Reform key to proving new kids aren’t like the old guard
MONTREAL— It is not just Justin Trudeau’s opposition rivals who were — as the prime minister indelicately put it in a recent interview — left in the dust on election night; a generation of old-school Liberal insiders was, too.
For most of the new Liberals in the House of Commons, the names of the party’s veteran power brokers ring only distant bells. Many party fixtures on Parliament Hill are unknown to the new movers-andshakers of the Trudeau cabinet.
The ghosts of a recent Liberal past still haunt the halls of Parliament but they are, for the most part, rattling their chains outside the corridors of power, with few or no IOUs to collect on.
Some used to make themselves indispensable by smoothing the Liberal path to well-heeled donors. But such go-between services became obsolete after Jean Chrétien banned corporate donations a bit more than a decade ago.
Then Trudeau was elected leader without the brokerage between various establishment factions that had attended past leadership contests. A politician with hundreds of thousands of social media followers brings a base to an open leadership process and, potentially, to the floor of his party’s convention that no organizer can hope to match.
With the restoration of a measure of grassroots democracy to the selection of the party’s election candidates, a connection to the old boys’ network is no longer a ticket to a nomination or, in the wake of the prime minister’s move to fill the upper house’s vacant seats with presumably free spirits rather than with proven loyalists, to a Senate appointment.
Trudeau’s quiet party revolution has left much of the Liberal old guard on the outside of the new government looking in. That may have been little more than a convenient shortcut to a changing of that guard. Or it could pave the way to a larger transformative change to the way parties approach politics in this country.
In the last campaign, Trudeau vouched there would not be another federal election held under the first-past-the-post system. The Liberal speech from the throne commits the government to bring electoral reform legislation within 18 months.
At some point between now and then, the prime minister will have to decide whether to walk away from his promise or to risk a reform that could make his Liberal government the last majority federal government for a long time.
For it is already clear that the party’s preferred option of a ranked preferential ballot is dead on arrival.
Under a system that would require voters to rank candidates from most to least preferred, Trudeau would have won an even bigger majority last October, mostly to the detriment of the Conservative party.
There is little support outside Liberal ranks for a change that could rig the system in favour of Trudeau’s party; the notion that he could use his majority in Parliament to get his way is a non-starter with many otherwise Liberal-friendly constituencies.
Government House leader Dominic LeBlanc acknowledged as much in an interview with Maclean’s this week. “I never thought that one party with a majority rewrites the rules that apply to everybody else,” he said.
If LeBlanc is serious about seeking multi-partisan support for a reform plan, he will not have to look far. The NDP, the Bloc Québécois and the Green party all crave a change along the line of a more proportional system.
Under most proportional models the dominant parties would have to find enough common ground with one or more of the smaller ones to form a viable government.
Any reform would at least initially make the Conservative path to power rockier. It would be hard for them to build the lasting formal or informal coalitions that would be a pre-requisite to holding federal power.
The official Opposition is calling on Trudeau to put the issue to a plebiscite. Three provinces and, more recently, Great Britain took that route and it led them all back to the status quo. If the government agrees to a referendum, an option that simply replaces one winner-take-all approach with a more Liberal-friendly variation is unlikely to prevail.
Only a leader who is remarkably free from the shackles of his party could even consider pursuing an electoral reform that is not in its apparent partisan interest. Time will tell whether Trudeau is that person. Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.