Politics killed electoral reform
Editor: In rebuttal to Dan Albas’ report, speaking to reporters about electoral reform, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said “Unfortunately it became very clear that we (Liberals) had a preference to give people a ranked ballot. . . We thought that was the right concrete way forward. Nobody else agreed.
“The NDP were anchored in proportional representation as being the way forward.”
But says he has been “consistent and crystal clear throughout his political career that proportional representation would be bad for Canada.” He went on to say, “creating fragmentation amongst political parties, as opposed to having larger political parties that include Canada’s diversity within them, would weaken our country.”
And he added the Conservatives, for their part, were insistent on keeping the status quo. The only way to break the logjam would have been a national referendum, which he definitely thinks is not in the best interest of Canadians.
The Prime Minister said, “So, it was a very difficult decision for me to make the determination that even given my own hopes that we would be able to move forward on reforming the electoral system, there was no was path to do that. There was no openness to compromise in the other parties and I wasn’t going to use the Liberal majority just to tick off a box on an election platform.”
In the last election, Trudeau promised electoral reform without specifying a particular solution. An all party committee of MPs spent 2016 studying electoral reform, concluding last December that the government should hold a referendum to bring in some type of proportional representation system.
The government rejected it, with then Democratic Minister Maryam Monsef calling it “hasty” and saying she was disappointed in the committee’s work. Shortly afterwards, Trudeau dropped the electoral reform promise from the minister’s mandate.
She certainly did not handle that well and has made some very good reasons look on the surface, messy.
Jon Peter Christoff, West Kelowna