The Canadian Press
Joan Bryden
OTTAWA—The Trudeau government yesterday was accused of stacking the deck in the Liberal party’s favour as it finally made good on a promise to create a special parliamentary committee on electoral reform.
Democratic Institutions minister Maryam Monsef insisted the government remains open to considering any and all alternatives to the existing first-past-the-post voting system.
But with the committee to be dominated by Liberals, opposition parties suspect it’s geared to propose a ranked ballot system—an alternative favoured by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and which critics maintain primarily would benefit the Liberals.
“The Liberals have chosen to maintain their false majority on the committee, stack the decks,” charged NDP democratic reform critic Nathan Cullen.
Cullen had proposed the governing party surrender its usual committee majority for this particular committee, instead allotting membership in proportion to the share of the popular vote won by each party with a seat in the House of Commons.
With that rejected, Conservative leader Rona Ambrose said it’s more important than ever that the government agree to hold a referendum to give Canadians the final say on any new voting system.
“The question is, who gets to make that change to our basic democracy, to our fundamental democracy?” Ambrose asked.
“It is not one government and one political party that has a majority. That’s not right,” she stressed.
Monsef did not categorically rule out a referendum, but said such talk is “putting the cart before the horse.”
The government’s immediate priority, she said, is using other tools to engage and consult Canadians on the kind of voting system they’d prefer.
Among other things, the committee is to invite all 338 MPs to hold town halls to hear the views of their constituents and report back on the results by Oct. 1.
“This is not about advancing a skewed partisan interest but about giving greater and more representative voices to all Canadians to express their values, needs, and aspirations in elections,” Monsef said.
The 10-member committee is to consist of six Liberal MPs, three Conservatives, and one New Democrat.
One member of the Bloc Quebecois and the Green Party’s lone MP, leader Elizabeth May, also will also be members but without the right to vote or move motions.
A motion to create the committee, tabled in the House of Commons, specifies that it is to study “viable alternative voting systems, such as preferential ballots and proportional representation,” as well as mandatory voting and online voting.
It is to present its final report no later than December.
The committee is the first step towards keeping Trudeau’s promise that last fall’s election would be the last conducted under first-past-the-post, in which the candidate with the most votes wins—often with considerably less than majority support.
That system has been widely criticized for routinely creating “false majorities,” including Trudeau’s last fall, where a party wins a majority of seats in the Commons despite getting less than 40 percent of the popular vote.
It’s also criticized for under-representing small parties, over-representing regionally-based parties, encouraging hyper-partisanship, and exacerbating regional tensions.
“In a multi-party democracy like Canada, first-past-the-post distorts the will of the electorate,” Monsef noted.
“It’s part of why too many Canadians don’t engage in or care about politics,” she added.
“We deserve broad, representative politics that lead to decisions that are in the best interests of Canadians, elections that inspire Canadians to vote, governments that respond to the needs of Canadians, representation that reflects our diverse political views, and stable governments that Canadians can rely upon.”
