Last week, the prime minister appeared on a podcast hosted by Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith and was asked what one thing he would have done differently, as PM, in retrospect. Justin Trudeau took no time thinking about the answer, which was “electoral reform”; as if to emphasize his regret, he later retweeted the segment himself.
Naturally, as an anthropologist of election-reform nerdery, I received this podcast clip and put it under the microscope as though it were the Codex Sinaiticus. The brief discussion between Trudeau and Erskine-Smith is absorbing, and may even be an important little piece of Canadian history, but I find myself unsure that the prime minister really answered the question.
“I made two big mistakes” in running on electoral reform and then handling the file, the PM says. Remarkably, the first of these mistakes was in allowing proportional representation (PR) to be considered among the alternatives to the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system he firmly promised to abolish. Trudeau says he personally regards PR as unthinkable for Canada.
One way or another, systems designed to deliver PR among political parties will create some parliamentary seats, and some MPs, who are elected as proportionality makeweights — they will have to be brought into the Commons through a side door, based on their party identity, to make the numbers balance. Trudeau doesn’t go into detail, but this is a common enough objection to full PR — that it requires the creation of two classes of MPs, with two different species of democratic warrant, and that it would diminish the locally grounded, one-place-has-one-MP nature of an FPTP Commons.
Trudeau’s preferred system is the one we have, but with voters casting transferrable ranked ballots in the same old ridings. He and the other designers of the 2015 Liberal platform designed their election-reform promise to appeal to Fair Vote Canada and other pro-PR reform groups, implanting their stated dream of “making every vote count” directly into the document. Wink, wink.
Unfortunately, Trudeau practically prefers the bad old FPTP system to any strong PR system — and, in fact, Fair Vote Canada opposes the ranked ballot so ferociously (pointing out that it would favour mushy centrists like the Liberals) that they might prefer to live with FPTP too. As the Fair Vote nerds point out, ranked balloting doesn’t really do anything to enhance or guarantee the party-proportionality that they see as the paramount ideal of elections.
I am not sure anyone notices the irony: the theoretical election-reform argument, which is an argument over how to combine individual preferences to create one unified government, is itself fraught with preference-combining issues. Anyway, to any objective observer, Trudeau’s original courting and then abandonment of the PR freaks has the character of a cynical swindle. What he says is that there were “strong voices in caucus” in favour of PR, voices that appealed to him to allow PR onto the agenda against his own better judgment. He never had any intention of letting them have their way: this, he adds, ought to have been clear to the poor fools.
Which leads to what he says was his second mistake — “Me not using my majority to bring in the model that I wanted.” He goes on to explain that he could simply have brought in the ranked-ballot system he likes, but he observes that changes to the electoral system have an irreversible quasi-constitutional character (because the winning party or parties under a new system will be certain to defend it) and so he needed cross-party consensus to introduce any change safely. This is obviously true, and was universally recognized in 2015, but it’s unclear whether Trudeau is actually now saying “Consensus be damned, I should have just forced through my preferred system.”
One might have thought he would identify his worst mistake as having made any election-reform promise at all. That’s what logic seems to indicate, given his own implacable opposition to PR. Erskine-Smith and Trudeau make some jokes on the podcast about how electoral reform is an obscure niche issue that puts people to sleep, but, of course, the context is Trudeau saying that screwing up election reform was the worst single political error he made in a decade.
He knows that reform is a big issue for quite a sizable fraction of the Trudeau Liberals’ natural progressive constituency, and he knows that the federal New Democrats are probably still half-alive only because he chased away borrowed votes he received in 2015. He knows the broken promise sowed mistrust, even among people who don’t want PR or who don’t care about it.
National Post