Electoral reform isn’t a job for our MPs
The Liberal government’s misadventure in electoral reform is a critical lesson in why politicians cannot and should not lead an electoral reform process.
Asking for a genuine debate on electoral reform plunges all politicians into conflicts of interest. The issue at stake for politicians is not which electoral system is the best for Canadians; it’s which system is best for them.
Before the merger between the Progressive Conservatives and the Canadian Alliance, former Prime Minister Stephen Harper was an advocate of proportional representation.
And while the federal NDP are calling bloody murder today, no provincial NDP government has acted to change the voting system in their respective legislatures.
Before the last election, the Liberals spotted an opportunity to scoop up votes from the fractured left, so they made an ill-conceived promise to change the voting system. And while only a small percentage of Canadians voted for the Liberals because of this promise, in our perverse electoral system, even a one-percentagepoint change in the national vote can flip swing ridings, and deliver a Liberal majority government.
So what should the Liberals have done? For starters, they could have turned to Elections Canada, our independent, non-partisan elections agency, to lead the consultation process. The agency already has a mandate to research and test new voting methods. Its staff could have presented options in an unbiased way.
The government could have also struck a citizens’ assembly or reference panel, made up of voters reflecting Canada’s social and regional diversity, rather than a parliamentary committee with MPs who all have skin in the game. When equipped with facts and with no party’s stake in the outcome, citizens can make a choice in the public interest.
While the door to electoral reform might be temporarily closing at the federal level, a different story is emerging from cities across the country where citizens, not politicians, are leading the charge for electoral reform. Kingston will hold a referendum on ranked ballots in 2018 and a report in Vancouver recommends changing those cities’ electoral systems.
Genuine electoral reform will come, not from the top down, but from ordinary citizens at the grassroots level, who know that such reform is too important to be left to politicians.
Colum Grove-White Ottawa 123, a voting reform organization