:

THE TRUDEAU GOVERNMENT’S SHAMBOLIC, CONTRADICTORY ELECTORAL REFORM PLAN PLAYS INTO THE HANDS OF CONSERVATIVE STRATEGISTS WHO CAN NOW MAP THEIR TWO-YEAR ASSAULT PLAN.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE, NOT TO MENTION ... HYPOCRITICAL, TO SELL A PROGRAM OF DEMOCRATIC RENEWAL THAT IS NOT ITSELF DEMOCRATIC. — MICHAEL DEN TANDT EITHER WAY, ON ITS CURRENT COURSE, THE GOVERNMENT LOSES.

The Trudeau government’s sweeping plan for electoral reform, which struck just the right note of idealistic boldness on the campaign trail, is dead on arrival. The Liberals are now trapped in a classic pincer of their own making — damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Conservative strategists have been handed a gift that will keep on giving, possibly for years to come.

Here’s the top line: it is impossible, not to mention contradictory and hypocritical, to sell a program of democratic renewal that is not itself democratic. The beatific reassurances of the smiling Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Monsef notwithstanding, no one but Liberals will believe it to be anything but a power grab. Critics will howl; there will be no consensus. There will be division, followed by failure.

More concretely, it is deeply irrational to assert, as the Liberals are now doing, that they have a decisive mandate to scrap Canada’s 150-yearold first-past-the-post system, when they draw their authority to govern from a vote taken under that very system.

It’s a vicious catch-22. The system is so broken, so dysfunctional and anti-democratic, that fixing it up the old-fashioned way, through the painful process of citizens casting ballots, is a risk that cannot, must not, be taken. But if Canadian electoral democracy is so dysfunctional, then the Liberals’ 184-seat majority, on a popular vote last Oct. 19 of just 39 per cent, is a symptom of that dysfunction. Therefore there is no mandate.

Add to this the government’s insistence on stacking its electoral reform committee with Liberals, and justifying this based on the current seat count in the Commons — which is, of course, illegitimate, because it doesn’t reflect the popular vote — and you enter the zone of self-parody.

We may throw in, just for the heck of it, that the appearance of doing Liberalism the old way, that is to say with naked self-interest and self-serving back-patting masked by high-sounding balderdash, is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Achilles heel. He sought and won his party’s leadership as a reformer, not of politics alone but of Liberalism. He cannot afford to become just another party politician.

Ultimately, therefore, it stands to reason there will be a climbdown. The political cost to the Liberals of ramming ahead unilaterally will be too high, next to the exigencies of other problems. Or, there will be a flip-flop on a referendum — which, if it happens, will likely swing against reform and enshrine the status quo, just as Trudeau has suggested it would. Certainly, with the governing party sitting cagily on its hands, as former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals did in 2007 when Ontarians opted against a mixed-member proportional system, that will be the outcome.

Either way, on its current course, the government loses, not least because its talking points have been so ludicrous.

The notion that “consultations” and town halls can be so frequent, geographically dispersed and inclusive as to make a deciding referendum redundant, is laughable, for example. Of course you’ll have, in this new era of independent MPs who represent their constituents’ views to Ottawa rather than the reverse, 184 town halls in 184 obedient Liberal ridings. You may get a decent number in the 44 NDP-held ridings too, since the Dippers have long advocated for a switch to a proportional system, such as almost all the world’s democracies now use.

But what about the 99 Conservative-held ridings? What possible incentive could a Tory MP have to invest time and energy in a process over which he or she ultimately will have no influence? Unless it ends in a referendum, the consultations as described by Monsef and House leader Dominic LeBlanc look like a series of coffee klatches or group hugs, with notes taken and tabulated, to be compiled in a voluminous report and ignored when the prime minister and cabinet decide what to do based on what seems best to them at the time.

The government has two not-terrible but not-great-either options here, as it surveys the smoking ruin of its policy launch. First, it could shelve the whole business, after a face-saving period of mourning, and back off on electoral reform for now, or until a second term. This would be painful but is still possible.

Second, the Liberals could commit to a referendum now, rather than later, after they lose a grinding rearguard battle to prevent one. Then they could try to persuade Canadians that whatever new system they favour — whether a ranked ballot, or proportional representation, or some blend or the two — is actually better than the system we have now. And put it to a vote, and let the people decide.

That is a hard road that may very well end in failure, if you’re among those who consider the status quo of Canada a failure. But it would be an honourable failure — unlike the utter shambles developing now.