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Thinking Critically - Why no vote on electoral reform is correct

Some things are too important to be left to voters. That may seem somewhat counterintuitive, but I have written this a hundred times and it bears repeating: democracy is not the same thing as majority rules.

Some things are too important to be left to voters.

That may seem somewhat counterintuitive, but I have written this a hundred times and it bears repeating: democracy is not the same thing as majority rules.

I can only imagine what kind of crazy, discriminatory society we would live in if, instead of letting our representatives do the job we elected them to do with the checks and balances of the courts and our other democratic institutions, we held referenda on everything.

We saw this a couple of weeks ago when (parts of) Great Britain voted to leave the European Union in an ill-conceived referendum. Sometimes the people just don’t know what is in the best long-term interest of the country.

In general, referenda are bad. They give people a false sense of democracy.

Clement Attlee, the post-World War II prime minister of Great Britain, famously dismissed them as being “devices for despots and dictators”.

Indeed, they tend to turn complex issues into simplistic yes/no propositions that can be easily manipulated by emotional rhetoric.

They may, in fact, undermine the very foundation of democracy by allowing elected officials to abdicate their responsibility to thoroughly examine the issues and forge robust evidence-based policy.

And they tend to favour the status quo, which, in the case of Quebec separating from Canada is a good thing, but in the case of keeping our out-dated electoral system is a bad thing.

In Ottawa, the Conservatives are currently trying to force a referendum on the issue of electoral reform. They say it is too important an issue not to give Canadians a direct say in the matter. I could write an entire book on the hypocrisy of that position.

Before I get to why that is simply wrong, let’s have just a quick peek at the hypocritical record look at the record, shall we?

“In New Zealand, which used to have a Canadian-style system of concentrated power, the voters rebelled against alternating Labour party and National party dictatorships: electoral reform now ensures coalition cabinets.”

Guess from whom that little gem comes? Right, the Godfather of modern Canadian fringe conservatism.

Here’s another beauty from the pen of Stephen Harper:

“Many of Canada’s problems stem from a winner-take-all style of politics that allows governments in Ottawa to impose measures abhorred by large areas of the country.”

He was correct. Of course, he wrote those before he got a taste of the dictatorial power first-past-the-post could give him, and that he wielded so heavy-handedly during his last term in office.

We note, in hindsight, the Conservatives never gave us a say on bills of equal gravity that they rammed through Parliament, including their own unconstitutional electoral reform law and over-reaching security legislation.

Harper was right about proportional representation. We need a better way to elect our governments. Everybody knows it.

Rona Ambrose, the interim Opposition leader, however, says it is not part of the Liberal mandate. Again, a whole book could be written on the hypocrisy of this, but suffice it to say, the Conservatives lorded their 2011 majority government elected with less than 40 per cent of the popular vote over us for four years as a mandate in justifying every omnibus package and unconstitutional thing they did.

Now, if the Liberals had not campaigned on electoral reform, one might question the mandate. But Trudeau said famously, loudly and frequently that, if elected, 2015 would be the last election to use first-past-the post. It was front and centre in the Liberal election platform.

Furthermore, the government put its money where its mouth is—granted, at the behest of the NDP—by making the committee that will study the new system based on proportional representation.

The Liberals have the power and they have the mandate to do this without a plebiscite.  

Perhaps more importantly, they also have the moral grounds to do it.

Historically, no one party has benefitted more from the winner-take-all system than the Liberal Party. There is no reason to believe that would somehow change in the future because it is the only truly centrist and ideologically flexible party—yes, that’s a good thing, perhaps a topic for a future column.

Why would you give that advantage up if it were not because it is the right thing to do?