Poor Maryam Mounsef

Poor Maryam Mounsef. Her title is Democratic Reform Minister; her job is to explain away why the Liberals are acting anti-democratically. 

The Liberals want to change the way we vote and the only legitimate way of doing so is through a referendum. When Ontario, PEI and British Columbia wanted to change their voting systems, they put it to the people. When Britain and New Zealand wanted to do the same, they also held referendums. The reason is obvious: political parties get elected to govern, but the voting system itself is not theirs to change.

The Liberals know this. Everyone knows this. But although it’s obviously the only democratic thing to do, the Liberals cannot hold a referendum. Why? Because they’d lose. The polls say so, and the votes in Ontario, PEI and BC all went against changing the way we vote – in Ontario and PEI, massively so.

Trudeau himself says this is the reason he doesn’t want a referendum: “Many of the people who propose we need a referendum, well they know that the fact is that referendums are a pretty good way of not getting any electoral reform,” Trudeau recently said at the University of Ottawa.

Poor Maryam Mounsef. She is not allowed to be so blunt or so brief. She has to make actual speeches on the topic and answer repeated questions in the House. And she has to pretend it makes some sort of sense to change our voting system without a referendum.

The Liberals have consulted Canadians on twitter, she says. (I’m not making this up.) And they encourage Canadians to continue Tweeting them their opinions (tweet, tweet).

The Liberals will even hold town halls – so hundreds maybe even a few thousand Canadians can sound off on the topic. Not that the Liberals will be bound by what ordinary Canadians say.  Indeed, the well-understood purpose of town halls is to give the illusion of participation to people who are excluded from decision-making.

Will the Liberals allow 30+ million Canadians to actually determine this issue? No, no, no. That would be democratic. And the Liberals are against it.  

The Liberals are also against letting the other parties in the House of Commons influence this decision. After many months of hemming and hawing the Liberals at last created an ordinary Parliamentary Committee to guide the process – so much for the Liberal’s solemn promise to seek consensus of the issue. Because as with all Parliamentary Committees, the Liberals have a majority, so what the Liberal members of the committee decide is the way the committee goes.

What’s more, before the committee even meets, before a single town hall or even a single tweet, tweet, the Liberals have already decided the change they intend to force on Canadians: it’s called alternative voting or preferential ballot.

The way it works is that you mark the candidates in order of preference, and if no candidate wins at least 50% of the votes, then you start looking at second choices. So first choice NDP, second choice Liberals, or first choice Conservatives, second choice Liberals, third choice, I’ll hang myself.

From the Liberal perspective, this is the ideal system because it favours the party in the middle. From the point of view of the NDP, the Bloc and the Greens, this is the worst option, because over the long run, it tends to squeeze out minority parties.

For their part, the little parties prefer some sort of proportional voting system. Such systems ensure you never get majority governments, so small parties get to exercise power out of all proportion to their popularity.

Neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives like proportional systems, in part because they dread the horse-trading of proportional systems, in which the government is forced to enact unpopular laws in order to satisfy the special interests represented by the little parties.

Even worse, under proportional systems parties fall apart. The social Conservatives will split from the fiscal Conservatives. The NDP radicals will split with the NDP pragmatists.

The party most threatened by a proportional system, though, is the Liberals. They’re likely to split between the old guard and the new, between the Quebec wing and the ROC, between the fiscally prudent Liberals and the spend, spend, spend Liberals. More than any other party in Canada, the Liberals are a big tent party. This has always been the party’s strength: that it’s a broad coalition of differing interests.

But in a proportional system, it makes no sense for a party to try to arrive at a broad consensus that will appeal to most Canadians. Why bother? Every politician with an ego and every special interest in the land can grab a few votes, elect a few candidates and get in on the horse-trading to cobble together enough MPs to form a government.

But poor Maryam Mounsef. Her job is to pretend the Liberals aren’t trying to re-arrange our voting system to their own advantage. The NDP suggested Parliament’s electoral reform committee be appointed according to the proportion of the popular vote they received – giving the Liberals just 4 out of 10 seats on the committee; instead of 6 out of 10.

But you can see what would happen: the committee would split 4 to 3 to 3, with the Liberals in favour of the alternative voting system, the Conservatives in favour of our current first past the post system, and the NDP and the Greens in favour of a proportional system.

The only way to break this deadlock would be to put it to the Canadian people in a referendum. In which case, whatever the result, the Canadian people would win. But again, the Liberals are against that.

Three-quarters of Canadians want a referendum before any change in our voting system

It's 2016. We've consulted Canadians by Twitter, says the Liberal Justice Minister. What more do you want?

A new poll conducted exclusively for Global News by Ipsos Public Affairs found 73 per cent of respondents “agree” the Liberals shouldn’t make any changes to the country’s voting system without a national referendum first. “There is a lot of public support for a [referendum], so you would have to have a pretty compelling reason not to have one,” said Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos.

But the only reason the Liberals don’t want a referendum is because they know they’d lose.

Demand a referendum before the government changes the way we vote

According to polls, about 62% of Canadians like our current voting system, as opposed to only 25% who dislike it. Canadians in favour our current system include two-thirds of Liberal supporters. Yet the Liberal government wants to get rid of the way we vote.

