Trudeau’s plan serious, radical

You will forgive me if I do not sneer. Lord knows the Liberals have gone in for enough silly stunts and pious gestures in their time — congratulated themselves on their own virtue, then gone back on their word, then ins is ted they hadn’t, leaving nothing but a trail of their own hot air.

So it would be the easiest thing in the world to say, of their new democratic reform plan, that they don’t mean it, or that if they do, they’re naive fools, because everybody knows nobody cares about “process questions.” Or if you really want to boil it down, because Michael Ignatieff.

You may remember him: tall fellow, brazen eyebrows, beseeched Canadians to “rise up,” was never heard from again. The lesson, to many observers, was “never try.” Nobody cares. Ignatieff had tried to make an issue of the alarming state of our democracy, the weakness of Parliament, the centralization of power in the Prime Minister’s Office, and the public had shrugged.

Of course they had. Academic elite! Ottawa bubble! What had this to do with taxes or jobs? And if we like, we can all have that laugh again.

But then, what did Ignatieff ’s party really offer in the way of reform? Can anyone even remember what the Liberals proposed in 2011? It’s one thing to rail against the state of Canadian democracy, but unless you actually lay out serious proposals to change things, people will quite rightly turn over in their beds.

Indeed, without experience of a functioning democracy, they would be a hard sell to even the most determined reformer. In its current state of disrepair, it’s logical not to bother about Parliament. What have they got to compare it to? How should they know what they’re missing?

The virtue of the plan the Liberals have just released, then, is its radicalism. It does not always go as far as it should, it is often light on details, it contains some significant omissions, but it is impossible to dismiss this reform package as mere show. Indeed, the plan would be transformative in its implications if it only contained the one line: “We are committed to ensuring that 2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system.”

Yes, they make no specific commitment beyond that, leaving it to an all-party commi tt ee to decide between ranked ballots, proportional representation, mandatory voting and other reform options. But legislation “within 18 months of forming a government” is concrete enough; if they’re flat-out lying, we’ll at least know we’ve been had.

It is important to understand how radical this is. You can’t just transpose current voting patterns onto a different electoral system: when you change how you count the votes, you change everything, since that’s what the rewards or penalties for different types of behaviour are denominated in. Which parties contest the election, how they appeal to voters, how they respond to each other, and how voters choose between them — all this and more would change.

Beyond that, the Liberal plan can be broken into several categories. There are measures to address some of the more well-known grievances against the Harper government: the abuse of prorogation, the loading of dozens of separate bills into sprawling, incomprehensible omnibus bills, the harassment of government watchdogs like the Parliamentary Budget Officer, and so on.

A second, overlapping group has to do with the business of Parliament. There are some delightfully wonky proposals to improve the workings of committees, and to repair the wholly broken budget process — only the most important thing Parliament does — with its separate systems of accounts for the estimates and the budget on which they are supposedly based.

The promise of more free votes, on the other hand, is a familiar one, and somewhat undercut by the exception for votes on “the shared values embodied in the Charter of Rights” (read: abortion). Without altering the balance of power between the leader and caucus — for example, by the kinds of measures envisaged in the Reform Act, now stalled in the Senate — this may prove a disappointment. Likewise, an improved process for appointments to the Senate is a thin substitute for real reform, however difficult that may be.

A third group concerns elections. Beyond changing the voting system, there are some praiseworthy proposals for an independent commission to set the rules for election debates, for banning partisan government advertising, and for setting some limits on party advertising outside the formal writ period, in place of the present free-for-all.

Last, there are a number of intriguing ideas for making government information more accessible to the public, including “individualized, secure accounts for Canadians who want to access all of their government benefits and review key documents.”

I don’t want to suggest this is the last word on the subject. While some of the pledges are specific (“we will also immediately restore the mandatory long-form census”), some are quite vague (“we will not use prorogation to avoid difficult political circumstances”). Worse are the out-and-out clunkers: a flat 50-50 gender quota in cabinet appointments, whatever the number or quality of their representation in caucus, is either a declaration that merit does not matter, or that cabinet doesn’t. Insisting that every Supreme Court judge be bilingual, likewise, is not only unnecessary (the court has perfectly good translation services) and inimical to merit, but amounts to shutting most western Canadian candidates out of contention. I can imagine this coming back to haunt the Liberals in the months to come.

It is, all in all, a serious and substantive package, if of mixed quality. Sure, much of it seems aimed at winning back support from the NDP — indeed, in some cases lifted straight from it — to whom the Liberals have given up much ground of late. At the same time, there is a clear contrast drawn with the governing Conservatives. That’s how elections are supposed to work, remember?