“We are committed to ensuring that the 2015 election will be the last federal election using FPTP (first-past-the-post). We’ll make sure that Canadians have a stronger voice in Ottawa – a voice that reflects and represents them.” – Justin Trudeau, Chateau Laurier Hotel, Ottawa, June 16, 2015.
When Trudeau made that commitment, he had been the leader of the Liberal party for two years. The Liberals were also-rans, the proud “natural governing party” reduced to third-party status with just 36 seats in the Commons, and facing a seemingly unassailable Conservative majority government under Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
But less than five months later, the winds of change transformed Justin Trudeau, MP for Papineau, into the Rt. Hon. Justin Trudeau, prime minister of a majority Liberal government with 184 seats.
Had Trudeau anticipated in June that he would be prime minister in November, he would surely not have embraced electoral reform and or have promised to replace FPTP with a system (unspecified) of proportional representation. No prime minister in his right political mind would scrap a system that gave him a majority government in favour a system that would virtually guarantee minority government.
Trudeau was not that daft. But how to blow off his commitment? A Commons special committee on electoral reform was sent across the country to consult experts and listen to ordinary voters. It did not find any great public unhappiness with first-past-the-post and it did not identity any system of PR that voters preferred to FPTP. Yet on its return the committee recommended replacing first-past-the post with some system (or other) of proportional representation.
Although the Liberal majority on the committee supported the recommendation, the Liberal government wasn’t buying it. Citing a lack of public consensus, in early 2017 it officially abandoned its campaign promise.
The breaking of the commitment has been an albatross around Trudeau’s neck ever since. It hurt him badly in the 2019 election, in which he lost his majority; the opposition parties cited it as evidence that the PM could not be trusted. It was still raised often in the course of last month’s election.
However, it was not the first time – nor, I suspect, will it be the last – that a promise of electoral reform had been made and broken. Back in 1919, William Lyon Mackenzie King promised that, if his Liberals were elected, 1921 would be the last election under FPTP. King won, appointed a special parliamentary committee, and two years later, reneged on the promise.
Justin’s dad, Pierre Trudeau, while in opposition, declared his support for proportional representation – “We can make sure that the national parties have representation in Parliament closer to the number of people voting for them.” Restored to office in the 1980 election, he did not follow his words with action.
Even Harper talked passionately at one stage about the need for electoral reform, but did nothing about it.
Don’t expect to hear much on the subject in the future from Justin Trudeau. At a campaign stop in Aurora, Ontario, on Sept. 18, he said that while he remained open to replacing FPTP, electoral reform was “not a priority” since there was no consensus among political parties on the issue.
Electoral reform is not a partisan issue. Opposition politicians embrace it, as long as they remain in opposition. Publish-or-perish academics seize the opportunity to spin pet theories on proportional representation, however impractical, in heavily footnoted papers for learned conferences. And journalists respond with glad cries to the chance to create elaborate scenarios to illustrate how different an election result would be if various forms of proportional representation were adopted to replace first-past-the-post.
It is all good fun. It’s harmless sport. No one gets hurt and everyone knows that poor old FPTP, which has served the country pretty well, is not really in danger.
This may be a heretical notion, but it seems to me that shutting down discussion on election reform by declaring it irrelevant, a non-priority, as Trudeau did last month, is a disservice to Canadians who laboured so hard over the years, and spent so many sleepless nights, struggling to understand and evaluate the arcane alternatives to FPTP.
Is all our exhausting mental effort to be wasted? When, if ever, will we be able to flaunt again our grasp of AVSD (average vote-seat deviation), MMP (Mixed Member Proportional Representation), TRS (Two-Round System), RCV (Ranked-Choice Voting), IRV (Instant-Runoff Voting), STV (Single Transferable Voting), AV (Alternative Vote), SV (Supplementary Vote), and, of course, the crucial distinction that only we, the cognoscenti, can recognize between the dueling theories of voting: cardinal utility versus ordinal utility?
Yes, we PR wonks deserve better. We possess a trove of useless electoral trivia. We need to use it before we lose it.
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens is an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail. His new book, Flora! A Woman in a Man’s World, co-authored with the late Flora MacDonald, is being published this month by McGill-Queen’s University Press. His column appears Mondays. He welcomes comments at geoffstevens40@gmail.com.