this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2024
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Trudeau absolutely lied about electoral reform.
Yep. That was the biggest reason I voted for him.
As they say down south, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice.. You can't get fooled again! (Because I'll be voting NDP.)
NDP is a big part of why you didn't get electoral reform. Probably one of the key influences in killing it.
We didn't get electoral reform because the Liberals torpedoed their own efforts. They went out of their way to find the most self serving electoral method possible.
If they wanted to do it right, look to countries who have successfully implemented. Follow NZ's process, for example: A two part referendum, Q1: Keep FPTP or switch. Q2: Which new system, with several options.
This is, again, a bad take. The Liberal electoral method was party policy for years and years by 2015. They didn't go out of their way to find it, Liberals from a cross Canada went to local policy workshops, voted, and raised their choice of electoral reform method at plenary / policy convention. They had also rejected a referendum, given they had just won a majority mandate with ER on their platform. But the reforms the LPC wanted were killed by an NDP/CPC coalition in committee.
I don't care if they asked a ouija board. They came up with the wrong answer that didn't serve Canadians in a fair and equitable manner, it served themselves. That's the bottom line.
If you really think the Liberals are truly interested in electoral reform, look no further than the vote results of Motion M-86. Only 25% of Liberal and 3% of Conservative MPs voted in support of the motion.
Ouija board? Fellow, listen, you don't like STV, fine, whatever, but that policy was arrived at through the democratic process and the party was right not to abandon the grassroots on it.
Nobody except the LPC wanted STV. That's not grassroots. STV didn't even fall within the committee's stated purview.
I'd recommend you go read the LPCs Supplemental Report to the Special Committee: https://www.ourcommons.ca/documentviewer/en/42-1/ERRE/report-3/page-435
It's basically a bunch of FUD saying Canadians are too dumb to understand any sort of PR, and we should just put it off because there was disagreement. But the fact is that there is consensus that FPTP is not providing fair elections. The liberals just wanted to manufacture any excuse to not change the status quo. The recent vote on motion M-86 with only 25% of Liberal MPs supports that.
You don't know what your talking about, not even what the term grassroots means. I'll take no lessons thanks.
Sure bud, enjoy your willful ignorance.
Yea, no, I'm not ignorant I'm just not falling in for meme thought. Liberals support STV because party members got together during policy convention time, which is semi annual, usually in hyper local groups of 40-50, across the country in small halls and hotel convention rooms, to debate and vote on policy to send to provincial and then national policy convention until all Liberal party members had a free vote on it, choosing STV. The fact you don't recognize Liberal support for STV as grassroots tells me you aren't serious in the least in your understanding of what happened.
You bought the hive-mind hot take and took it as gospel, like many others, and find it easier to close your ears and repeat that take than to actually consider what happened. You're in popular company I guess, but still wrong.
I don't recognize a single party's unilateral decision as a grassroots movement of the whole. I have no idea regarding the precise mechanism by which the Liberals choose the voting system best suited to their own needs, and frankly, I'm not sure how it's relevant to our conversation.
Other systems are better suited to a majority of Canadians and have support that crosses party boundaries. It's a minority, but a good number of Liberal voters support MMP, for example.
You aren't sure why it's relevant for a party to respect their grass roots supporters and the policy they decided on? You aren't sure why that would be relevant in a discussion that I evolves the precise mechanism by which party policy becomes the law of a nation? Come on.
Why would the LPC adopt the policy position (MMP) of the smallest party in the House of Commons over the known, official, grass roots, twice democratically affirmed over ten years position of their own membership? It doesn't make sense, never did, wasn't going to happen.
Way to just put words in my mouth which I haven't even come close to suggesting. Such good faith behavior. If you don't understand what I've written, or I haven't communicated well, you can simply ask for clarification.
I'm saying it's irrelevant if the effective decision to torpedo their party's own promise was decided upon by collectively, by a conference of their MPs, or dictated by Trudeau himself.
They wouldn't, because it hurts them at the polls. They don't care about doing the right thing for Canadians, just that they don't lose seats to the NDP, even if that comes at the cost of losing an election to the conservatives. The main thing keeping them in power isn't good policy, it's scare tactics of a Conservative majority combined with FPTP.
Once again, read their comments on the ER report if you want to know what they truly think of their own voters. They spent pages whining about methodology which wasn't thoroughly explained because its already widely accepted. Pure FUD.
Edit: It just occurred to me that perhaps were not seeing eye to eye because of how this conversation started: "Trudeau lied."
I just wanted to clarify that you understand that when most people say that, they're aware that the policy platform that a party head runs on isn't solely their own personal discretion. Is your argument that Trudeau didn't lie because it was a collective decision? Because that would clarify why you care so much about this whole grassroots distinction.
No, he didn't. This is the fantasy narrative that election reformers tell themselves.
The reality is that these efforts always blow up because there is never a consensus on what to change it to, and the general public just doesn't care.
And with the blowback they got for their efforts, they won't touch it again for at least another 15-20 years. The CPC would never even consider it. The NDP are as far from power as ever being essentially dead east of Ontario, and spotty through the rest of the country.
So people can sulk if they want to, but it's going to be status quo for the foreseeable future.
There absolutely was a consensus. Trudeau created a commission on electoral reform to find out what the best system for Canada would be. That commission came back that a Proportional Representation system was the recommendation. That's not the answer Trudeau wanted (himself favoring a watered down STV) and so he canceled the whole idea.
