If Trudeau breaks his word, he’ll be kicked out

It looks like a pants-on-fire moment for Canada’s very own Sun King.

A year ago, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was making this sweeping promise in his campaign literature as he prepared for victory in last year’s election: “We will make every vote count.

“We are committed to ensuring that 2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system.”

It doesn’t get any clearer than that. We believed him.

We were even inspired by the promise. There is a profound appetite for change to the way we elect politicians. Local residents have attended dozens of meetings. When Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Monsef came to Kitchener as part of a cross-country listening tour, 300 people welcomed her.

But now, there are signs that Trudeau is backtracking. He told Montreal’s Le Devoir newspaper this week that major reforms to the voting system would require “substantial” support from the electorate.

He went on to say that Canadians aren’t pushing quite as strongly for electoral reform now, because they are more satisfied with the current Liberal government than with the Conservative government that was defeated. Therefore public motivation to change the system is “less compelling,” he said, according to a translated version of the French-language article.

I’m going to pause while we all let that sink in.

We don’t need reform anymore, folks, because you’ve got me running things, and I’m fabulous! What astonishing arrogance. But it’s our own fault in some ways, isn’t it? Enough of us were hungry for a rock star, after a decade of leadership from dour Stephen Harper, that we started worshipping the new guy. His selfies! His gravity-defying yoga poses! Him, hanging out with the cool kids at the White House!

Nevertheless, if he thinks that he can wheedle his way out of this promise by sheer charm, Trudeau has miscalculated.

The suggestion of a backtrack is “offensive at every level,” said a frustrated Gordon Divitt of Cambridge.

He attended that meeting in Kitchener last month, and remembers Monsef saying that if people didn’t express a strong preference for a certain model, the government would not feel that it had a mandate to change things.

Back then, he was alarmed at that comment. But “what I heard (then) is now confirmed,” he said.

Another advocate for electoral reform is Matthew Pigott, who is active with the local Green party. He called the backtracking “completely unacceptable.”

Pigott said the current system rewards only the winning candidate, while the votes for the others are not counted at all.

It serves to polarize politics, he said. The Liberal party tends not to get MPs in the Prairie provinces and the Conservatives don’t elect representatives from Toronto. Under the current system, the parties have no reason to listen to people in areas that don’t produce representatives.

If the system were changed, each party would consider more diverse viewpoints, he said.

Pigott and other activists are calling and writing to their local MPs to let them know how disappointed they’ll be if Trudeau doesn’t keep his promise.

Trudeau is a talented public relations man, but he should also study history once in a while. He would learn that popularity today is no guarantee of eternal life. Governments come and go, even his. And if this particular promise, on which so many people’s hopes are fixed, is broken, the electorate will turn on him sooner rather than later.