HOUSE LEADER
Liberals rule out referendum on electoral reform.
TORONTO• The federal Liberals have all but ruled out a referendum on promised electoral reform.
“Our plan is not to have a national referendum, our plan is to use parliament to consult Canadians,” Government House Leader Dominic Leblanc said in an interview with CTV. “That’s always been our plan and I don’t have any reason to think that’s been changed.”
He said he would work with Democratic Reform Minister Maryam Monsef to strike a committee to consult with Canadians and come up with a plan for reform.
But his dismissal of a referendum runs counter to recent precedent. Three provinces have held recent referendums on electoral reform: Prince Edward Island in 2005, Ontario in 2007 and B.C., in 2005 and 2009. In all three provinces, voters rejected an alteration. In B.C., support for the status quo actually grew during those four years.
The first- past- the- post system — where the candidate who wins the most votes, even if not a majority, takes the seat — has been widely criticized because it allows majority governments to form with far less than a majority of the popular vote. Trudeau’s Liberals, just like the previous Conservative one, formed a majority government with less than 40 per cent of the popular vote. That’s also proven to be the case in the provinces that rejected electoral reform.
Top advisers to the Trudeau government have previously expressed some wariness of those failures and that may have influenced the party’s opposition to referendums on reforms.
Other experts, however, contend that just because an idea is complicated, doesn’t preclude it from going to a referendum.
“This response misrepresents the referenda process in both B.C. and Ontario,” Lydia Miljan, a senior fellow of the Fraser Institute, argues in a blog for the right- wing think tank.
In Ontario in 2007 and B.C. in 2009, over 60 per cent opposed changing the electoral system, but Milijan said that alone i s not an argument against a referendum: “For example, in Ontario, it wasn’t so much that the public didn’t understand the proposal, but that it was neglected by political elites.
“Polls at the time indicated that only eight per cent of the public were aware that there even was a referendum. … If the government is confident that the public has a desire to change the electoral system, then it should be willing to face that electorate in a question on the matter.”
Some cite the previous provincial referendums — and their results — as a point for, not against, putting the question directly to the people.
“A referendum is now widely seen as the norm for such a change and departing from it would be politically risky,” said Don Lenihan, a senior associate of policy and engagement at Canada 2020, a left-leaning think tank.
Interim Conservative Leader Rona Ambrose has also called for a referendum, and Tory MP Scott Reid has created an e- petition to drum up support. So far, over 4,000 Canadians have signed on.
The NDP, for their part, favour some form of proportional representation, when a party’s seats in the House of Commons are redistributed to match its popular vote.