Paul's Internet Landfill/ 2017/ Liberal Betrayal

Liberal Betrayal

Look. I know you are sick of me complaining about electoral reform. I am sick of it too. But I am still angry to the point of screaming. There was an episode of The Agenda with Minister of Democratic Institutions Karina Gould, and I was literally screaming at the podcast. I went to the Spectrum open house on Sunday and had to leave because Bardish Chagger was there and Raj Saini was on his way, and I did not want to cause a scene.

From what I understand, today marks the end of the federal Liberal debacle on electoral reform. The House of Commons will hold a vote to endorse (or not) the findings of the electoral reform committee. The Liberals will vote against the motion, and it will fail. It's just as well. Endorsing the motion would have meant endorsing a referendum, and nobody is in a position to win a referendum.

Meanwhile it looks like British Columbia is getting a de-facto coalition government between the Greens (which got 3 seats on 17% of the popular vote) and the NDP. Electoral reform is on their agenda, and apparently they will be holding a referendum in 2018. If the coalition works well then maybe this referendum has a chance. I am not holding my breath (is BC happy or mad that Christy Clark won't be premier for another term despite winning a plurality of the popular vote?), but the eternal optimists of the electoral reform brigade always accuse me of cynicism. (I will note that winning a referendum may not be enough, as the debacle in PEI has demonstrated.)

If I don't want a federal referendum and there is electoral reform action happening in BC, why am I so mad? Why have I decided that I am no longer willing to support either the federal or provincial Liberals from here on in?

I am furious because the game was rigged. The Liberals never intended the electoral reform process to succeed, and they (like the provincial Liberals of 2007) went out of their way to sabotage the process. That makes me feel helpless and without a voice. They squandered our good faith and our effort. Hundreds of thousands of Canadians played along with their consultations. But because the Liberals have a majority government and because they have calculated that they will pay no political price for jettisoning electoral reform, they engineered the process to fail. And there is little any of us can do about it.

What's worse is that the Liberals have two tricks they can alternate between indefinitely. Trick one is to promise electoral reform, waste our time, effort and money, and then not follow through. Trick two is to warn us that we have no choice but to vote Liberal, because a vote for any other party is a vote for the Conservatives. More than any other party, the Liberals benefit from first-past-the-post. Why would they abandon it? They won't, so we get played for fools again and again and again.

Let's be clear: I am less furious because electoral reform failed and more furious because it never could have succeeded: the Liberals engineered it to fail. The messaging following the electoral reform debacle has been consistent, and it illuminates this engineering fairly well. One representative example is the response to petition e-616, the electoral reform petition I previously blogged about. Here are the main talking points:

None of these talking points is incorrect. All of them are deceptive, and that is what is so infuriating.

It is true that the government wasted a tonne of money and time running the ERRE process and holding consultations. At first we hoped that the government was running the process in good faith, and in good faith we poured our time and effort into the process. We were heartened when the Liberals gave up their majority on the committee and allowed the Bloc and Greens to have voting shares in the final report.

But the Liberals betrayed the process from the beginning. First Minister Monsef framed the terms of the consultation by coming up with five guiding principles:

These are fine principles. Why were they the only five under consideration? Fair enough.

Then the government held its consultations. They received 574 briefs, many of which involved voting system proposals. The committee heard testimony from experts all over the world, most of whom supported proportional representation.

It's true that Minister Monsef went on her consultation tour and that the ERRE went on an expensive tour of the provinces. Sure, the consultations were poorly advertised. Sure, we received precious little notice when the consultations were going to happen locally. Surely the Liberals were acting in good faith?

Not so much. Minister Monsef was forceful when defending the process at the Kitchener-Waterloo consultation, but almost none of the consultation had to do with electoral reform. A lot of it had to do with electronic and mandatory voting, which was a convenient way to waste our time.

Then Justin Trudeau claimed that because he won power we didn't need electoral reform any more.

Then the Liberal ERRE members decided (or were told) to oppose any recommendations for electoral reform, forcing the NDP and Greens to come up with some ridiculous partnership with the Conservative members, who demanded a referendum. To get a report out at all, the NDP and Greens caved. Surely this was not Liberal shenanigans.

But of course it didn't matter, because immediately after the ERRE out with its report the Liberals came out with their survey. This survey was widely mocked because it forced people to think in terms of tradeoffs. I am in the minority of people who feel that thinking in terms of tradeoffs is valuable, but even I could see that the survey was put together so that it would be difficult to express a clear preference in favour of proportional representation. More importantly, the survey had nothing to do with the findings contained in the ERRE report. So why did they bother with the report, or the ERRE process at all?

Around this time there was some mathphobic thing around being frightened of the Gallagher Index (which is a pretty straightforward concept even for non-mathematicians once you get past the notation).

And then the Liberals killed electoral reform. Justin Trudeau threw Maryam Monsef under the bus and found his next victim for the role of Democratic Institutions minister. They then claimed that there was no consensus and that this was a very very big decision to make, so the government was being prudent and shutting the initiative down.