What’s with that?

I’m sure some in the government think changing our voting sytem would make our democracy stronger. On the other hand, the Liberals intend to replace our current system with a preferential ballot, which always favours parties in the middle … like the Liberals.

Perhaps it’s just human nature for Liberal politicians to confuse what’s good for democracy with what’s good for getting Liberals elected, but the other parties don’t have those particular blinkers which is why all of them – NDP and Conservatives, the Bloc and the Greens – oppose the change the Liberals want.

About 65% of Canadians believe that, if the Liberal government does pursue electoral reform, a referendum must be held – including 68% of Liberal supporters. Only 17% of Canadians think a simple vote in the House of Commons would be legitimate. Yet, this is how the Liberal government plans to change the way we vote.

Why?

Because the Liberal government knows they’d never win a referendum. Trudeau has said as much: “Many of the people who propose…we need a referendum, well they know that the fact is that referendums are a pretty good way of not getting any electoral reform,” Trudeau explained at an event at the University of Ottawa.

It seems Trudeau doesn’t understand that’s the whole idea of a democracy: if Canadians oppose electoral reform, it shouldn’t be forced on us. But as this seems to be a blind spot for our P.M., I urge everyone to sign this petition, demanding a referendum on any electoral change: http://www.jasonkenney.ca/demand_a_vote

Just Say No by Brian Henry

This is an op-ed I wrote for The Toronto Star when Ontario was having a referendum about changing our voting system. In Canada’s current federal election, it’s once again become relevant, as two of the parties say, if elected, they’ll change our voting system.

On October 10, Ontario will vote on whether to switch the way we elect our government to a scheme called Mixed Member Proportional (MMP).  The system is deliriously complicated but suffice it to say that MMP is a form of proportional representation and thus shares PR’s usual faults.

Like all proportional systems, MMP is meant to guarantee that a single party can’t form a majority government.  Consequently, we may have elections once a year as they do in Italy. 

Alternatively, we may get reasonably stable governments, as the party winning the largest number of seats forms a coalition with one or more parties on the edges of the political spectrum – the NDP, the Greens, and other fringe parties that would emerge and win seats in a proportional system.

MMP salesmen will tell you it’s only fair to give greater clout to parties that the vast majority reject.  I can’t see the logic. 

In a typical Ontario election, more than 80% of us vote for either the centre left party (the Liberals) or the centre-right party (the Progressive Conservatives).  Then one forms the government, and the other forms the opposition, while the NDP takes about 15%, leaving 4% to the Greens and other fringe parties.

It might be more fair – that is, it might better reflect the will of the large majority – if we could have a blend of the two centre parties.  But that won’t happen. 

To join a government coalition, the second largest party would need to relinquish its role as the government in waiting.  It’s much better for them to wait for us to throw out the party in power and then step forward as the reasonable alternative.

The opposition won’t give up that opportunity.  Nor should they.  A strong opposition helps keep the government honest.  A government that faces no credible opposition does what it likes without fear of being voted out of power.

So the best MMP has to offer are unstable governments or coalitions composed of a centre party and a fringe party or two that the large majority of voters have rejected.

The worst MMP offers is a splintering of the party system as every politician with an ego and every demagogue with a grievance forms his own party. 

Unlike most places in Europe where proportional systems are common, Ontario doesn’t have any racist or xenophobic parties.  Why?  Because we’re tolerant people.  There isn’t a riding in the province where an extremist could come in fourth place, let alone win.

But under proportional representation, the extremists don’t have to be concentrated in one riding.  In the MMP system, a party gets votes from across the province, and with just 3% of the vote a party would win four seats and instant respectability – regardless of how vile their policies might be.  

According to an Association for Canadian Studies (ACS) survey released September 11, 12% of Canadians don’t like Jews.  This is better than most places in the world, especially as only 4% have a “very unfavourable” opinion of Jews.  But even 4% is over the threshold a party would need to gain seats under the MMP system.

Other groups would be even more vulnerable.  The ACS study found 16% of Canadians don’t like Sikhs and 18% don’t like Muslims. (In each case 9% hold a “very unfavourable” opinion of these groups.)

Under our current electoral system, no party represents the bigots.  Under MMP it will be only a matter of time before a party emerges to fill this vacuum.  And a few years down the road when seven or eight parties are winning seats in the legislature, a party on the centre left or centre right, desperate to cobble together a stable coalition, might well invite some extremist party to join the government. 

We could end up with a Citizenship Minister who flat out doesn’t like immigrants or an Aboriginal Affairs minister who doesn’t like native people – anything at all is possible. 

And that’s the main point.  We have an electoral system that works just fine.  The proposal is to break it and see what happens. It’s sheer foolishness.  On October 10, vote no.

Brian Henry is a writer and editor living in Toronto. He frequently contributes to the Jewish Tribune.

Note: The referendum was massively defeated, with 102 out of 107 ridings voting against changing the way we vote. To read my comments on the debate (or lack of debate) on changing the voting system in the 2015 federal election, see here.