Liberals keeping mum on referendum issue

Well, if nobody in the Trudeau government is going to explain why there won’t be a referendum on electoral reform, I guess I’ll have to.

There won’t be a referendum on electoral reform because referendums are trouble. They transfix government, binding up the attention of public servants and political staffers so nothing else can get done.

But that’s not the worst of it. There has never been a calm referendum on a narrow technical question in Canada. There have only been donnybrooks. Canadians voted on the prohibition of alcohol in 1898, with all the English-majority provinces voting in favour (89 per cent on Prince Edward Island! Fun crowd) — and Quebec solidly against. There would be no prohibition. Canadians voted on conscription in 1942. The ensuing crisis lasted almost to the end of the war. We voted on the Charlottetown Accord in 1992 and were lucky to get away with the near-death experience of the 1995 Quebec referendum.

Referendums are polarizing by their nature. They put people on opposite sides of some question they never even thought they cared about. They offer no incentive to compromise or to make reasoned arguments. Each side’s pride gets bound up in the outcome, then its very self-definition. National referendums in Canada are deeply emotional and divisive events.

Then there are the details, technical on their face, more hell when you think about them. Would a referendum be held under the same set of rules and the same federal law, from coast to coast? If so, this would be the first national referendum held on Quebec territory since 1942, and that’s a really lousy precedent if you’re big on national unity. Would Quebec hold its own referendum, as it did in 1992? What happens if reform passes big in Quebec, or Ontario, but fails everywhere else? Pass the reform anyway?

A national referendum in Canada is so indistinguishable from a crisis that you only hold one if you’re already in a crisis anyway. That’s why Pierre Trudeau didn’t hold one on the Constitution, why Jean Chrétien and Stephen Harper wouldn’t think of it and why Brian Mulroney was the only modern prime minister to put a policy question to a one-issue vote: because the Meech Lake Accord had collapsed and the woods were already on fire.

Scott Reid, the Conservative MP who’s leading the charge for a referendum on electoral reform, knows all of this. It’s why he decided early to demand a referendum: it’s the same as insisting that the electoral system not change. I’m not even blaming him. I don’t have a strong enough personal stake in the question, and you have to grant Reid’s position is skilful tactics.

But my goal today isn’t even really to make this argument. It’s to wonder why Maryam Monsef hasn’t made it. The minister of democratic institutions has had an awful week since she blamed the Commons committee on electoral reform for writing a report on electoral reform. She apologized Friday, but she was back into the same rut minutes later. Reid asked why she won’t hold a referendum.

She talked brightly about how she’s trying to hear from “as many Canadians as possible.” Next week, she’s launching an app. A failed app, in the wake of her failed consultation tour and the failed attempt to get Canadians to have their own electoral-reform meetings in church basements. Making Canadians vote on electoral reform would reach a hell of a lot more of them than any app would. Since Monsef’s stated goal is to hear from a lot of Canadians, and she refuses to explain why she doesn’t want to do the one thing that would let her hear from the most Canadians, she comes off witless or distracted.

In this, Monsef is increasingly representative of the entire Trudeau government, which relies on chipper talking points instead of argument. Question period is a daily lamentation. Ministers read their prepared answers. On Fridays, when the ministers are away, their parliamentary secretaries read the same answers. This government talks more than the last one, absolutely, indisputably. That’s not the same as saying more. Maryam Monsef was angry at the MPs on the electoral-reform committee because, unlike her, they refused to pretend a referendum isn’t an option.

She should be mad at herself for not having explained, even once, why she doesn’t like referendums. But to be mad at herself, she would have to drop the presumption of perfect good faith that is becoming this government’s biggest weakness. Paul Wells is a national affairs writer. His column appears Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.