Before that point, one might have had reasonable doubts that the Liberals were more incompetent than malicious. But the justification that Canadians did not come to consensus on electoral reform was the final straw.

First of all, there was no indication that we needed "broad consensus" around a single voting system via this ERRE process. The Liberals moved the goalposts of the exercise.

Secondly, there was no way that the survey could have delivered a broad consensus around a voting system, since the survey did not concern itself with voting systems.

Thirdly, who are they trying to kid? Consensus is exceedingly rare in any political or democratic debate. If nothing else, the opposition party is supposed to oppose the government. So why is "consensus" the minimum threshold to meet when we do not need consensus to elect a government (with 39% of the vote), go to war, sign binding multi-decade trade deals with China, or make any of the other decisions a majority Liberal government feels entitled to make?

Fourthly, who are they trying to kid? The Liberals know full well that opinions around electoral reform vary especially widely. Everybody has their own favourite electoral system, so expecting consensus is not realistic. Furthermore, there are powerful interests in the backrooms of the Conservative and Liberal parties who benefit from First Past the Post, and who have no intention whatsoever of reaching consensus with Canadians who are ripped off again and again and again. This alone is a signal that the Liberals rigged the process to fail.

Fifthly, the Liberals engineered every aspect of the ERRE system to encourage a diversity of views, not consensus. We were asked how we ranked guiding principles. Were we all supposed to react exactly the same? We were all invited to participate in consultations and submit briefs. Were our thoughts all intended to be identical?

It is utterly clear. The Liberals had no intention whatsoever of seeing electoral reform succeed. The provincial Liberals in BC and Ontario pulled similar shenanigans a decade ago. And they will do so again.

Then the government has the nerve to make statements like the following:

The Government of Canada will continue to work to strengthen and protect our democratic institutions and ensure they represent the values of Canadians.

No it doesn't. It has no such intentions. It has betrayed the wishes of hundreds of thousands of politicially aware, politically active Canadians. It has undermined their trust in democratic institutions. It has demonstrated that the system is rigged. None of this strengthens OR protects democratic institutions. It undermines them.

Our values are not represented by political parties squandering our trust and good faith so that they can stay in power and win phony majority governments election after election. Our values are not represented by having no effective way to Kick the Bums Out that does not involve splitting the vote. Our values do not reflect a deep desire for only two political parties to exist in Canada. Those are Liberal values, not Canadian ones.

Even people who oppose electoral reform can see how transparently the Liberals sabotaged this process. Does that strengthen or protect democratic institutions?

To summarize:

There are many more criticisms one might make of the process -- the way they cherry picked results from while ignoring other messages, the way they waiting so long before getting the process started, the shameful shrugging off of the electronic petition, and on and on and on.

But maybe that is not the important part. The important part is that now you all get to accuse me of being a one-issue voter, because I am mad about this one issue. Don't get me wrong. Even I realize that the government has many responsibilities, and I acknowledge that it is much better for the Liberals to be in power than it would have been for Stephen Harper to win another term.

The thing is that electoral reform is not even that an important an issue. Unlike other people I do not believe it will solve many of our political ills. But our diminishing trust in political institutions is a huge problem, and electoral reform could go some way towards addressing that.

I also acknowledge that there is a charitable way to interpret this debacle: that this was some super-genius secret plan to move the cause of electoral reform forward. Here is the intepretation: awareness of and education around electoral reform is dismal. I continue to believe that many many people are frustrated by First-Past-the-Post, but I also believe that many people cannot articulate those frustrations or even connect those frustrations to their voting system. Without that education electoral reform will have a difficult time being successful. Thus the Liberals generously moved the bar forward. Electoral reform made the news, and in doing so regular Canadians learned more about what it means and what it involves. The fact that the Liberals suddenly killed it makes for a good martyr story, so we can collectively lament What Might Have Been and curse the Liberals for their betrayal. Thus the next time we have an electoral catastrophe and/or some party makes promises to implement electoral reform, more of us will be aware and more of us will be on board. Thus, the Liberals have done a good thing in initiating the process, and we should be grateful that they did so.

You can go ahead and believe that story if you want. I will concede that dropping electoral reform at this point leaves us further ahead than holding a referendum would (I expect a referendum would push back electoral reform an additional 20 years, since we would lose). And realizing that this debacle has probably moved electoral reform forward a little more than it has set it back has softened my rage a little. But I am still outrageously angry, to the point where it is dysfunctional. I am not willing to forgive the Liberals, and I am not willing to forget what they have done.

There is not much we can do to punish the Liberals for their betrayal. I am convinced they will win the next election (and I am not particularly looking forward to the Conservative government we will get if they don't). But there are plenty of people who are angry with the Liberals locally, and many of those people are politically astute. Several of them campaigned for Liberal candidates during the last election. If we were sufficiently motivated and sufficiently organized, we could do a lot of work to ensure that our local Liberal MPs do not get re-elected. It won't happen, but it could.