No, not the committee, in the electorate.
You can get a small majority to support switching away from FPTP. Then the supporters split into MMP, Ranked, STV, and a number of hybrid systems. That's the primary reason why it has repeatedly lost at the provincial level.
No, sorry, this take is a meme, not the truth of what happened. We don't have electoral reform because the NDP banded together with the CPC to kill it in committee. The NDP, a rump party, couldn't get what they wanted so they got nothing at all.
The CPC, NDP and GPC deserve every bit as much blame, if not more, for the failure to move away from fptp. Why? They banded together in committee to poison any hope of getting electoral reform past the Senate or even the house. Trudeau , naively I think, promised to do things differently from Harper. True to his promise he balanced the electoral reform house committee by popular vote, instead of using his majority power. This meant that the opposition parties could outvote the liberals in committee and, seemingly forgotten by everyone, the opposition parties welded that power to deliver a complete nonsensical , posion pill filled committee report / reccomendation to the house which had no real chance of passing. That document, a worst of all ideas document if I ever saw it, threw out all ideas put forward by the LPC (the majority in the house, who had a free vote on this) instead favoring CPC demands for a referendum, NDP demands for a vague and nonspecific system that wasn’t STV, but was proportional. The GPC and Bloc got in on it, and passed this report that had no chance , none, of passing the house. Even if it had passed the house it wouldn’t have got past the Senate and the committee delayed their report so long nothing could be done before the next election.
I know parliamentary procedure is boring, and most people don’t follow it, but I do and I saw what happened here. The LPC failure was only in so far as they didn’t just stomp all over the opposition to impose their changes. The LPC acted in good faith instead and got politiked so bad people still blame them, reducing the whole thing down to “Trudeau break promise”.
So the Liberals —who had a majority government and declared that we would never have another election using FPTP— chose to put a bunch of people in a room together who they knew wouldn't agree on anything, and then those people came back and said "yeah sorry we couldn't agree on anything", and the Liberals were just like "yeah no worries. We didn't expect you to agree on it... Wow, electoral reform is really hard! We give up!"
And you don't view that as the Liberals killing electoral reform? You are a sucker falling for their incredibly transparent attempt to pawn off the blame. It was absolutely their responsibility and their fault.
Anyone with experience in politics knows why the Liberals did what they did.
IF the Liberals had pushed through the legislation, the CPC and Bloc were both going to portray it a Liberal power grab, and that message would definitely get traction. The CPC had already said they'd revert back to FPTP, and the Bloc was making noises that they'd back them up.
That's why the Liberals went out of their way to do what they did. What they didn't expect was the NDP going all or nothing on MMP, a system that laypeople find difficult to understand, and certainly not one to be explained easily in a sound bite.
Internal Liberal polling, not the dog and pony online poll, found that most people didn't care, but could easily be convinced it was a power grab. They were putting a lot of effort in something that had no upside, but a pile of potential downside.
They cut their losses, and aside from online forums, paid little price for it.
Congrats on having "experience in politics" (whatever that means), but it seems like you just used a lot of words to agree with me:
Trudeau lied about electoral reform.
Trying to justify it with Machiavellian politics doesn't change that simple fact.
No. That's a completely reductivist take. They gave it a shot, the NDP were MMP or bust, the CPC got the others to agree to a referendum that they knew would fail. At that point the project was dead.
I do think that the NDP going all or nothing on MMP is what ultimately killed the whole thing for the LPC, what was the final nail anyway. Reading that committee report broke my heart, to be honest, because I wanted ER to succeed, but I knew it was dead when the CPC/NDP/Bloc wrote the majority committee report and didn't put anything the LPC could vote for in it.
MMP is the best system though, I don't see why the NDP pushing for it is considered bad. You really only get one shot at electoral reform, why put in a system like STV that's barely any better? Pleanty of other countries use MMP without issue.
Well on the flip side the LPC grassroots supported STV, and had twice in the previous ten years voted to make it party policy. I see no reason the LPC, majority in the house and elected to a mandate, should have been the ones to abandon their party policy for the policy of the smallest party in the house. But even then, in committee the NDP didn't recommend a specific form of MMP, they more or less provided vague instructions for choosing a new system, not a new system. The NDP also sided with the CPC, and reccoemended a referendum that could not be held before the next election. It was a bad spot, with no good way through.
MMP is difficult to explain to anyone uninterested in electoral reform, ie the majority of voters. Include things like party lists and members at large, and you can get some pretty significant drawbacks. There was also the more likely possibility of constitutional issues than with STV or ranked ballot, given the seat allocations outlined in the constitution.
Ranked or STV are easy to explain, ranked especially. Ridings and the ballots don't even need to change. Instead of an X, put numbers in the circle. Easy-peasy to explain.
It might be easy to explain, but it is less effective at proportionally distributing power and more likely to keep the two party system going. That's why the LPC supported it, because they hoped it wouldn't really change anything.
I'm sorry you're wrong about this. There was no conspiracy to kill ER from the onset, no lie, just a failed attempt to build a cooperative process that varying interests killed for their own, largely self serving, political reasons.
That you can't tell a lie from something that didn't quite work out is, I think, a common failure in the electorate, so at least you aren't alone in this frankly poor understanding of what happened.