A promise is a promise – except when it’s not.
The federal Liberals have reneged on their crystal clear pledge that 2015’s would be “the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system.”
They struck an all-party committee and consulted with Canadians but the Liberals and Maryam Monsef, minister of democratic institutions, were roundly criticized for botching it at every available opportunity.
And when that committee put forward its recommendation for some form of proportional representation if Canadians approved of it in a referendum, Trudeau and his cabinet largely ignored it and claim now there was no consensus.
Perhaps they saw changing the system as a no-win outcome for the Liberal party. Perhaps they’ve done some internal polling, which has led them to believe that, apart from the really diehard poli-sci eggheads, no one really cares that much.
In any case, we expect they’ll be getting an earful in their constituency offices, and rightly so.
This has proven to be squandering of time, effort and political goodwill on a Parliamentary scale.
More than a broken promise, which frankly is not new to our system or any other one, this represents something worse. It was an opportunity to wash away generations of cynicism that have built up in Canadian politics.
Trudeau won his majority thanks, in part, to wooing back swaths of disaffected voters and people who typically support other parties, many of whom because they were enthused about the thought of a new election system that won’t waste their vote. They’ll surely remember this back-peddling when the go to the polls in 2019 – or don’t.
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